What if the city was constantly being rebuilt using the same stock of materials? A city that was constantly under construction, where nothing would be added or taken away, where building materials and building elements would just be shifted around and appropriated for new, sometimes unexpected uses.
The most provocative aspect of reuse in architecture is probably not be the fact that construction happens with used rather than brand new parts. Most architects are however likely to be thrown off by the fact that design has to begin from a predefined set of objects rather than from the vagaries of a sketch or diagram. This is not a new issue. In 1961, architecture critic Reyner Banham coined the phrase “design by choice” to connote design that happens “by choice” from an existing stock of objects rather than by the architect’s hand. Against a backdrop of mid-century consumerism, Banham had observed that an increasing level of specialisation in the fields of architecture and industrial design had led to a situation where architects furnished their spaces by choosing products from manufacturers’ catalogues, as opposed to making them bespoke. Le Corbusier’s 1925 pavilion lÉsprit Noveau, for example, was entirely furnished and equipped from manufacturers’ catalogues, “a triumph of disciplined and adventurous selection from what was at hand”, according to Banham. Banham even went so far to suggested that Le Corbusier had adapted the design of the pavilion to the objects, rather than the other way around, which is to say that the careful selection of objects predated the design of the pavilion. To design by choice, Banham argued, was by no means a dilution of the architect’s power or responsibility.
Today, a new take on design by choice might be on the rise, for a whole different set of reasons. We are increasingly past a view of the world inherited from industrialism in which materials could be sourced and moulded into shape indefinitely. Design should arguably no longer start from scratch, nor should it start from manufacturers’ catalogues, but from an existing stock of materials, elements, and whole buildings. Faced with an impeding climate crisis and scarcity of material resources, architecture increasingly turns to reuse as a way to limit endless extraction and processing of raw materials. Design, again, becomes a question of designing by choice – of bringing existing elements and objects together.
Reuse in the built environment is typically taken to be a problem of legislation, codes, and logistics. But it is as much a cultural and architectural problem. One of the most persistent architectural conventions is to consider abstract space before material entities. Building elements and furnishings should be subservient to a larger whole. Reuse, as a conceptual approach to architecture, flips this order: Objects and chunks of material take priority over organisation and composition. In addition, each piece for reuse comes with a set of qualities – a character – that may be amplified, subverted or altered. Depending on the relation between the context of the original structure and that of the new structure, reused objects may be charged with different cultural value and meaning.
Style and sustainability may seem to be unrelated issues. Today, a building designed in a certain style is just as likely to be granted LEED platinum status, or some other green building certification, as another building designed in another style. The way a building looks is typically not connected to how it performs environmentally. This would change in the 100% reuse city. The design of each new building would be based on bits from other buildings, perhaps designed in other eras and in other styles. A façade for a housing building designed in 2025 could for example be conceived by chopping up concrete prefab elements from a factory complex constructed in 1973 and combining them with metal window frames from a 1999 office slab. Or imagine a careful mix of 1930s classicism and colourful 1980s high tech, finished off with a pinch of 1990s digital formalism. In this way, there would be new styles of many styles, assembled through collage, grids, fields, figures, or some other compositional principle. A variety of styles would always be present, not just at the scale of the city, the neighbourhood, or the block, but within each building.
Architecture for reuse is often found in a state of obsolescence or disrepair. In the city under construction, architects would have to invent new formal and material vocabularies based on repairing, refinishing, and rewiring. Design would constantly have to negotiate fractures, missing pieces, patina, misalignment, abrupt cuts, etc. What is usually considered to be mundane building maintenance would have to be reconsidered as intricate architectural problems. Like artful takes on jugaad, new kinds of design solutions based on hacks, fixes, and mending would start to show up throughout the city and its buildings. Is a column missing? Replace with an odd one. The right odd one. Or with something else that does the job of propping up. A hole in the brick façade? Use off-coloured bricks to patch up. And perhaps cover the whole wall in paint. Each thing up for reuse would be considered as it is rather than as it was meant to be. Removed from its original context and function, each thing would be free to take on new meanings and uses, and to reach new states of fulfilment.
The world is already full of stuff. Our urban fabric is increasingly conditioned by an excess of existing structures and materials that can be salvaged. Reuse may not be the definite answer to the climate crisis. But it may be a way to mobilize and rethink architecture as a discipline and as a design practice that goes beyond green buildings and smart technologies.
Daniel Norell and Einar Rodhe, “La Ville 100% Réutilisée“, in special issue “1 Image / 1000 Mots”, edited by Joanne Pouzenc and Sebastien Martinez Barat, Plan Libre, no 175, 2020. ↗