‘Un-building’ architecture?

This research project focuses on the systematically overlooked afterlife of architecture. Through examining the practices of reuse professionals, it asks how they engage in reusing salvaged building components. The reuse of what would otherwise become waste implies an interference with conventional processes of architectural making – the order of design, construction, demolition, and discard. This is investigated not only as affecting materials and construction but also as being connected to fundamental assumptions about architecture’s materialities and core disciplinary values. Hence, the central thesis is that reuse professionals engage in the potential of un-building architecture literally in its components and figuratively in its material meanings. Through a relational lens and employing a multi-sited ethnography, this study’s empirical focus is on material trajectories, practices of reuse, and how professionals succeed or fail in transforming materials from potential waste into architectural components.

Context

In the past 20 years, socio-scientific research on architecture has produced a variety of insights, prominently on the socially active qualities of materiality. Insights from STS and anthropology have challenged conceptual binaries such as human-only agency vs. passive objects, or the separation between objects and the processes of their making. Questioning prevailing assumptions regarding architecture’s material presence has continuously opened new lines of inquiry and enriched the understanding of architecture as a multifaceted socio-cultural phenomenon. However, the empirical focus generating these insights often remains set on architectural creation processes or on the object in its most usable form. Consequently, there is a systematic lack of understanding architectural materiality from the perspective of processes that ‘pull it apart’,¹ leaving its afterlife underexplored. Yet it is in the sites and moments of decay and discard where reuse professionals actively set in motion alternative endings for building materials. This phenomenon provides insight into the very concrete recovery processes of architecture’s discarded aspects, and, more broadly, into the social and cultural renegotiation of material meanings and knowledges, such as how materials are rendered ‘usable’ for and within architectural practice.

Aims

Targeting this lack of insight into architecture’s afterlife and the significance of reuse as a cultural practice, the main aim of this study is to contribute to the socio-material understanding of architecture by empirically examining professional practices that interfere with the ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’, and thus the trajectories of material becomings in architecture. This contribution is grounded in concrete doings and sayings² in the everyday practices of reuse professionals, yet approached through a ‘perverse view’: architecture considered from the perspective of its material end, and with the lack of social research reflection on this fact critically turned back onto itself.³ This perspective deepens understanding of the situatedness of architectural practices as well as reuse and is complemented by relational and spatial perspectives offered by waste studies, such as Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as ‘matter out of place’⁴ and its recent critical adaptations.⁵ Finally, the study aims more concretely to explore the relations among aesthetic, creative, logistic, and economic practices of reuse, between design and construction processes as well as dismantling and discarding, and how these relations define the terms of un-building architecture.

Research design

Based on the assumption that reuse is a concrete phenomenon unfolding in professionals’ everyday practices as well as across different spaces and events, this research is conducted as a multi-sited ethnography. At the core of transformation in architectural practice is the movement of materials from site to site as they become reusable building components. Key actors in this process and the main focus of participant observation and semi-structured interviews are architects integrating salvaged materials into building projects. However, reuse in architectural practice is not confined to proceedings in the studio. The field is constructed to include spaces and practices involved in negotiating discard, such as demolition, deconstruction, and salvaging at material hubs, all of which are highly relevant for observation. This methodological approach is designed to mirror the movement of materials themselves and to allow iterative adaptation to developments in the field, particularly given the unpredictable nature of reuse processes.

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