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Examples on found or taken building components and elements. Building in Girona, Spain (Photo: Hana Svatoš-Ražnjević)

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Examples on found or taken building components and elements. San Marco in Venice (Photo: Maria Wyller)

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Examples on found or taken building components and elements. Trümmersäule, Berlin (Photo: Maria Wyller)

What, why, how, and with what did we reuse in the past?

​Driven by the belief that understanding the mechanisms of reuse in the past is a necessary prerequisite for developing novel reuse methods for contemporary architecture, we gathered and reviewed more than 300 examples of historic and contemporary reuse in architecture. To organize, understand,  and evaluate the projects – not from a theoretical or a comprehensive historical perspective, but from a practical perspective of architects, we posed four guiding questions. What was reused? What motivated the reuse? How did reuse influence the design process? What technologies were developed as a response to reuse? The following text summarizes our conclusions and can be thought of as a short introduction or a beginner's guide to reuse in architecture.

What did we reuse?

Buildings. Repurposing buildings takes place everywhere, all the time: stores are turned into kindergartens, apartments into office spaces, restaurants into gyms – and vice versa. But buildings can also endure – and have endured much more radical programmatic changes: churches were turned into mosques, power stations into museums, and former factories into headquarters. Adaptive reuse can be easy – or hard, depending on the state of the building and the difference between the new function and the old, but in the end, humans and programmatic functions are more flexible than concrete slabs and steel beams will ever be. However, this has not hindered people from designing buildings that can be relocated altogether, for example, to fit nomadic lifestyles or to simplify the production and transportation of new buildings. In the past, Mongolian emperors traveled from place to place with deployable tent palaces [1], and people at Svalbard rolled or slid their houses from one place to another [2].

 

Building components.  It is much easier to relocate parts of buildings than entire buildings and therefore many building systems are composed of components: columns and beams, prefabricated slabs and walls, windows and doors. In the past, reclaimed building components were valuable: capitals, columns, reliefs, doors used to find their way from one building to another either by being stolen, traded, or found. Why bother making an intricate new capital when it was possible to get one from a ruin around the corner? Reuse of building components was practiced not only because it was practical, but also because it was prestigious. The façade of San Mark’s Cathedral in Venice is composed of building components brought back by the Venetians after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 [3]. To transport ship after ship with marble columns was certainly not practical, but definitely emphasizes the prestige.

 

Building elements. Yet easier to handle than building components are building elements – parts of building components such as bricks, stones, rubble, pieces of wood, metal plastics, ceramics, mortar, or tiles. Although disassembly into components is possible, today, established demolition processes, as well as other destructive actions such as natural catastrophes or wars produce broken elements – rubble. In the past, even the broken brick found its way back into architecture. After World War II, the rubble from ruined cities was used to rebuild them, such as the church of St Anna in Düren, Germany. After the town of Gibellina was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1960s, Francesco Venezia integrated the stones from the façade of a former palazzo into a new exhibition space [3].

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Combination of wet stone masonry from Spain (Photo: Hana Svatoš-Ražnjević)

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Dry stone house from Norway 
(Photo: Maria Wyller)

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Opus caementicium in variations

(Photo: Hana Svatoš-Ražnjević)

Why reuse?

Pragmatic reuse. Before the industrial revolution and in post-war and post-disaster reconstructions and recoveries, reuse was widely practiced because it was economically and timewise profitable. If you have complete buildings, building components, or a pile of building elements available, why spend time and energy to make new ones? When the Middle-Age Cathedral of St Alban was completed in only eleven years, this was noted down in the church books as an absolutely exceptional achievement. The credits partially went to the particularly efficient archbishop, but also to the fact that they had a large supply of reused bricks and stones from a nearby ruined Roman town [4]. After industrialization, streamlined production lines made it faster and cheaper to produce new materials than to reuse old ones [5] [6]. Everything standardized became cheaper, and everything non-standardized more expensive. Today, however, we are at a point where a new technological shift and rapid advancements coincide with an emerging raw material supply crisis,  and reuse might again retrieve its position as the pragmatic option.

 

Ideological reuse. Reused materials come with a past – they have been somewhere before.  In ideological reuse, the embedded meaning of the material is an essential driver for the decision to reuse it. The Arch of Constantine, built to celebrate the triumphs of Emperor Constantine, was composed of building components taken from buildings erected by other grand emperors [7]. The reason was probably not the lack of skill and resources to make new ones but the symbolic value of the reclaimed parts [7] – Constantine built pieces of other people’s success into the built manifestation of his own. A contemporary example is the façade of the Europa building in Brussels, made out of reclaimed windows gathered from all member states. The reuse of the windows was not driven by a lack of alternatives or because it was particularly efficient but to make a “practical and philosophical statement about the reuse of these traditional construction elements, expressing the European diversity of cultures” [8].

 

Compositional reuse. Reused building components and elements have inherent qualities that new materials do not, such as patina, variety, and uniqueness, which can be employed to achieve architectural and spatial effects. For example, if you take a closer look at how spolia was incorporated into churches in the Middle Ages, you discover that the difference in the components has a function: columns of different colors could mark progression, or a single Corinthian capital amongst composite capitals marks the beginning – or the end, of the circular interior space. To choose variety over uniformity was a way to rebel against and create distance to the rational – and pagan, culture of antiquity [9].

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Spolia in Athens (Photo: Martin Reichert)

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Spolia in Berlin (Photo: Maria Wyller)

How did reuse influence the design process?​

The top-down approach. In a top-down approach, one moves from the general to the specific [10], which, transferred to reuse in architecture, means that the overall design and form are developed first and the material later. In Le Corbusier's church in Ronchamp, the large, sculptural walls that seem to carry the convex concrete roof are built out of locally reused bricks [11]. However, the architectural concept is not developed around reclaimed bricks, and the building would have been just as fine with new.

The bottom-up approach. Contrary to the top-down approach, a bottom-up approach focuses on the process rather than the final result. The end result and form might even be open. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson used this “opposite design process” when they worked on the project Hexenhaus [12]. Together with the client, Axel Bruchhäuser, they extended and modified the property through “small interventions gauged to respect what already existed” 15 over almost 40 years – a process “that neither seeks nor finds completion” [13].

 

Combination of top-down and bottom-up. The top-down and bottom-up approaches are two extremes, and it is also possible to juggle between the two. When Dimitrios Pikionis designed the paths leading up to the Acropolis, he first made the overall concept: he sketched out the new routes, defined viewpoints, and the general dramaturgy of the paths. However, his drawing for the project also stopped with the sketches, and all further design decisions were made on the fly on the construction site, while the project was realized. [14] This approach requires that the overall concept is adaptable and can adjust to the process.

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Dimitrios Pikionis paths to Akropolis

(Photo: Eva Schad)

What technologies were developed as a response to reuse?​

Flexible construction methods. Many reuse techniques have in common they have to be exercised with adaptivity and skill. It is not the same to build a wall out of uniform bricks and a pile of stone and brick rubble, and what do you do if you have a nice collection of spolia columns but they are all of different heights? Different masonry techniques were developed all over the world ranging from the Chinese wapan [15] as seen in, for example, the contemporary project Ningbo Museum to Roman concrete – opus caementicium [16], to cope with mineral building elements of different qualities and geometries. The problem with the columns of varying heights was solved by using the arch, as seen in, for example, Al Nasir Mohammad Mosque in Egypt. Today, in countries where manual labor and craftpersonship is expensive and materials cheap, reuse immediately becomes the least favored option. Hopefully, through new technologies that, for example, allow for flexible automation, reuse might become less dependent on craftmanship and more available.    

Design for assembly/disassembly methods. Reuse of buildings, components, and elements become easier if a possible later reuse is planned from the beginning. Steel structures and Eastern European or Scandinavian log houses are examples of buildings systems that are built for disassembly and reassembly. Through reversible joinery methods, steel pylons can be screwed apart, and wood logs taken apart by two persons. The reuse of steel structures is common practice and even today, Scandinavians sell their disassembled log houses on online marketplaces for someone to come and pick them up from their backyard and reassemble them at a new location.

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References

[1] M. Garcia, „Prologue for a History and Theory of Architextiles,“ Architectural Design, 2006.

[2] LPO Arkitekter;, „Rett plass rett form,“ 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.lpo.no/prosjekter/rett-plass-rett-form.

[3] Á. Moravánszky, „Der Kreislauf der Bausteine - Stichworte zu einer Ökologie des Bauens,“ in Bauteile Wiederverwenden, Zürich, Schweiz, Park Books AG, 2021, p. 16-31.

[4] T. Perkins, „The Cathedral Church of St Albans,“ 1903. [Online]. Available: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19494/pg19494-images.html#illus_5.

[5] European Commission, „Waste Directive Framework,“ 19 November 2008. [Online]. Available: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/DE/TXT/?qid=1602768647329&uri=CELEX:02008L0098-20180705.

[6] M. Wahlström, J. Bergmans, T. Teittinen, J. Bacher, A. Smeets und A. Paduart, „Construction and Demolition Waste:challenges and opportunities in a circular economy,“ European Topic Centre Waste and Materials in a Green Economy, 2020.

[7] H.-R. Meier, Spolien Phänomene der Wiederverwendung in der Architektur, Berlin: jovis Verlag GmbH, 2020.

[8] A. Griffiths, „EU headquarters features glass box containing curvaceous glowing "lantern",“ 16 Dezember 2016. [Online]. Available: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/16/european-union-headquarters-offices-curvaceous-glowing-lantern-glass-box-brussels-belgium/.

[9] M. F. Hansen, The Spolia Churches of Rome, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015.

[10] Merriam-Webster, „Definition: top-down,“ 7 03 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/top-down.

[11] W. Boesiger, Le Corbusier et son atelier rue de Sèvres 35, Œuvre complète, 1952-1957.

[12] M. Scimemi, „An open work by the smithsons at Bad Karlshafen,“ in Alison & Peter Smithson - Hexenhaus A House for a Man and a Cat, Köln, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2020.

[13] E. Stricker, „Reusers,“ in Reuse in Construction - a Compendium of Circular Architecture, Zürich, Park Books, 2022, pp. 59-77.

[14] A. Papageorgiou-Venetas, The Architect Dimitris Pikionis - and the experience of his teaching at the Technical University of Athens, 2002.

[15] E. Golden, „Traditional materials optimized for the twenty-first century,“ in ACSA International Conference, 2012.

[16] H.-O. Lamprecht, Opus Caementitium Bautechnik der Römer, 2. edition (1985) Hrsg., Düsseldorf: Beton-Verlag GmbH, 1984.

 

Design for assembly and disassembly in Norway (Photo: Maria Wyller)

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