reuse: recovering waste First, temporary projects that build from waste, or that redirect their own waste streams or byproducts toward subsequent projects. In Germany, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser took this approach to extremes in a range of temporary public structures they designed and built from salvaged materials during the early 2000s. Their projects were often visually striking; they made a conspicuous display of their salvaged components. Construction pallets, wood sheathing and discarded doors used as ad hoc cladding-framed legible public narratives around waste and reuse. Working with whatever unused materials they were able to scavenge from construction sites and city streets required that they develop a somewhat improvisational design process—one that allowed them to modify their designs in real-time during construction. This way of working brought challenges as well as pleasures: as their projects became more public and more permanent, the artists found that municipal authorities were often not amenable to changes made on the fly. Ultimately, their open and improvisational approach proved to be fundamentally incompatible with a public review process that demanded predetermination and certainty. As a result, Köbberling and Kaltwasser shifted their attention away from architectural installations and back toward the relative freedom of art practice. Working with the irregularities of miscellaneous scrap materials is one of the key challenges in waste-recovery design projects. Jessica Colangelo and Charles Sharpless, of the architectural practice Somewhere Studio, tackled this challenge with a temporary pavilion as part of the Biomaterial Building Exposition at the University of Virginia in 2022. Their pavilion, called Mix and Match , was developed in response to the large quantities of waste lumber – offcuts, overages and
temporary shoring—generated by conventional housing construction in the United States. Somewhere Studio’s approach foregrounded the inherent inconsistencies of salvaged wood as features of the pavilion’s design: pieces were stacked in a vertical gradient from tallest to shortest, and half-lap joints constituted a visually expressive connection detail that accommodated dimensional irregularities. In developing Mix and Match in this way, Somewhere Studio leveraged design to highlight both the opportunities and challenges presented by salvaged materials in architecture. Meanwhile, in a different corner of the building industry, large-scale commercial developments produce waste from short-term constructions in the form of construction mock-ups. For example, full-scale façade mock-ups up to one-story tall have increasingly become de rigueur among New York City’s newest high-rise projects. They allow design and construction teams to research, test and control for technical performance and design quality, and are typically discarded upon a building’s final completion (figure 1) . Testbeds , a project by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates, in collaboration with Samuel Stewart- Halevy and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, captures and redirects this waste stream for public reuse. Their project— they describe it as akin to a rescue operation 1 —is to reconfigure these discarded assemblages as the basis for any number of local community garden structures: sheds, shade structures, casitas, greenhouses or raised beds (figure 2) . Much more than a simple reuse of raw materials, they aim to bring the ‘image of the growing city down to the ground’, recontextualizing the mock-ups while ‘humanizing the scale of the skyline’. 2 New Affiliates completed a Testbeds pilot project in 2022 for the Garden by the Bay in Edgemere, Queens, currently featured in MoMA’s New York New Publics exhibition.
1. Akiva Blander. ‘From Playful Products to Clever Urban Interventions, New Affiliates Distills Design to Its Essence’. Metropolis , June 5, 2019. https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/new- affiliates-firm-profile/pic/56480/ . Accessed Oct 13, 2019. 2. Testbeds , New Affiliates, https://new-affiliates.us/Testbeds. Accessed June 22, 2023.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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