Rotor, the Brussels-based design and research collective, brings architecture into the RECIPROCITY fold with Deconstruction. This project aims to shed light on the practices of building deconstruction and the reuse of construction materials, in turn joining the dots between logistics and lyricism. Proposing an alternative material flow and economy, it is not an artificial life-support for the hegemony of the past, but an integrative system that extracts the healthy, the valuable elements from a building, and then cleans, cuts and stores them for sale and reuse.

And is that what really motivated the setting up of Rotor Reconstruction?

One thing that we noticed was that there’s a mismatch between the services and practices that currently exist, and the building stock that is going to be demolished now and in the following decades…there were hardly any initiatives taken on really large scale demolition sites, especially not on demolition sites of modernistic or late modern buildings. Most of the dealers and designers that work with reclaimed materials focus on sort of rustic building materials. We tried to convince dealers to pay attention to these other materials but it didn’t work, so we decided to fill this gap ourselves.

Interview extract by Emma Firmin in the publication RECIPROCITY 2015 / About Social Innovation

Photography © Germain Ozer