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By Jessica Camille Aguirre
When the Dutch National Bank moved to its Amsterdam headquarters in 1968, the new buildings were epic and elegant. An extensive modernist monument that occupied an entire block on the banks of the Amstel canal, jutted out through an imposing skyscraper of polished ochre tiles. The tower were low workplaces elevated on columns, giving the impression that the total complex floated, monumental and airy, just above the ground. In 1991, when more work area was needed, a momentary tower was built. This one, cylindrical and wrapped in bluish glass, earned the nickname “the cigarette lighter” for its sloping roof that appeared to be operable.
People liked or hated running on the lighter, with their blue desks with gray lines stretching from a curved central aisle like slices of cake. In the end, however, the reviews didn’t matter. A few decades into the new millennium, the entire complex began to show symptoms of wear and tear. The tiles fell from the façade. The pipes began to leak. And, perhaps most troubling in a country that values environmental innovation, its overburdened heating systems burned too much fuel. In 2020, an architectural firm finished a design plan that would update the original structures and turn the inner courtyard into a public garden. The plan didn’t come with the lighter. Twenty years after his incorporation, he had exhausted his function. It would have to disappear.
As a rule, the fate of a construction that has lost its usefulness is demolition, leaving a huge pile of garbage.
The Netherlands and other European countries have tried to reduce this waste with regulations. Buildings break into pieces and turn into asphalt. When it came time for the cigarette lighter, a Dutch environmental engineer named Michel Baars thought he could do more than convert it. in curtains for a road. Baars sees himself as an urban miner, someone who extracts raw fabrics from deserted infrastructure and digs up a market for them.
Lean and level-headed, Baars belongs to an emerging organization of architects, engineers, contractors and designers determined to find a new way to build. This organization has a philosophy rooted in a set of concepts infrequently referred to as circular or regenerative economy. , the cradle-to-cradle technique, or the donut economy. There are two fundamental principles in his thinking: first, on a planet with limited resources and a warmer climate, it is crazy to throw things away; Second, products deserve to be designed with reuse in mind. The first concept is an integral component of our daily lives: recycling has long since reclaimed family waste. More recently, the technique has begun to take hold in industries such as fashion, with thrift retail stores and clothing rental services, and in food production, with compostable packaging. The moment calls for more foresight and would force corporations to reconsider their activities in the most fundamental way possible. Translating any of the concepts into human settlement infrastructure draws attention to reuse to a great extent. longer time scales.
Buildings are meant to include progress. Each generation, in stone, steel, glass or concrete, leaves its mark on the future. And the need for homes and other buildings is evident as the world’s population continues to grow. Over the next 4 decades, a built-up area on the order of Square footage of some other New York City city will be added to the month of the planet. But buildings use a staggering amount of raw fabrics and are responsible for nearly 40% of global climate emissions, some of which are generated through their construction. Cement production alone is responsible for 8% of global emissions.
In recent years, waste and climate considerations have led cities like Portland, Oregon and Milwaukee to pass ordinances requiring some homes to be deconstructed rather than demolished. Private corporations in Japan have pioneered new tactics to bring down high-rise structures from the inside, floor to floor. China promised to reuse 60% of structural waste in its recent five-year plan. But perhaps no country has committed itself as deeply to circular policies as the Netherlands. In 2016, the national government announced that it would have a waste-free economy by 2050. At the same time, the country held the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union and made circularity one of the main concepts driving the business sector. worldwide. the block. The Amsterdam city government has set its own targets, announcing its goal to start framing a fifth of new housing with wood or bio-based fabrics by 2025 and to halve the use of unfired fabrics by 2030. Cities like Brussels, Copenhagen and Barcelona, Spain, have followed suit.
However, even in the Netherlands, creating a true circular economy is a challenge. According to national statistics, almost a portion of all tea in the country comes from structures and demolitions, and 97% of this tea was classified as “recovered” in 2018. But most of the recovered tea is recycled, that is, it is crushed on the roads or incinerated to produce energy. A 2020 report by the European Environment Agency noted that only 3-4% of fabrics in new Dutch buildings were reused in their original form, i. e. trees are still cut for wood and limestone is still mined for cement.
“We’re very smart at recycling, but we don’t make it the most productive circular solution,” Salome Galjaard, a sustainability strategist at the municipality of Amsterdam, told me. The ideal procedure for an old building would be to set it aside and reuse its parts, as Mr. Baars did with the cigarette lighter. Baars, who runs a circular demolition company called New Horizon, sent a team of about 15 other people to dismantle the office’s partitions. They packed interior glass and plasterboard for corporations that can use the materials. Then, starting with the most sensitive part of the 86,000-square-foot tower, they began cutting through the glass façade. A crane carried portions to a dock, where they were loaded onto barges on the Amstel Canal for the seven-mile adventure upstream to Mr. Baars’ warehouse. Once the team landed on the construction’s concrete-metal skeleton, they used high-pressure water and diamond saws to cut columns, floors, and a thick inner pillar that stretched down the construction backbone. construction. The pillar gave way like a soft cheese.
Mr. Baars’ effort to painstakingly deconstruct and reconstruct a skyscraper remains a rare example of a completely circular thinking that materializes in the real world. It helped through chance. The cigarette lighter was lifted in such a narrow area that it had to be prefabricated and brought to the site in sections. “That’s why we were able to oppose the procedure and bring out the elements in the same way,” Mr. Baars. like laymen. “
What’s in the store. The Retrospective series examines beyond our world’s efforts to be informed how society can move further in the face of ever-increasing dangers. Here are some key examples that can help us chart our path:
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This twist of fate in history is now the focus of various architects in Amsterdam, a hive of planning and activity around circularity. Last fall, I traveled around town to see how wacky concepts translate into practice and how they can be blocked. In recent years, I’ve begun to see clutter as a non-public failure: each and every crushed plastic bag in the bin or random unused roll of cable turns out to be a careless contribution to a wasted future. During my vacation in Amsterdam, I was aware of this; I regretted the umbrella I bought one rainy morning and lost before going to bed. But after spending a few days in the company of activists, architects, and designers looking to create a new built environment, I began to see lost umbrellas and other clutter, rather than being purely a service of my own limited virtue, it may also be a result of an unimaginative fabrication. Circularity emphasizes the composition of things, rather than their use, suggesting that anything made carefully enough can last or offer its molecules to break down and rearrange. Trash doesn’t want to exist, and creating a new kind of drapery richness, proponents suggest, is a matter of design.
The roots of circular economy thinking go back at least to the 1960s, when M. I. T. The effort aimed to simulate the long-term consequences of things like population growth, industrialization, and the use of herbal resources. In their 1972 book, “The Limits to Growth,” the researchers warned that unless humanity replaces the way it wears and consumes clothing on a global scale, civilization will most likely collapse before 2070. That, along with early Earth from Area photographs and Rachel Carson’s iconic 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” fostered an environmental philosophy based on the planet as a wonderful system.
Around the time “The Limits to Growth” came out, a young college student from Dartmouth named William McDonough began reading architecture. Later, when designing a nursery, she watched as children put everything in their mouths and began to think about the fabrics they used. were exposed. He befriended a German chemist named Michael Braungart. The two collaborated for years, and in 2002 they published their concepts in an e-book called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” in which they argued that biological tissues, which can be composted, be separated from minerals and metals, which can simply be reused. E-books have become a touchstone for a certain type of avant-garde architect.
In part they responded to the complex nature of tissues. In the early twentieth century, the oil and fuel industry began using chemical byproducts from their refining processes to expand things like plastic polymers. insulation, varnishes, sealants, pipes, pigments, flame retardant fabrics – all involve such compounds; Only about 20% of plastic is used in the structures industry. Jessica Varner, a historian with the Society of Humanities Fellows at the University of Southern California, has studied how petrochemicals seeped into the structure in the United States. He found that the industry was pushing to shape local structural codes and inspire architects and engineers to incorporate new composite fabrics into their designs. “How do you separate when everything is embedded with the fibers, coatings and pigments of the necessarily petroleum and fuel derivatives?”Mrs. Varner said.
The nature of fashionable structure fabrics is one of the most difficult parts of implementing circular ideas. In many cases, the renovation is so expensive, time-consuming, and so expert that it’s less expensive to simply buy a new one. Part of the challenge is that so many of the fabrics used in the traditional structure in the U. S. “In the U. S. specifically they’re laminated, they’re multiple assemblies,” said Paul Lewis, principal at LTL Architects in New York. These, therefore, have their own inhibitors to disassemble and reuse productively in another life. Until now, much of the reuse of fabrics in the structure has been limited to aesthetic-focused store options such as selling weathered wood from old barns for interior use. Dressing up in trendy cafes. And there are the added expenses of finding a place to buy things while waiting for their next life and updating old factors to meet new demands and requirements.
As a result, in many settings, the focus has shifted to designing structures whose parts can be disassembled and creating new bio-based fabrics that can eventually be composted. “We design man-made items and products in such a way that we don’t not destroy resources, but borrow them for a certain period of time,” said Dirk Hebel, professor of sustainable structure at the University of Karlsruhe. German Institute of Technology, he said. And that we can take them out in their natural form and put them back into the system. “
Proponents of circularity also say it’s not just about materials, but also about how the global economy is structured. A British economist and Oxford University professor named Kate Raworth, who attacked classical models of economic expansion in her 2017 book, “Economics of Donuts: Seven Ways of Thinking. “As an economist of the twenty-first century,” he argued that it is about achieving structural renewal without also renewing the fundamental assumptions about how production and intake are incentivized. Lately he is running with Amsterdam officials on the city’s circular plan.
These prospects have remained on the fringes of environmentalism without the efforts of a British sailor named Ellen MacArthur. In recent years, MacArthur, who broke the world sailboat’s solo circumnavigation record, introduced a base for advertising the classes he had. He learned from his trip, adding a desire to plan for resource reuse. In 2012, he presented a study, conducted with McKinsey.
Thomas Rau, an architect from Amsterdam, is one of the main proponents of this concept. In 2015 he made an impression in a Dutch documentary titled “The End of Ownership”, in which he advocated not so much the abolition of ownership as its move from Americans to brands. If brands retain ownership of their products, he argued, they will need to make products that last longer and require fewer repairs. Of equal importance, they will need to design items that can be easily taken as components and reused. Theoretically, this could also help consumers. Nobody needs to have a computer, a TV or a washing machine, Rau said; they just need what those products provide: computing power, visual entertainment, textile cleaning. If you see your car or your iPhone as a brand of your tastes or part of your identity, that might seem like a bad idea. But think of how subscription music streaming has temporarily replaced CD ownership. In the age of the sharing economy, it’s a concept that has intuitive, minimalist appeal; after all, he didn’t need the umbrella he had bought in Amsterdam. I just looked to dry out in the rain again.
One windy morning in Amsterdam, I met Mr. Rau at his workplace and we drove his BMW to make a stop at one of the structures he designed. Rau grew up in Germany but moved to Amsterdam as a young architect and has spent the last 3 decades looking to replace the way fabrics are used in structure and structure structures that can be dismantled and reused. This focus on dismantling has a leitmotif of M’s work. Dutch national grid operator Alliander.
When we arrived at the Alliander building, which he renovated in 2015, we parked under a bank of solar panels and walked to what had been a cluster of low-floor buildings. Rau had kept them intact but had replaced their appearance. He took reels of discarded commercial wires and used his worn wood to cover the exteriors. with trees and coffee stalls. In creating a huge roof for the atrium, Mr. Rau looked for anything that could be dismantled. The idea of who might have the ability to design structures that are light and easy to disassemble, but strong enough to provide a huge eaves. He approached a roller coaster designer, who at first was skeptical, but proposed a corrugated metal frame that Mr. Rau supplied with stretched white cotton and giant skygentles. On the day of our visit, the atrium was bathed in sunlight. .
Mr. Rau likes to create scrambled words; It calls for products intended for the elimination of “organized problems,” for example. The trend may seem corny or overworked, but its goal is to confuse so you can reorganize fundamental assumptions. In addition to running his architecture office, he identified a consulting firm with his wife, Sabine Oberhuber, to inspire corporate circular efforts, as well as a base called Madaster committed to tracking fabrics in buildings. He also gives many speeches. Tall and gray, though jovial in his youth, he has gone through many young architects to be part of an avant-garde that helped identify circular concepts in Amsterdam.
One of Rau’s first publicly acclaimed projects was the renovation of a terminal at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. His creation had a sublime and utilitarian aesthetic, but as with many of his projects, it is possible that the exclusive is not noticeable to the naked eye. Early in his work, he discovered the century-old light bulb, a light bulb that has been burning in Livermore, California, for more than 120 years, and was made to think about how production could be replaced if there is no incentive for obsolescence. All the soft bulbs needed for the airport terminal and how the airport would throw them away when they wore out.
He approached Philips, the generation and deodorization conglomerate, with an unusual proposal. Instead of offering physical bulbs, Philips would provide light as a service. For 15 years, the airport would pay Philips a normal payment for a certain amount of light. He would own the equipment, add the energy-saving light bulbs, and discharge and pay for electricity. According to Rau, this would make Philips interested in making something of the best quality (so it didn’t have to be replaced), which uses the least amount of energy imaginable (so the electric power bill would be lower), and whose building blocks can be reused once the product reaches the end of its life. Similar service contracts under the so-called Signify, says its circular bulbs last 75% longer than classic bulbs.
The experience led Mr. Rau to challenge the client’s ownership style in other industries. In 2012, her and Ms. Oberhuber’s consulting corporation began operating with a Dutch affordable housing provider called Eigen Haard. They negotiated a seven-year assignment in which Bosch, the appliance maker, would supply heating and cooling as a service to residents. The corporate installed 63 appliances, adding washers, dryers and refrigerators, in individual departments; Eigen Haard processed the monthly invoicing and directed maintenance requests to Bosch. Although the pilot was a combined bag (some machines disappeared because other people thought they owned them), Bosch introduced BlueMovement, which awards service contracts to families in Europe for a monthly payment for almost all of their devices. Miele, another appliance maker, has done the same with its own subscription service. The service is still new, but “it’s attractive enough to put a lot of effort into figuring out how vital it can be,” said Stefan Verhoeven, managing director of Miele Netherlands.
“This generation of 20- or 25-year-olds see things completely differently,” he said. “They want blank clothes, for example, a washing machine, and they don’t care who owns it. This does not apply to the total market, however, it is a much larger component of the market than before.
But those service contract experiments didn’t lead to a product overhaul as M. Rau had hoped. For a company like Miele, which relies on a reputation for quality, anything that reviews its engineering is subject to scrutiny. Managing global supply chains and ensuring fast delivery of products makes it difficult to incorporate recycled items.
However, Rau remains confident that the case for reuse will be strengthened. When I was in Amsterdam, Oberhuber and Rau met with Miele engineers from Road2Work, an e-te recycling plant, to talk to them about how to reuse discarded device components. At first, engineers wanted to know what kind of fabrics can be collected from older devices, the basic ingredients that make up the covers, and the adhesives of the devices, such as polypropylene, but they soon realized that it would make more sense to focus on the assembled parts that are expensive. to manufacture and less difficult to isolate. as published circuit boards. They didn’t come to any conclusions, but in communication with the managers of the recycling center, the engineers guilty of creating an object began to talk about what had happened in the end.
Before traveling to Amsterdam, I read about a network called Schoonschip, created through an organization of 144 disjointed idealists who built 46 houseboats on an urban canal. Unlike a corporate structure project, Schoonschip is an explicitly popular effort to create a utopian vision of circular design. . I wrote to a generic email to ask for a visit, and someone named Pepijn Duijvestein responded a few days later inviting me to his house.
When I arrived, the morning rain subsided and a sparkling sun lit up the sky. From the sidewalk, the houses almost looked like an exhibition, the rooms arranged over the canal at a distance from each other. A walkway dotted with potted plants and hung from festive luminaires snaked through the houses, which opposed the dark waters below.
Schoonschip was started in 2008 by a woman named Marjan de Blok, who approached the municipality for permission to build a network of paintings on one of the canals in Amsterdam’s former north trading domain. Officials looking for artistic tactics to expand the features of affordable housing have welcomed Ms. de Blok’s proposals. She began recruiting like-minded people, and after about ten families signed up for the project, the organization wrote a manifesto. They spent years understanding the construction and permitting process, as well as locating contractors willing to work with their demands and banks open to financing unconventional property deals. Future citizens formed painting teams and developed lists of recommended fabrics, though each house was ultimately given the freedom to decide what it would use. Most of the houses were built with wooden frames and used fabrics such as burlap or straw for insulation. “It’s a totally netpaintings project, and that’s the good fortune of the project,” said Sascha Glasl, one of the architects who helped design netpaintings and now lives there.
It’s not until 2020 that the network is finally finished. Today, many solar panels produce energy that is stored in giant batteries in each and every home and controlled locally through a private smart grid. Heat pumps use the thermal energy from the canal water to regulate the temperature. Green roofs collect rainwater and help maintain buildings. Great. Network residents participate in a car-sharing program, and the organization’s chats are full of offers: other people post their dinner leftovers, and leftovers are collected.
I rang the doorbell given to me by Mr. Duijvestein and he led me to a discreet living room, the duration of which was provided with a floor-to-ceiling glass door leading to the shipyards. We climbed a flight of stairs and sat at a table in their kitchen, where we drank coffee in small ceramic cups. Duijvestein, now 37, was 26 when he got involved in the network and did not have the same financial resources as others, but his space was no less elegant. He chose mud for many walls. Some of the beams come from wood extracted from tree branches that fell in Amsterdam’s parks during heavy storms.
There have been many complications. Finding the right used appliance instead of buying a new one is a boring traditional process, M. Duijvestein had to reconsider his kitchen after the second-hand counters he had ordered arrived with dimensions other than those advertised. But the design of the counters was a simple challenge compared to the resistance of lenders and contractors. When he chose clay for his interior walls and roof, contractors said they couldn’t secure their paints with that material. Now the earthen roof is sinking and he has no one to call. “If they experiment, they don’t need to give guarantees; they don’t need to accept a threat,” Mr. Duijvestein. “During the transition to a circular economy, it would be wonderful if banks or financiers said, ‘Okay, take the threat together. “Now I’m the one who has to pay to fix the roof because I’m a crazy and sustainable experiment bunny.
Inspired by Rau, some members of the Schoonschip network have tried to implement a service style for their heat pumps (“I don’t need a heat pump!” said M. Duijvestein. ” I need warmth. I need comfort. “) The essential factors do not belong to the owner. Even in the Netherlands, whose government is committed to supporting a circular economy, it is a challenge to decipher the regulatory procedure for the new bureaucracy of recovery and ownership of curtains. Banks would likely be reluctant to provide financing for projects that rely on service contracts, with their day-to-day jobs and schedules. Contractors are reluctant to ensure the functionality of fabrics they are unfamiliar with. Appropriate owners.
Mr. Duijvestein estimates that he invested between 375,000 and 450,000 euros in his houseboat, since he himself made much of the paintings, but cares little about the property; He considers himself a butler of the fabrics that make up his house for a while, warning of the fact that they will survive him. On the terrace in front of his kitchen, an insurrection of flowers and plants leaned against the bamboo railing. been cultivated through a woman with a rooftop garden; When they approach death, they look for someone to take care of them. Duijvestein took them home. When the woman died, he arranged a bouquet for her coffin. He calls them his second-hand flowers, though “if you look at it philosophically, all the flowers are secondhand,” he said. Great system. “
Baars’ company sits on a pier facing the North Sea Canal, the city’s main waterway, and has the distinctive commercial din of a working factory. Tractors enter and leave the warehouses. Clouds of dust rise from the piles of debris. A giant component of Baars’ business involves recycling old concrete and conveyor belts that transport demolition waste through aisles near giant, noisy machinery. Inside, giant steel plates rub the concrete pieces in combination to produce an aggregate that can be separated into active cement powder, sand or gravel. This procedure avoids the carbon emissions associated with the production of new cement as much as possible. It powers its machines with solar energy and reuses the other elements of old concrete: sand and gravel. – and markets its product as climate neutral; is executing an allocation of 300 million euros with the city of Amsterdam to supply concrete for the repair of the canal walls.
When Mr. Baars started his business in 2015, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing. He began soliciting demolition projects with the certainty that his paintings would cost no more than his competition’s and with the vague promise of making something circular out of the material. Slowly, policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions began to tilt in his favor. When regulations pushed up the prices of combustible brick making, a major facade and roof manufacturer contacted Baars looking for pottery salvaged from old buildings. When the Dutch government announced it would phase out coal-fired power plants, Baars learned that gypsum manufacturers, who use the sulfur by-product of coal production, would have problems at source. Array Gypsum is found in maximum gypsum, so he began by collecting gypsum cloth salvaged from demolition sites. It took him 3 years to get approval from the Dutch government to sell what they thought was tea, he told me. But now he sells the plaster. “I don’t think it’s helpful,” he said. “It’s just stuff. “
However, reframing waste as a curtain within a policy framework is tricky. In February, the city unveiled its circularity plan. The tone was self-critical. The people discovered that they used more raw fabrics than was thought in the past. He also pointed out that the city can do a much bigger job by reusing fabrics from demolition projects in new construction. “There is potential for the use of these wastes to be harnessed to satisfy the city’s abundant wants for building fabrics,” the report said. City officials have grappled with bottlenecks facing circularity advocates: how to expand and pay for the hard professional labor needed to deconstruct and restore old fabrics; where to buy fabrics as they are updated for their next iteration; how to gather enough knowledge about existing buildings and their demolition schedules to be a useful resource for designers. “There are a lot of pilot projects going on,” Ms. Galjaard, the city’s sustainability strategist, told me. “What we are facing now is a vital step in the transition from piloting, studies and testing to full-scale implementation, and it comes with many new and demanding situations that you don’t actually encounter when you fly. “
In the circular dream, nothing is lost or thrown away, waste is accumulated in specialized workshops to be remade and designed in the future, building fabrics blend with the environments they come from, and the concept of ownership provides a position of ownership. path to more productive use. The obstacles to this dream – standardized construction parts made from composite fabrics, inflexible supply chains, legislation and contracts – are far from gone. In reality, each and every commission that can be called circular, in its broadest sense, remains primarily an act of hobby: Dutch designer Hester van Dijk’s pavilion strung together from unaltered pieces; Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye’s forays into compressed earth construction; American architect V. Mitch McEwen’s experiments with felt and hemp-based concrete building envelopes. “People looking to design 50 years from now are looking to think about how we can build in a way that can respond to crises that already exist. ” Ms. McEwen told me, noting how fabrics like felt are more resistant to environmental bugs like flooding than classic construction fabrics. “And how can we build in a way that possibly doesn’t produce more crises?”
Mr. Baars’s contribution to this effort ultimately rests in a shed. He led me down the pier as the tractors passed, walking from the concrete reprocessing plant to a huge adjoining warehouse. Inside were the remains of the cigarette lighter, panels of cut concrete cleverly stacked to form walkways. “We’re creating a new build out of that,” Mr. Baars told me. Working with a homework development company called REBORN, Mr. Baars builds the hardware for a senior care facility for a large healthcare company. Later, he showed me the models: the original cylinder of the building would be rebuilt into 3 shorter asymmetrical builds with greenery and walkways connecting the spaces between them. The slices of cake, with their towering windows, would become apartments for other people in nursing care. Baars hopes to begin rebuilding the rooms this fall. In the new iteration of it, the cigarette lighter would not dominate the city, but instead create an organization of welcoming spaces. This is what Mr. Baars sees when he surveys the city: in the dilapidated buildings and aging infrastructure lie the unbaked fabrics of some other life.
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