Useless 1 ‘Deep Re-Use’

6 USELESS 1 ‘DEEP RE-USE’ Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake FIGURE 6.1  3D thing, (day 7) – experimental 3D model using photogrammetric scans of brick fragments prepared for reuse. Source: Derk Ringers at the School of Re-Construction, 2021 DOI: 10.4324/9781032665559-11 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 101 When you close your eyes, it’s easy to picture an old brick – its shape, dimensions, colour perhaps. You could even have a sense of its weight. We carry one around with us at all times – a virtual, generic one, which is deployed every time we think ‘brick’. In reality, every brick is different, with its own history and idiosyncrasy – the closer you look, the more is revealed to you. When we design and build architecture, the brick is often treated as if it was the generic virtual brick you can picture rather than the specific real-world brick. What does architecture look like when professionals and the public start to intimately understand the objects that make up their buildings? How does architecture change when its constituent parts are treated as specific objects rather than generic commodities? What implications might this specificity have on the culture of re-use in the realm of DIY making? By re-evaluating materials commonly considered obsolete, what new aesthetic tastes emerge? We explored these questions through an experimental two-week workshop titled ‘New Forms of Measurement’ at the School of Re-Construction. The first week, ‘Experimental Inventories’, looked at tools that might capture a greater variety of material qualities. The second week, ‘Montages’, made use of the readings made by the new tools. From this process emerged the concepts of ‘Deep Re-use’. Context Deep Re-use is an approach that responds to the ecological imperative to use fewer raw materials – focussing on the cultural case, alongside economic and technical aspects of re-use. The construction industry consumes approximately 50% of all natural resource extraction worldwide.1 A precondition for this wasteful practice is that end users are distanced from the materials that make up their built environment. A comparison with how consumption and waste are reported in fashion, products, or the food industry illustrates how this reality scarcely impacts popular imagination. Taking food as an example, the industrialization of production has created counter movements pushing for stronger critical public awareness, “empowering consumers to make healthy and sustainable choices”.2 This has been pushed, in part, by legislation of obligatory labelling requirements for ingredient provenance. In contrast, information about materials in construction processes is often accessible exclusively to professionals – end users and the general public have little contact with this information and are, therefore, often unaware of the potential environmental and cultural benefits from re-using the existing material world around them. Despite the extreme urgency to transform the construction industry from a linear to a circular economy, we still lack viable mechanisms to properly value re-used materials. Commodity price is a useful, if inexact, mechanism that indicates the relative scarcity of a commodity in a market. However, that price does not account for carbon cost. It is the commodity price which most often dictates professional and non-professional material selection. So while a current lack of radical policy renders the re-used material market financially prohibitive in many regions, making different choices is hard for consumers. The intrinsic value of construction components is negligible in comparison with potential real estate profits, which incentivise demolition instead of deconstruction. Deep Re-use builds on the growing set of tactics which encourage re-use, for example, material passports.3 However, rather than focussing on technical standardisation, Deep Re-use favours the additional transformative power of seeing objects through a cultural lens. 102 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake FIGURE 6.2  Separation of bricks using non-specialist tools, physical process experiment (days 2–5). Taking a lead from Ivan Illich’s philosophy described in Tools for Conviviality,6 Derk Ringers responds to the challenge of manual disassembly of brickwork: “Bricks separated: 6/Amount of cleaning vinegar: 4 litres/Days soaking in vinegar: 3/Estimation of labour: 1.5 hrs”. Source: Derk Ringers at the School of Re-construction, 2021. To return to the ubiquitous brick – in the UK, “an estimated 2.5 billion bricks arise as demolition waste each year (almost equal to the number we use new each year), but only 5% are reclaimed for re-use, with the rest crushed for fill”.4 The prevalence of cement-based mortars in contemporary bricklaying makes effective brick deconstruction challenging. Yet a re-balancing of the labour market5 and changes in popular aesthetic preferences could bring radical opportunities for job creation and new types of participation in making through re-use. The experiment begins with new ways of seeing. The paradox of novelty While most of the construction sector in the developed world thrives on an appetite for the ‘new’, there is an existing, if narrow, contemporary re-use industry. It is often focussed on ‘architectural antiques’ and or finishes that are considered ‘high quality’. In the case of the former, the taste for antiques paradoxically relies on the exclusivity and scarcity of those materials. In the case of ‘quality’, this is often underpinned by ideas of durability based on a preconceived idea of single use. In both cases, this perception obstructs the potential for a radical re-used material revolution. Deep Re-use has the potential to liberate us from such fickle perceptions of heritage and fashion and a limited imagination for alternative further lives of materials. As Cullen and Allwood Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 103 FIGURE 6.3 Collated frame extracts from the film 44 Doors and 35 Windows for the New Sala Beck- ett, 2016. Carpentry elements of an abandoned Cooperative in Barcelona are represented in a film as characters in the story of their reinterpretation and re-use. Despite having no formal ‘heritage’ value, these doors and windows represented the time and love of a collective process, built by the cooperative members themselves in their free time, each making different decisions about the technique and design as they went along. Source: Flores & Prats Architects observe: “We rarely demolish buildings because their performance has declined, but because their value to owners or occupants declined, so they become unsuitable or undesirable”.7 The challenge lies in commodification. Deep Re-use can be seen as an attempt to create bubbles of decommodification – places where different values re-emerge. Prior to being commodified, objects have specific individual use value. After becoming a commodity, that same object has a different value: the amount it can be exchanged for. This idea returns us to the old brick. The brick has a specific market value which you could look up right now, but you know it’s not truly the same as the exchangeable brick. According to Karl Marx, this new value of the commodity is derived from the time taken to produce the good. When an object is commodified, all other considerations are obsolete, including morality or environmental impact. Marx went as far as claiming that everything would eventually be commodified: “The things which until then had been communicated, but never exchanged, given, but never sold, acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conscience – all at last enter into commerce”.8 We may have got close to this reality, but Deep Re-use offers a potential way of stepping back from the precipice. Marx notes the danger of commodification being commodity fetishism and alienation.9 The process of Deep Re-use de-alienates. It brings people directly back into contact with the real substance and use value of objects. 104 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake The Deep Re-use approach – an outline Key to the approach of Deep Re-use is the ‘measurement’ of material. We start by asking some basic questions like: What is being measured? Who participates in and influences the measurement? Who has access to the measurements? In response, the technique of ‘Experimental Inventories’ was developed, using standardised measurement methods (e.g., taking values for dimensions, optical qualities, structural or thermal performance), then integrating additional information borrowed from conservation methodologies (e.g., histories of origin, maker, popularity), and subjective readings (e.g., referential description of the form, moral judgement – is it the best of its type? – or a memory that is associated with the object). It is the historical and subjective readings that start to build up a cultural understanding – “immaterial values” as described by workshop participant Julia Flaszynska such as the “validation of craftmanship and emotional bonds”. Implicitly, Deep Re-use is a critique of common forms of material passports and points to ways that they could become participative and reflect a broader set of values. Even the format of recording is expanded from the use of a basic spreadsheet towards a broader set of FIGURE 6.4A (left): Brick selection AR (still frame from animation, day 5). Derk Ringers speculates on a future model of an open-source material investigation app that could identify and share multiple levels of information for materials with re-use potential. Here, Ringers could be seen as a contemporary version of a ‘prospector’ (the mineral/mining detectors of the Renaissance era now suited towards mining of the Anthropocene in the 21st century), with a focus on new tools for observation.10 Source: Derk Ringers at the School of Re-Construction, 2021 FIGURE 6.4B (right): Misuse montage (1 hr exercise, day 6). Quick intuitive exercise exploring reuse languages using a pool of materials shared between students. Source: Thomas Parker at the School of Re-Construction, 2021 Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 105 ‘tools’ including interviews, analytical drawings, photographic records, physical samples and 3D scans. The workshop pushed towards creating accessible, editable and active tools that allow for constant reinterpretation of the past and present. The workshop’s second phase, ‘Montage’, involved synthesis of these measurements. Compositional techniques were tested using the prompts: ‘order’, ‘tesselate’ and ‘symmetry’. A variety of design and non-design approaches were adopted involving deliberate mis-use and re-contextualizations. One of the key design tools available to the Deep Re-use designer is placing re-used building materials or objects in dissonant contexts, or places that amplify or contradict their original use. The Deep Re-use approach – tactics Deeper readings might help us overcome negative associations with ‘secondhand’ materiality, in search of popular and radical aesthetic languages for re-use. For example, it is the proven provenance of the antique, that is, a deeper understanding of its cultural value, that really increases its exchange value. Looking at some exemplary student experiments from the workshops, we find some applications that come out of these ‘New Forms of Measurement’. In his investigation of bricks in the Netherlands, Derk Ringers looked at the challenges of disassembly due to high-grade cement mortars. By carrying out physical experiments using basic, non-professional tools and household products, Ringers found that if our perception of the value of time and labour changes, then so does our relationship with the material. Ringers was left with irregular chunks of bricks with excess mortar, each with its own unique quality. He subsequently explored the Japanese art of Kinsugi (“golden repair”, or treating the “breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise”)11 as a methodology to piece together the rough edges of these material elements that are typically deemed undesirable. Ringer’s project suggests that when we reassemble ‘vintage’ bricks, there are new opportunities for architectural expression. The problems of re-commodification are exposed, where the idea of ‘vintage’ becomes a gimmick to add value to the fetishized object.    FIGURE 6.5 (left): An imagined 5 kg Kintsugi Mortar Colour kit, and (right): a Kintsugi arch (day 7). A celebration of the crude patched up aesthetic of manually dismantled brickwork. Source: Derk Ringers at the School of Re-construction, 2021 106 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake Thomas Parker, based in Portugal, started by looking at failing commercial centres, considering that a case might be made for conserving materiality either on the grounds of cultural memory or embodied carbon. Through a careful process of measurement, Parker identifies a palette of re-usable materials with a variety of values relative to their local abundance and the popularity and associations of their visual qualities and finish. Parker concludes with proposals that include a montage of high-quality and low-quality materiality used to form floor surfaces as ‘crazy paving’. Here, there is a knowing reappraisal of the suburban domestic driveway mainstay, a realm where DIY aesthetics and personalization reign. By applying these materials in popular mode, Parker’s work locates itself in an anti-design aesthetic trend which forces people to reassess a high/low division of commodified material value. Parker makes us wonder that if the economic parameters change, whether this DIY aesthetic could become an industry norm as opposed to a niche eccentricity. Juxtaposition is a technique that lends itself to Deep Re-use. Julia Flaszynska, in Austria, worked with 19th-century façade ornaments on a building in Vienna, which had heritage value yet lacked protected status. While watching this building being demolished, Flaszynksa used interviews to analyse the public’s emotional experience of the destruction. Flaszynksa then made calculations to quantify similar ornamental fragments that will be erased from Viennese buildings of a similar age and condition. FIGURE 6.6  Crazy paving (day 9). Mixed ‘value’ materials, damaged from the complications of wet fixed dismantling, given new life and a new aesthetic language in a collaged floor surface. Source: Thomas Parker at the School of Re-construction, 2021 Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 107 FIGURE 6.7A (left): Demolition, Vienna, December 2019 Source: Georg Scherer/wienschauen.at FIGURE 6.7B (right): Ornamental climbing wall (day 8). The lost rubble of Hofmühlgasse 6/Mollardgasse 7 and a graveyard of its demolished fragments are playfully recontextualised in public space as part of a climbing wall. Source: Julia Flaszynska at the School of Re-construction, 2021. Background image of collage with permission by Sebastian Wahlhuetter/www.wahlhuetter.net Flaszynksa found that these elements are “an embodiment of longevity and historical meaning”. She imagines the emotional impact of relocating some of these ornaments in various public and private environments. One image shows a proportionally massive plaster coil re-used as a secondary structural element (a shelf) – resurrecting its symbolic function but within a domestic environment. In another montage, fragments of ornament are crudely strapped onto the utilitarian metal railings of a bridge like love locks. What gives this project its potency is that the historic or heritage value is heightened by these recontextualizations. A short history of progress These student projects draw from a long but often overlooked tradition of Deep Re-use avant la lettre. From the columns and friezes of the Arch of Constantine, Rome (315 AD),12 which re-used imperial reliefs from Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, to more everyday re-use of masonry from dissolved English monasteries, which turned churches into quarries. We can think of these examples as fitting somewhere in the spectrum that spans between ideological re-use and pragmatic re-use. Ideological re-use relates to the objects’ cultural value, objects that are re-used because of the meaning of the action, whereas pragmatic re-use refers to an act of resourcefulness or the benefits offered by technical performance. When Cleopatra’s Needle was relocated to London,13 it was a grand statement about power and empire – an ideological re-use. Deep Re-use is not limited to the realm of grand monumentality and can be found in abundance throughout history as ‘common-sense’ vernacular self-build. Here, the legacy of material has a strong relationship to the craft of the communities that used them, gaining immaterial 108 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake FIGURE 6.8 The inherently highly ideological re-use language of the DIY geodesic domes fabricated from materials such as salvaged car bonnets at Drop City (1965–1973). Source: ‘Drop City Panorama’ courtesy of the Clark Richert Estate importance over time. Deep Re-use can be unintended, such as in the case of the black steel and mesh railings that line various estates in London. These fences were originally emergency stretchers used by air raid protection officers during the Blitz in 1940–41. During the World War II, many of London’s housing estates lost their original iron railings when they were melted down and used for weapon production. With a large stockpile of stretchers following the war, the London City Council had the stretchers welded vertically together and used to replace the missing fencing. It is the juxtaposition, or mis-use of the object, that gives it potency – what was once a pragmatic re-use of material is now a poignant reminder, embedded in London’s built fabric. In latter-20th-century history Deep Re-use can be found in experiments of aesthetic subversion and as a counter-culture to industrial material principles and consumerism within the developed world, most notably starting in the 1960s. These associations and legacy still influence our relationship with materiality today, further merging with reactions to the accelerating climate crisis and reassessments of global attitudes towards re-use in reflection of its cultural significance in developing countries, or within non-designed environments. The good, the bad and the ugly During the workshop, Parker observed that “conservation on the grounds of heritage, while valid, can only ever represent a fraction of the existing building stock”. The relationship between re-use and heritage has both the potential to save or hinder radical transformation of material re-use. Conservation is inherently a sustainable practice, yet it can also be a polarising force, often diverting public attention towards what is ‘good’ in the built environment and what is not, creating bias and prejudice.14 As we move into an era when materials will need to be re-used to a far greater extent because of diminishing raw material and the unviability of mining, we question will ‘heritage’ be Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 109 absorbed or, perhaps, exist only to distinguish between preservation and reappropriation? If heritage, as a cultural category in the built environment, becomes irrelevant through absorption, what can we save and re-use from the idea of heritage itself, and how does this also overlap with the increasing number of conversations critiquing the Western architectural canon? In the UK, we can find new responses to the malleable concept of heritage in the growing trend at the National Trust to try to tell more democratic stories, oral histories, showcasing ‘lower status’ buildings.15 Material histories sidestep the traditional bias of text-based histories, which often are written from the privileged perspective. Underpinning the Deep Re-use approach is the idea that culture is upstream from politics sometimes – in the respect that cultural beliefs, whether they are informed by TikTok influencers, authors of novels, lyricists or even architects, can change the wider political discourse. We are on the edge of re-use becoming mainstream. We could assume that this culture would be filtered through the equivalent of TV home improvement shows, where instead of getting over excited about redoing a 3-bed semi-detached in 24 hours, the presenter will marvel at the slow considered placement of a re-used kitchen counter. The cultural hegemony of the last epoch has been underpinned by capitalist overproduction and dominated by a specific class which demands new and ever larger status symbols – in the FIGURE 6.9A (left): Capturing the spirit of musical re-use through the labour of sample searching in record stores – Brian Cross’s photo used for DJ Shadow’s album Endtroducing. Source: B+ for Mochilla.com FIGURE 6.9B (right): Re-use presenting a “physical manifestation of a thought process”20 in Shedboatshed, Simon Starling, 2005. The installation involving the deconstruction and transformation of a found shed, made into a boat, taken on a journey down the Rhine to a museum in Basel and reassembled back into a shed, bearing the scars from its journey. Source: Simon Starling, Installation view, Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2), 2005, Courtesy of the Artist, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin Bühler 110 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake UK, this is typified by virgin marble kitchen islands or wet rooms with abundant glass. Those who now have high cultural capital can change the direction of travel. However, we should be wary of the inevitable co-option of the superficial aesthetic of re-use, which denudes it of its radical potential, as in the case of commodified ripped jeans. Now jeans can be bought preworn, given rips by a machine. What was once a symbol of long use or re-use and rejection of the aesthetic of newness is now just another cultural status symbol, unbound to realities of material process. The architectural equivalent of this is aged brick slips being installed at multinational franchises such as Pret a Manger, borrowed from the once counter-cultural warehouse conversion aesthetic – now literally stuck on the surface. Cultural practitioners, from musicians to visual artists, deploy re-use to create wholly new cultural artifacts. This can be found commonly in video, such as the work of George Barber16 or Christian Marclay,17 and in installation work, such as Shedboatshed by Simon Starling. The case of music could be considered as having the most popular impact; the electronic group Daft Punk, who have sold over 9 million albums globally,18 talk about re-use of audio that reflects the freedom that can come with interpretation of the existing: “When you use a sampler, nobody plays on it, so the problem of the ego of the musician is not really there”.19 DJ Shadow’s 1996 album ‘Endtroducing’ pushed audio re-use to an extreme, created almost entirely from samples involving extraction from a vast archive of records. Despite having no obvious ‘material’ benefit, re-use culture in immaterial expression can influence the perceptions, ideas and actions of wider society towards resourcefulness and innovation in ‘re-use’. Material revolutions Architecture by architects has minimal impact on the material environment in quantitative terms on a global scale, as a small indicator of this, according to the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 2017 only 6% of new homes in the UK were designed by architects. In 2016, 200,000 homes were built in England without the input of an architect21 – it is within informal and nonprofessional construction culture where the material revolution will have real impact. Here, the parameters are different, the (self)builders have more time than money, flipping the hierarchies of material choice, and are not driven by the same performance requirements or risks. Improvisational ideas flourish when the maker is the same as the end user, where there is a direct relationship with materiality – a culture of ‘ad hocism’.22 On the date of writing, a YouTube search for videos with the phrase ‘DIY’ produces over 150 million results. The material impact of Deep Re-use within the kitchen or bathroom renovation sector, regularly a DIY staple, gives us an idea of the scale of impact if re-use starts to dominate cultural norms. A 2017 study in America suggested that each year one in ten domestic kitchens are renovated.23 The material implications are massive. To have any meaningful impact on carbon consumption, re-use must achieve accessibility at an industrial scale within either professional or non-professional spheres of design. Evolving precedents take various guises internationally, such as the progressive approach of the cooperative RotorDC,24 concentrating on processing and marketing the redistribution of latter-20th-century building materials in the local context of Brussels. A different example is evolving American deconstruction and redistribution models such as Good Wood,25 Habitat for Humanity26 and Details,27 which operate in the charitable sector with a focus on positive change in material re-use and employment through the social economy. Such third-sector models are not reliant on revenues and can, therefore, afford to process lower value materials, expanding Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 111 beyond the realm of antiques and challenging the status quo of re-use dominated by concepts of antiquity or established fashions. In the case of RotorDC, this concept “champions a model of materials recovery that resists hippie aesthetics, self-built DIY fads, the fetishization of timeworn surfaces, and the mere circulation of easy-to-reuse modules”.28 With societal change at scale, a plurality of aesthetics can evolve that will cease the need for re-use languages to be claimed as ‘re-use’. The opportunity for the overlapping of cultural and technical information within Deep Reuse requires new standards that push the cultural challenge further: a model that sits somewhere between the role of a public archive and builders merchant – the museum and the DIY warehouse. A small-scale and imperfect example exists in Porto, Portugal, the ‘Banco de Materiais’29 (Material Bank). This state-run project opened in 2010 with the objective to act as a record of the city’s materiality but also as a resource. Aisles of salvaged ‘azulejos’ (ceramic tiles common on facades in the city) and other decorative or valued construction materials are accessible as if museum exhibits yet also for free supply in the case that a citizen can prove they own a property that is missing elements that are available. However, this model is limited to an agenda of conservation, with a small palette of ‘heritage’ materials. To engage with the mass market of self-builders and small-scale contractors, we might instead imagine the big-box buildings on the ring roads of cities, currently housing Ikeas, self-storage and Amazon warehouses, being converted into storage of re-usable architectural salvage. It’s a very small step – the blurry combination of serious cultural activity mixed with streamlined e-commerce efficiency. The new publicly accessible Science Museum – National Collections Centre, designed by Sam Jacob Studio is an example of curatorial contextualisation and juxtaposition, which have much in common with this imagined re-use depot.30 Blending together these last two examples, we can imagine a hybrid ‘Re-use Archive’. This archive replaces the go-to staple of public material supply but presents materials organised in a variety of ways that transgress the rules of their original function or value, perhaps as Simone Ferracina imagines when describing the ethos of the ‘bricoleur’ in the context of architecture and construction, where the organisation of materials “remain in a state of suspension; to exist between value systems and roles”.31 Here, material passports are produced using inquisitive methods, inviting public interpretation and stories, becoming open-source tools. The typical roles of dismantling, handling, cleaning, refurbishment, storage, repackaging, documenting, promotion and resale are complemented by adding the role of cultural interpretation. Instead of a librarian or a sales adviser, we imagine a ‘Material Interpreter’, who engages the public (amateur or professional) with the materials, providing technical guidance and examples of experimental re-use solutions. They will record more than the dimensions or colour of the virtual brick you can imagine with your eyes closed, nurturing a culture of care for the materials. This role of the Material Interpreter becomes more economical with scale of the operation and the mass of elements, flexible to suit available labour resources at different scales, but ultimately aspiring towards mass job creation. Material value lies in the hands of the participants of a new shared material economy. This form of infrastructure will serve as a resource and memory bank allowing for free interpretation of re-use – recording the minutia and specific qualities that give the objects their cultural value. This ‘Reuse Archive’ could take many organisational models. A radical approach, which might have more scalable impact, would be a centralised state model where the materials are mapped and loaned, following the idea of construction within the brackets of a service economy. This environment challenges the association of re-used materials with luxury or marginality; instead, they become a new universal aesthetic language. 112 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake  FIGURE 6.10 (left): Tile section at the Banco de Materiais, Porto, Portugal, and (right): the Science Museum – National Collections Centre, UK, Sam Jacob Studio – flexible coloured geometric grid awaiting the future organisation of objects in multiple ways. A future ‘Reuse Archive’ may be a blend of these two spaces: part Aladdin’s cave, part museum, part warehouse, part supermarket, part library. A resource for the collective sharing of material history, merging the interpretative freedom created in John Soane’s Museum (London) and its mysterious assembly of classical fragments, with the spontaneous and accessible circulation potential of re-use sharing networks such as Freecycle, Craigslist, and OLX. Source: photograph by Jonny Pugh, SJS/photograph by Timothy Soar In the professional realm, designers urgently need to think about re-use. This starts with education – the premise of the School of Re-Construction. As Ruth Lang points out, in Building for Change, re-use in architecture “usurps dogmatic hierarchies and questions the role of architects within the design process”.32 Thinking critically about how we measure the existing material world is an important foundation. Derk Ringer takes us back to the brick, with a final reflection on the workshop: Looking at measurement with curiosity, puts prescribed value judgments into perspective. With this distanced perspective, it is easier to consider neglected and contested values, which might lead to meaningful change in material culture. We started seeing the documentation of material, in my case bricks, as an abstraction that aims to isolate or emphasize a specific quality. The intent behind the abstraction is what became really interesting. Although a specific measurement in itself might be objective, the act of measuring is not. Using measurement as a framework allows us to zoom in on values that challenge common material systems. Deep Re-use, whether ideological or pragmatic, juxtaposed or harmonised, by an architect or DIY actor, is the key to making re-use part of the mainstream. The emerging pedagogy of climate aware architecture must embrace this cultural challenge. ... Useless 1 ‘Deep re-use’ 113 With thanks to participants of the workshop: Charissa Leung (Canada), Derk Ringers (the Netherlands), Julia Flaszynska (Austria), Manon Ijaz (UK), Nafisah Musa (Nigeria), Thomas Parker (Portugal), and to visiting external critic Cláudia Escaleira. Notes 1 https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/industry/sustainability/buildings-and-construction_en, accessed October 1, 2022. 2 The European Commission Join Research Centre, News Announcement, Last modified September 9, 2022. https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news/evidence-food-information-empoweringconsumers-make-healthy-and-sustainable-choices-2022-09-09_en 3 “Material Passport” also known as a “Product Passport”/“Circularity Passport”: “The majority of current initiatives are limited to defined areas of application . . . To provide a solid data source for a circular built environment, holistic information from different fields is needed”. Heinrich, Matthias, and Lang, Werner Materials Passports – Best Practice, BAMB (Buildings as Material Banks, 2020), p2. 4 Mounsey, Rosie and Webb, Steve Climate Action: We Can Put a Block on Brick. Last modified June 21, 2021. www.ribaj.com/intelligence/structures-sustainability-we-can-put-a-block-on-brick-steve-webb 5 In his book Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet, 2022, Simone Ferracina comments that skills in re-use are indispensable, for example, cleaning and laying old bricks, when contrasted with the relatively deskilled labour imposed by the modernist adoption of construction techniques such as reinforced concrete. 6 Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them, and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Illich, Ivan Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), extract from chapter II 7 Allwood, Jullian and Cullen, Jonathan Sustainable Materials Without the Hot Air (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p238. 8 Leopold, David Karl Marx, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 9 Marx, Karl Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapter 1, Section 3 the Form of Value or Exchange-Value, Part 4 the Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof (Moscow: Progress Press, 1867). 10 “Today, prospecting methods are based on advanced techniques and scientific methods”, yet also rely on a “great talent for observation”, as described by Ghyoot, Michaël, Devlieger, Lionel, Billiet, Lionel and Warnier, André Déconstruction et réemploi. Histoires, tendances et perspectives (Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2018). 11 Kintsugi, In Wikipedia. Last modified October 28, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi 12 “the entirety of its roughly 16,000 marble blocks were derived from earlier monuments”: Barker, Simon speaking at the Architectural Association event ‘(Re)Building with Stone: Ashlars, Spolias, Quarries and Cities’ (London: Architectural Association, January 28, 2022). 13 Cleopatra’s Needle is an ancient Egyptian obelisk now located on the Victoria Embankment, London. Inscribed by Thutmose III and later Ramesses II, the obelisk was moved to Alexandria in 12 BC, where it remained for nearly two millennia before it was presented to the United Kingdom in 1819 by the ruler of Egypt and Sudan Muhammad Ali. 14 Illustrating this point, the critic Rafael Gómez-Moriana discusses the Flores & Prats project Sala Beckett in his article ‘Circle of Life’ (The Architectural Review, December 2021) as a methodology that rejects ‘old’ versus ‘new’ binary ideology in favour of a language of ‘renewed old’: The Venice Charter established the heritage restoration guidelines still in use today. Article 12 explains why, in many historic building restorations, a sharp contrast is emphasised between old and new: a visual trope that has come to express a certain idea of historical rupture or discontinuity between past and present. Never mind that most historic buildings are, themselves, products of multiple interventions and adaptations throughout the ages. For some reason, historical changes are never considered ‘falsifications’, whereas contemporary ones are – which is why the latter must always be ‘distinguishable’. 15 For example, Rainham Hall opened to the public in 2015 with stories about all its historic inhabitants rather than a single famous character www.studioweave.com/projects/rainham-hall/ 114 Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake 16 The rapid editing of recycled video material in The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video, Volume One & Volume Two (Barber: George and Various Artists, 1984–1985). 17 For example The Clock, 2010, a 24-hour long installation made from a montage of thousands of film and television images of clocks, edited together so they show the actual time. 18 https://bestsellingalbums.org/artist/2807, accessed October 30, 2022. 19 ‘Daft Punk’, Reesman, Bryan, Mixmag, 1st October 2001, as referenced in Domestic Discovery or Sampling and Synthesising With Daft Punk, Geoff Shearcroft, P.E.A.R Paper for Emerging Architectural Research, Issue 3, 2011. 20 www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2005/turner-prize-2005-artists-simon-starling 21 www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/most-new-housing-so-poorly-designed-it-should-not-have-beenbuilt-says-bartlett-report, accessed October 30, 2022. 22 Ghyoot, Michaël, Devlieger, Lionel, Billiet, Lionel and Warnier, André. Déconstruction et réemploi. Histoires, tendances et perspectives (Pu Polytechniqu, 2018) (making reference to the term adhocism in: Jencks, Charles and Silver, Nathan Adhocism. The Case for Improvisation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). 23 In the case of kitchens, almost half of these were budgeted at $15,000 or more www.prnewswire. com/news-releases/americans-love-their-kitchens-and-baths-nkba-research-pegs-industry-value-at134-billion-300387346.html 24 https://rotordc.com/, accessed September 23, 2022. 25 https://urbanwoodgoods.com/, accessed October 30, 2022. 26 http://www.habitat.org/restores, accessed November 2, 2022. 27 https://details.org/, accessed October 30, 2022. 28 Ferracina, Simone Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet, Chapter ‘Architectural Bricolage’ (London: Routledge, 2022). 29 https://museudacidadeporto.pt/estacao/banco-de-materiais/, accessed October 30, 2022. 30 www.samjacob.com/portfolio/national-collections-centre/, accessed October 30, 2022. 31 Ibid. 32 Lang, Ruth Building for Change – The Architecture of Creative Reuse (London: Gestalten, 2022).