Architecture carries within it the traces of past lives. Stones shifted, fragments recomposed, spaces reborn.

On every continent, you can find buildings that show of their age proudly, exhibiting their crumbled plaster, half-revealed and rough bricks, concrete columns bearing the marks of construction, and the remains of advertising messages.

The rising voice of our unravelling planet begs for restraint, reconciliation and the end of exploitation.

The assumption that building new is architecture’s premise. That new is always better than old.

The Thoravej 29 cultural hub has been created by transforming a former factory built in the 1960s, with a careful process of dismantling and reintegrating structural elements, surfaces and fittings, reusing 95 per cent of the materials and components

Fitted together like Tetris pieces, large concrete rubble fragments mixed with low-impact mortar become ready-to-reuse material for building new walls

The conversion of OLA Palermo shows how adaptive reuse can turn urban infrastructure into a resource for the community, where sustainable development, memory and community now intertwine in a porous and vibrant landmark

Marcel Raymaekers’ practice (from 1962 to 2014) mirrored the Belgian post-war demolition frenzy

To create the Staple stool, large fragments of plastic and discarded prototypes are compressed into pictorial slabs, a reuse that gives plastic a sense of identity, value and memory

The Bultan’s structure reuses police security barriers, sturdy objects that have often suffered little damage

To create his sculptures, the American artist assembles non-recyclable waste from our daily lives, thus expressing his clear disdain for mass consumerism and the unsustainable environmental problems it causes. The whole world literally becomes his palette, in the belief that knowing the objects that surround us means knowing ourselves

Combined with geometric precision, everyday objects reveal traces of their previous lives and signs of human presence, telling new stories

Made from hundreds of pallets, factory o!cuts or storm-felled trees, the Danish artist’s large sculptures demonstrate that rubbish is actually a resource just waiting to be transformed. His trolls are cra"ed from our waste, and with the desire to do something di!erent with it

Collected and installed with the participation of the local community, over 8,000 plastic bags make up The Plastic We Live With, a collective installation that exposes the widespread and persistent presence of waste in our daily lives

By carving into existing surfaces, the Descascando a Super!ície series allows new images to emerge from what is already there. Reuse thus becomes a form of urban archaeology and an act of remembrance

Recyclate – the material that results from the process of recycling – is the protagonist of Domus this October.