Making with Repurpose: Finding Architectural Value between Waste and Landfill

Abstract

This project rethinks architectural work in the context of waste. Fourth-year students designed and built a mobile maker-space at the Repurpose Project, a last stop for cast-off materials before the landfill. This essay argues that the material ecologies found in such places provide a critical context for understanding architectural work as a collective body of knowledge and practical know-how. The rejected and scrapped materials themselves had agency, carrying legacies and future potentialities, not just for the project but also for the larger collaborative project of evaluating and addressing work and waste in and out of academia and the architectural profession. Building the maker-space recast the process of making as a series of critical ecological acts and explored the Repurpose Project model as a knowledge commons for alternative architectural practices.

Keywords

• architecture
• design/build
• pedagogy
• making
• technology/science