ABSTRACT
In the context of the School of Re-Construction, an experimental summer school in 2021, the essay ‘Deep Re-use’ reflects on ‘New Forms of Measurement’, a workshop led by Jonny Pugh and Eddie Blake.
What does architecture look like if we start to understand the components that make up buildings more intimately? Pugh and Blake set up a methodology for deepening our understanding of re-used materials and a conceptual framework underpinned by two ideas: pragmatic re-use and ideological re-use. The essay challenges the aesthetics of preservation and re-use that are shaped by fashion and hierarchical concepts of heritage.
The workshop sought new ways of creating alternative, deeper readings of materials, attempting to synthesise the materials into new popular, radical aesthetic ‘re-use languages’. In the essay, this is contextualised with reference to historical and contemporary precedents.
Deep Re-use concludes with speculations on future models of material resourcing – overlapping cultural and technical information, sitting between the role of a public archive and builders merchant. These ‘Material Archives’ and the participative role of ‘Material Interpreters’ may provide the key to establishing a new universal aesthetic language in re-use, straddling the realm of both professional and DIY making.
