What is waste for us? Although consumer society didn't invent the concept of waste, it has generated a sharp dichotomy according to which an object is either a product or a waste, never both at the same time (either you use it or you throw it away). Before the industrial revolution and the rise of contemporary capitalism, however, economic scarcity made material care and creative reuse a necessary part of the relationship with our material environment. A church enclosing an ancient temple, an apron made of rags, or a football of sewn tripe are testimonies of a time when the human impact on the environment was mitigated by a kaleidoscopic use of everything that surrounds us.
Instead, consumerism, by generating the illusion of an abundance of objects, makes them easily transformable into rubbish. Paradoxically, it is today's world, which has progressively become a huge landfill of dead, disfigured objects, that makes it more necessary than ever to start producing again from what already exists. Ecology teaches us to stop being protagonists and become co-protagonists of human activity itself, always considering the material reality in which we live. Resource scarcity also forces us to take a critical look at the built environment, a material x-ray of our architectural heritage, which can be seen as a true urban mine of products.
Under this approach, it is the physical reality of the material that remains, and not the people who inhabit it, allowing us to forget in a certain sense the current categories of what is built. Instead, it could be more useful to think of a building as one of the multiple transfigurations of matter, capable of accommodating a certain way of life in its current configuration. But to do so, we must get used to living among this ‘waste’ and blur the dissonances that may appear with our desperately new, clean, white, neat present.
We seek an architecture that is committed to the normalisation of materiality in architectural form, as part of a deeper process of normalising the ‘diseases’ of the material, of that which is considered rubbish. We oppose the perfectionist anxiety in the new, consumerist, throwaway logic that cannot take care of our built realities. And this approach is not so much about recycling, i.e. destroying, processing and rebuilding the fragility of the new, but about intelligent reuse. All of this is linked to a paradigm shift, a way of unlearning to desire objects and start to love them, understanding that the real transformation of a product into trash is mental, and that our inability to feel affection for the environment can cost us all a great deal. Unlearning to live in a brand-new world, as if it were a commodity with a finite lifespan, of which the built landscape is its visible face, its ever-young and distorted expression.
Our interest lies in how movement and transport, with their own logics, can generate a valid architecture with a high ecological value. Not as a series of recycling or isolated happy ideas, without ambition, but as a circular system integrated into the building industry, encompassing deconstruction, transport, storage and construction of structures in a dynamic way.
