Bjarke Ingels on reuse: “The future is already here, we’re just using it for something else”

I live on an old Norwegian ferry in the port of Copenhagen. It is a piece of decommissioned infrastructure that used to carry cars and passengers across the fiords of Norway. My living room is a loft space open at both ends that used to fit four lanes of cars. The raw steel walls, the portholes and the continuous curving surfaces below deck are all little aesthetic and experiential gifts that came along with the fact that my home was never designed or built as one. Radical reinterpretation has given me and my family spaces and experiences unlike any other house.

This October issue is dedicated to recyclate: the material that results from processes of recycling. If the Anthropocene is the geological era where human impact outweighs any other force, including tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions, then it only makes sense that its primary material sediment is the deposit of our built environment. In other words, our main material resource of the future may be deposits from our past. In the mindset of William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, if sources are what we extract from nature, re-sources are the materials we mine in the decommissioned structures and products of the manmade environment.

Wang Shu’s use of wapan tiling in the Ningbo Museum (2008) turns broken bricks and stones in irregular patterns into almost geological strata of reclaimed bricks. HArquitectes reuse the rubble of a demolished building as aggregate for new prefabricated blocks. The limestone reappearing as mega terrazzo like geological nougat. Lendager’s facades resemble a patchwork quilt of decommissioned sandwich elements. The cementitious mega joints between the Frankensteined patches of brick wall act like urban kintsugi highlighting the wabi-sabi nature of the mismatched, as a fresh aesthetics of reclamation.

For Lacaton & Vassal, the environmental argument for recycling is often a poor excuse concocted to legitimise the violent act of demolition. Having sworn to never demolish, they turned their practice of appreciation into an aesthetic pursuit. The pre-existing building, no matter how raw or unloved, has the patina of past lives combined with the generosity resulting from being already there. In an economy of means, the spaces that you don’t need to build are free, and therefore can be taller, wider and more generous than standard fit new construction.

On my first study trip to Barcelona in 1993, our visit to Ricardo Bofill’s La Fábrica became an eye-opener to the aesthetics of repurposing. The old cement silos were reinvented as palatial halls. Surgically inserted slabs of Malaga marble coexisted with low-grade concrete and sticks of rebar hanging out from the ceiling like stalactites. Rafael Moneo’s Atocha Railway Station takes the gift of the decommissioned train hall and turns it into an urban oasis, an Angkor Wat of abandoned infrastructure surrendered to the biosphere. The Mosque of Córdoba is a testament to the collage-like nature of sequential adaptive reuses. In the middle of the forest of Moorish columns rises a Catholic cathedral, the two stitched together like a chimera of style, culture and religion. Even Ayasofya, the Great Mosque of Istanbul, was designed and built like a Christian basilica before becoming the template for mosques around the world.

No category of buildings has produced more inventory ripe for reinvention than the global backof-house buildings of industrial infrastructure. The rust belt of the German Ruhrgebiet is littered with abandoned coal plants and steel mills. The blast furnaces of Emscher Park have been reinvented as a post-industrial ecological fantasy. The Miesian brick and steel structures of the Zollverein are reborn as a cultural campus. The gasometer rises on the horizon as a cathedral of contemporary culture whose monumental dimensions could never have been justified to accommodate conventional sculpture or performances. A global institution of art, the Tate Modern Turbine Hall (2000) commission, would never have existed if it were not for the reinterpretation of the former power plant into a cultural institution. Our Danish Maritime Museum in Elsinore (2013) uses the majestic dimensions of the abandoned dry dock to organise the exhibitions, leaving the dock empty like a ship-sized mega artefact at the heart of the museum.

Technologies evolve and economies change. Driverless cars make parking structures obsolete, while manufactories and warehouses mutate and migrate, releasing a steady stream of abandoned buildings ready for reinterpretation. The mismatch between their existing attributes and our current needs may be the greatest creative margin we have to explore as practitioners in the years to come.

In this issue, Aaron Betsky makes a case for repurposing rather than building anew, while Anders Lendager explores sourcing new materials from the existing built environment. Olaf Grawert pioneers the aesthetics of the found and unfinished, while Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal propose an outright ban on demolition. Pihlmann Architects cultivates a dogmatically raw aesthetic of the objet trouvé in their design for the Bikuben Foundation Blaising Borchardt Studio gives painful significance to old rails as the building blocks of their Rails of Memory Holocaust memorial. Maxence Grangeot reuses rubble in a sort of Cyclopean concrete of large fragments of broken walls. With OLA Palermo, ODA reinvents an abandoned parking structure into a new three-dimensional park. Palma + Nula.Studio uses ground ingredients to cast new materials with their Fake Realness.

Marcel Raymaekers’ oeuvre is a lifelong work-in-progress of upcycling fragments into a palace of scraps. Dirk van der Kooij’s stable explores the geological quality of disparate hues of plastics merged into new metamorphic material. Maximum’s Bultan chair repurposes abundant outdoor fencing into a tubular aesthetic, while Material Record and Yamaha explore the aesthetics of upcycling with their speakers and guitars.

Thomas Deininger scavenges the debris of beaches and parks to celebrate nature with the very material waste that threatens its existence, when he isn’t designing the cover of Domus. Thomas Dambo uses construction debris to materialise Scandinavian mythological creatures with this Trolls series. Michael Johansson applies his aesthetic OCD to orchestrate the discarded into abstract symphonies of colour.

Luzinterruptus turns singleserving plastic containers into would-be leaded glass windows, transforming abandoned buildings into cathedrals of garbage. Vhils, aka Alexandre Farto, engraves majestic murals into existing walls and pavements like a sculptor carving into marble. And lastly, Kathleen Ryan turns trash to treasure with her supersized Stilleben of bejewelled perishables.

All are examples of how the material of the future has already been made for something else, and our role as architects may largely be evolving from creators to curators. From creation to adaptation. With 8 billion people today and 10 billion expected by 2050, it would seem reasonable to assume that most of our urban tissue is already here. Itmay not fit to the way we want to live. And it may only be the way it is, because that is how far the people who came before us got in realizing the world of their dreams. So not only do we have the possibility, we have the responsibility to make sure that the way we manage and manipulate the material we inherit will reflect how we would like to live our lives. Whether by disassembling and reassembling the structures we inherit, or by reinterpreting and readapting them, the clay in our hands is the built remains of the societies that preceded us.

When Lacaton & Vassal designed the architecture school in Nantes to free themselves from the conventional building programme and proportions, they imagined an industrial structure left from the past and reinterpreted how it could serve as a school. Like turning an abandoned warehouse or parking structure into a new building for education. Even if it never existed. The imagined renovation became their creative license, their architectural freedom. Our old workspace in Copenhagen was a decommissioned bottle cap factory. It had 14-metre-high ceilings, enormous spans and surfaces of raw steel and exposed concrete. It became our benchmark for the purpose-designed, groundup construction of our new studio. We had to think of ways to construct raw and generous spaces, with a blatant authenticity to match the found factory halls that we came from. In that sense, the commitment to recycling and reinvention through adaptation may not only be a responsibility we have to take upon us out of plight. It may actually be the single biggest opportunity to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of convention, and free us to explore new ways of arranging life and work in found environments seemingly unfit for what we want to do with them.

To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is already here, we are just currently using it for something else. 

Opening image: Photo © Gregori Civera