ABSTRACT
Architects like to pretend they are building legacies, monuments that will outlast them, standing as a testament to their ideas. In reality, architecture is but waste in transit,1 existing in its intended form for only a brief time, before being demolished and disposed of. Rotor, a cooperative design practice based in Brussels, realised that in order to address the climate crisis, they needed to confront architecture’s troubling relationship to waste. To do so they created a new kind of architectural practice, one focused on deconstructing and repurposing materials, with outputs ranging from design, research, exhibitions, books, pedagogy, economic models and policy proposals. Here, we look at how their approach is realised across these different fields.
