FCRBE - Facilitating the circulation of reclaimed building elements in Northwestern Europe

Reuse of building elements: - will it soon be the norm in Europe ?

Reuse of building elements, who to call on? part 1

Reuse of building elements, who to call on? part 2

French and Dutch versions available on our Youtube channel!

Important notice:

The Digital School of Re-construction (Digi-SoR-c) summer school will run from Monday 2^nd August 2021 for two weeks.

Thank you to everyone who has made an application to the digital School School of Re-construction Summer School.  We have had a great response and are looking forward to working with some great students. 

From left to right: Duncan Baker-Brown, Antony Roberts, Lucy-Ann Gilbert, Nick Gant, Dr. Ryan Woodard, Siobhan O'Dowd.

We will be joined (online) by partners from across North-West Europe*, including re-use experts Rotor from Belgium, and Bellastock from France, who are deconstructing the 59-storey Montparnasse Tower in Paris.

The School of Re-construction is part of an EU ERDF €4.33million Interreg NWE project entitled, ‘Facilitating the Circulation of Reclaimed Building Elements’ (FCRBE) which runs from 2019 to 2022. It will deliver, among others:

• An online directory of more than 1500 specialised salvage dealers and allied businesses in North-West Europe.
• A pre-demolition 'tool kit' designed to help clients assess the re-use potential of materials and products present in buildings slated for demolition.
• A specifications manual to help construction professionals integrate reclaimed building materials and products in large-scale projects.
• Test and promote tools through 36 pilot operations taking place in large (de)-construction projects across North-West Europe.

This project responds to the worldwide declaration of Climate and Ecological Emergency, and locally to Brighton and Hove’s ambition to be Net Carbon Neutral by 2030.

*North-West Europe includes Ireland, United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland  and the Netherlands.

Topic 2021: Re-think Re-Use

Digital School of Re-construction 2021

Students from different regions will work in teams with designers and makers to re-think and re-use, through the re-construction of disassembled materials to create a series of thought-provoking digital design interventions, that will prove that “there’s no such thing as waste, just stuff in the wrong place!”

Drawing on the partners and work of the Interreg FCRBE project the Summer School will include discussions and debates on topics relating to urban mining, resource mapping, deconstruction, re-use, and buildings as material banks.

Drawing from their immediate environment’s, each participant will survey a chosen artefact, room, or building with a view to digitally unpacking and deconstructing them. Each of the eight teams will create their own digital library; to be shared, interrogated, understood and re-imagined as a ‘new’ proposition.

Since the rise of modernity, design usually precedes construction. Consequently, designers generally develop their projects around standardized, stable and predictable construction products or they order specialised production of bespoke elements that will match their requirements. In essence, reclaimed products are the exact opposite of this: they are largely heterogeneous, unpredictable, and situated. In this sense, they question the habits of designers.

We will tackle this question by challenging each team to design and realise a small construction out of reclaimed elements in response to one of the workshop themes as detailed below.

These themes pose questions and provide a particular ‘lens’ for re-structuring elements that are usually discarded or re-worked. Each team will have an array of digitally reclaimed elements sourced from across the Interreg FCRBE region to choose and experiment with.

All these realisations are small living laboratories that will allow you to have direct  experience with these challenges. The two-week-long workshop will culminate in a carefully curated online exhibition of these experimental design interventions.

The following themes should be read as specific ‘lenses’ through which participants will look at their particular ‘libraries of elements’. Please note that they might be slightly adapted depending on what will have been surveyed and collected by each of the teams taking part.

Theme 1 THE RAW:

The aim of re-use that will be explored, is how to effect a new condition by NOT altering, or ‘re-cooking’, the materials gained by reclamation. By working with the dismantled elements in their ‘raw’, or unaltered form – what are the possibilities of reconfiguring them into new, spatial and material combinations?

Theme 2 THE ‘USELESS’:

Materials deemed ‘useless’ are often cheap, can be found in abundance and as a result, are often discarded as not worthy of consideration. How can we make these rejected elements useful and desirable for construction?

Theme 3 THE BY-PRODUCT:

Materials that exist as a by-product of conventional modes of production can often be overlooked and ignored. How can they become one of the re-fashioned and delivered as a newly envisioned focus that supports the act of re-use?

Theme 4 THE HYBRID:

Systems and materials are often standardised and configured in conflicting or unaccommodating arrays of sizes and shapes, which generates more waste. How can they be combined to create new, workable relationships through the crude use of montage?

Theme 5 THE ‘OFF-CUT’:

The off-cut is notoriously known for being ‘not quite long enough’. By only utilising these awkward materials the question again arises, how can these usually discarded elements be re-examined and re-combined to form workable structures and envelopes that might not conform to the notion of the standard?

SoR-c Summer School Programme (details to follow)

Get in touch:

Email:  School-of-Re-construction@brighton.ac.uk

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