Rubble?
Rubble is created through destructive processes, ranging from planned building demolition and renovation to natural disasters and wars. During these processes, many of the original material’s qualities are lost, such as its size and shape, documented performance, and certification. However, at the same time, new qualities emerge. By studying stock materials from different active building and renovation sites in Berlin, we saw that rubble can offer a variety of qualities that new materials often do not have. Although rubble's diversity is also a barrier to its reuse, we believe there are ways of turning the perceived drawbacks of this material into an advantage.
Rubble pile
Rubble – an unidentifiable mass
Most of us experience rubble as a pile. Depending on what was demolished, when, and how, color and size become its only recognizable characteristics. However, just as snowflakes, sand, earth, and stones, rubble is a granular material composed of large amounts of particles held together by friction. As a granular system, it can be easily reshaped and reconfigured, changing from a loose stream of rubble to a stable aggregate structure.
...or a collection of individual objects
When rubble is thought of not as a pile but taken out of its context and considered as a collection of individual objects, a diversity of colors, geometries, textures, sizes, and performances emerges. Small pieces, large pieces, concrete pieces, brick pieces, pieces with smooth, rugged, or perforated faces, pieces that look like stones, and pieces that look like sculptures – all cohabitate the pile.
By examining different batches of rubble from local building sites, we saw that brick rubble tends to be more rectangular and breaks longitudinally, retaining one or two of the original dimensions. Concrete rubble, on the other hand, is generally more irregular and has a larger variation in size. While the size of brick and ceramic rubble is constrained by the standardized dimensions of the original element, the concrete rubble is not since the dimensions of concrete building components are cast as single objects and may vary.
Brick and concrete rubble from demolished floors and walls of the same building
(Top and bottom image: first published in DMS 2024, Scalable Disruptors, p. 3–14, 2024 by Springer Nature.)
(Middle image left: first published and adapted from eCAADe 2024, Data-Driven Intelligence, Vol. 2, p. 587 – 596, 2024 by eCAADe and University of Cyprus, Department of Architecture
Analyzing concrete rubble in the "material lab"