Deconstruction Blight

March 5, 2019

This guest blog is courtesy of Mike Gable, Executive Director, Construction Junction, Co-Founder of Project RE_, and President of the Board of BMRA.  

My last post in December, summarized the work being done by Project RE_, a collaboration between the Urban Design Build Studio (UDBS) in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, Construction Junction, a nonprofit building material reuse retailer in Pittsburgh and a local job training organization called Landforce.  Soon the UDBS meets with a nonprofit neighborhood development corporation to present the house design that Professor John Folan and his students are developing with the added challenge of incorporating some of the material from the solar house deconstruction.  The house design also includes an innovative reuse feature utilizing ultra-high performance concrete panels that are “cast offs” from a local manufacturing facility. The UDBS is also exploring design for deconstruction.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Professor Folan to get his perspective on the response of the students to this challenging project. His first comments were enthusiastically centered on the increasing number of students seeking admittance to the UDBS program. The students are attracted to the community and environmental goals of the studio. We turned to the challenges of the current project which is addressing a number of complex issues. One of the challenges, of particular interest to me as part of the building material reuse industry is incorporating used materials into the house design-which will be a new construction project. What I took away from our discussion was essentially in architecture school students are not usually presented with a specific type of material to build a design around. You design and then find the materials that work for your design-usually material of which you have familiarity with a broad range of options. Starting with the limitation of using material at hand, particularly salvaged material, is not “business as usual” in architecture schools. Bottom line is simply; this work is hard.

Professor Folan is deeply committed to the vision of Project RE_. The students who are drawn to the UDBS see the importance of reuse and are committed to the idea, the challenge is always putting ideas into practice. The critical point here is someone needs to be practicing!

Professor Folan is deeply committed to the vision of Project RE_. The students who are drawn to the UDBS see the importance of reuse and are committed to the idea, the challenge is always putting ideas into practice. The critical point here is someone needs to be practicing!

NERC welcomes Guest Blog submissions. To inquire about submitting articles contact Lynn Rubinstein. Disclaimer: Guest blogs represent the opinion of the writers and may not reflect the policy or position of the Northeast Recycling Council, Inc.