ECOLOGIES OF INCEPTION

DESIGN POTENTIALS ON A WARMING PLANET 

By Simone Ferracina

Image and text courtesy of the Publisher
Publisher : Routledge
400 Pages 162 B/W Illustrations
Language: English
ISBN: 9780367858766

Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality—an object’s ability to change—in architecture and design.

The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts—through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines—a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place.

As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms—as situated individuals and co-authors.

Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.

About the author:

Simone Ferracina is the founding director of Exaptive Design Office (EDO) and a Lecturer in Architectural Design/Detail at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), The University of Edinburgh.

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RE–USA: 20 American Stories of Adaptive Reuse

A Toolkit for Post-Industrial Cities

Matteo Robiglio

Image and text courtesy of the Publisher
Publisher: Jovis Publishers
Softcover: 14.4 x 20.2 cm
240 pages with approx. 230 col. and plans
Language: English
ISBN-10: 978-3-86859-473-7

Adaptive reuse – the process of repairing and restoring existing buildings for new or continued use – is becoming an essential part of architectural practice. As mounting demographic, economic, and ecological challenges limit opportunities for new construction, architects increasingly focus on transforming and adapting existing buildings.

Based on best-practice examples in American cities such as Detroit, New York, or Pittsburgh, this book shows successful cases of adaptive reuse that preserve the legacy of the industrial past while turning it into a key ingredient for urban regeneration. An aquaponics farm in a former meatpacking facility or a freight train railroad converted into a linear park: these are just two successful examples of the creative and effective reuse of abandoned industrial infrastructure. Culture, leisure, sport, research, education, design, services, production, housing, and even agriculture regenerate former factory sites and upgrade cities economically and culturally.
Eight steps guide the way through the process of adaptive reuse—from choosing an existing site to the vision, design, and funding, and finally their implementation. Professionals, activists, decision-makers, as well as entrepreneurs and committed citizens worldwide are therefore provided with a practical toolkit to discovering the unused potential of their city.

About the Author

Matteo Robiglio is an architect and urban designer. He is a full professor at Politecnico di Torino. After 20 years of practice in community architecture and urban regeneration with Avventura Urbana, he founded in 2011 with Isabelle Toussaint the office TRA (lit.: in-between). In 2014 TRA and the community foundation Benvenuti in Italia jointly founded the non-profit social innovation start-up HOMERS, recognized as Polito spin-off, promoting bottom-up cohousing projects for the reuse of abandoned buildings. He was a member of the Scientific Committee of the Centre for African Studies, of Rebuild and of the recovery project of Giancarlo De Carlo’s University Colleges in Urbino of the Getty Foundation. He is a German Marshall Fellow in Urban and Regional Studies. He has also been a visiting lecturer in many universities such as the Carnegie Mellon of Pittsburgh, the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, the Technion of Haifa, and the MIT in Boston.

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RESOURCE SALVATION

The Architecture of Reuse

A valuable source of information, insight, and fresh ideas about a crucial aspect of the growing sustainable design movement

Author: Mark Gorgolewski

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
296 Pages paperback

eBook & oBook available

ISBN: 978-1-118-92877-6

Mounting resource shortages worldwide coupled with skyrocketing extraction costs for new materials have made the prospect of materials reuse and recycling an issue of paramount importance. A fundamental goal of the sustainable design movement is to derive utmost use from construction materials and components, including energy, water, materials, building components, whole structures, and even entire infrastructures. Written by an expert with many years of experience in both industry and academe, this book explores a wide range of sustainable design strategies which designers around the globe are using to create efficient and aesthetically pleasing buildings from waste streams and discarded items. Emphasizing performance issues, design considerations and process constraints, it describes numerous fully realized projects, and explores theoretical applications still on the drawing board.

There is a growing awareness worldwide of the need for cyclical systems of materials reuse. Pioneering efforts at “closed-loop” design date as far back as 1960s, but only recently have architects and designers begun to focus on the opportunities which discarded materials can provide for creating high performance structures. A source of insight and fresh ideas for architects, engineers, and designers, Resource Salvation:

• Reviews the theory and practice of building material and waste reuse and describes best practices in that area worldwide
• Describes projects that use closed-loop thinking to influence and inspire the design of components, interiors, whole buildings, or urban landscapes
• Illustrates how using discarded materials and focusing on closed loops can lead to new concepts in architecture, building science, and urban design
• Demonstrates how designers have developed aesthetically compelling solutions to the demands of rigorous performance standards 

Resource Salvation is a source of information and inspiration for architects, civil engineers, green building professionals, building materials suppliers, landscape designers, urban designers, and government policymakers. It is certain to become required reading in university courses in sustainable architecture, as well as materials engineering and environmental engineering curricula with a sustainable design component. 

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ADAPTIVE REUSE OF THE BUILT HERITAGE

Concepts and Cases of an Emerging Discipline

Image and text courtesy of the Publisher
Publisher : Routledge
Paperback : 256 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10 : 1138062766

Adaptive reuse – the process of repairing and restoring existing buildings for new or continued use – is becoming an essential part of architectural practice. As mounting demographic, economic, and ecological challenges limit opportunities for new construction, architects increasingly focus on transforming and adapting existing buildings.

This book introduces adaptive reuse as a new discipline. It provides students and professionals with the understanding and the tools they need to develop innovative and creative approaches, helping them to rethink and redesign existing buildings – a skill which is becoming more and more important. Part I outlines the history of adaptive reuse and explains the concepts and methods that lie behind new design processes and contemporary practice. Part II consists of a wide range of case studies, representing different time periods and strategies for intervention. Iconic adaptive reuse projects such as the Caixa Forum in Madrid and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are discussed alongside less famous and spontaneous transformations such as the Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin, in addition to projects from Italy, Spain, Croatia, Belgium, Poland, and the USA.

Featuring over 100 high-quality color illustrations, Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage is essential reading for students and professionals in architecture, interior design, heritage conservation, and urban planning.

About the Authors

Bie Plevoets holds a PhD in architecture and works on theory of adaptive reuse in the research group Trace – Adaptive Reuse and Heritage in the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at Hasselt University, Belgium. She teaches courses on adaptive reuse at BA and MA levels.

Koenraad Van Cleempoel is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at Hasselt University, Belgium, where he is also a member of the research group Trace. He was previously holder of the Pieter Paul Rubens Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

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Author: Herman Hertzberger, Anna Heringer, Jean-Philippe Vassal
With contribuitions by: Kamiel Klaasse, Nanne de Ru, Jan Jongert, Marijn Schenk, Hedwig Heinsman, Rudy Stroink.

Publisher: Uitgever:nai010 Uitgevers
ISBN: 978-94-6208-082-9

At eighty, internationally acclaimed Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger invited colleagues and students to reflect on the future of architecture. While questioning the profession’s status as ‘the discipline par excellence that has lent itself to the representation of a new, better world’, Hertzberger acknowledges that ‘it is exactly when the ground under your feet is collapsing that you need elevation’.

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Author: Paola Altamura with contribuitions by Serena Baiani,

Eliana Cangelli,Fabrizio Orlandi, Giovanni Zannoni.

Publisher: FrancoAngeli, 2015

ISBN: 8891725676

→ Acquista il libro o eBook in Italiano 

→ English  version not available 🙁

The use of materials in construction involves high environmental costs: consumption of soil and raw materials, CO2 emissions, and vast waste production, which can only be avoided using closed-cycle resources, from cradle to cradle. The prevention and upcycling of construction and demolition waste materials and other supply chains are decisive for the building’s ecological impact, which can no longer be entrusted exclusively to energy efficiency during use.

The volume presents the features of an innovative design-operational approach to construction, with zero waste, to induce a rethinking of the logic of selecting materials. Alongside a framework of theoretical and regulatory references, the text illustrates the potential for reusing and recycling the most used materials. It presents seven international best practices useful for understanding a variety of practical strategies.
Therefore, the volume proposes a systematic set of procedures and tools aimed at the three leading operators in the construction chain: client, designer, and contractor. Design principles, technical details, criteria for calls for tenders and tenders, IT tools to address innovative but substantially urgent questions:
– how to design with recycled components and materials?
– how to allow a zero-waste transformation or disposal of the building?
– how to build a tender specification that favors the procurement of sustainable products?
The book thus offers an in-depth investigation of efficiency in the use of resources in construction. It attempts to transfer to Italy through technical and operational guidelines that meet the most up-to-date environmental requirements.

The book thus offers an in-depth investigation of efficiency in the use of resources in construction. It attempts to transfer to Italy through technical and operational guidelines that meet the most up-to-date environmental requirements.

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Authors: Césare Peeren, Jan Jongert, Ed van Hinte

Published by: 010 Publishers, 2013
ISBN 10: 9064505926

Pioneers in designing and building with various dead stock and waste materials, compiled the book Superuse. This book shows examples from their own practice as well from other designers who incorporate trash in their design.

Cable reels, window frames, washing machines, diapers, crates, carpet tiles, double glazing panels or old buses–you could recycle, discard or even burn all of these things. The other option is to put them to good use: ‘superuse.’ This is happening everywhere, albeit on a modest scale. Architects apply these materials in their designs. Superuse is a practical and inspiring book about constructing new buildings with surplus materials. It was initiated by Recyclicity, a Rotterdam foundation dedicated to such possibilities. Copiously illustrated with examples from the Netherlands and elsewhere, Superuse presents ideas for tools and methods for architects and superuse scouts such as the ‘harvest map’ of everything reusable within a given distance of a building site. Superuse renders the superfluous superfluous.