A Facade System Built Entirely From Salvaged Material

Every panel on the street front came from a building that was coming down within four miles of this one.

Buildings of this kind are rarely decided by architects alone. A structural engineer, a planning officer and a facilities manager who will never be named in the credits each moved this one several metres from where it started, and the drawings record the argument.

Rena Osei, who followed the salvage for three months, has been close to it from the start.

Background

The team catalogued 2,100 square metres of cladding from six demolitions, then designed the elevation around what they actually had.

The timeline tells its own story: eighteen months from first conversation to the point anyone outside the room saw anything, and then six weeks in which everything visible was decided.

Insurance was the hard part, not construction.

We drew the building twice: once as we wanted it, and once as the skips allowed.

the lead architect

The method

The panels are not matched. Four tones of brick slip sit side by side, and the joint pattern changes where the source changed.

What stops this being a one-off is the documentation. The practice has published the details, which means the next team does not have to rediscover the same three failures.

Reaction has split along predictable lines. The people who have to maintain it have the sharpest questions, and the fairest ones.

There is no shortage of people willing to call it inevitable in hindsight. Nobody involved describes it that way.

Where it goes

The practice has published its salvage schedule so the next project does not start from nothing.