PAM Public Lecture | THE BIG SUFFLE by Maarten Gielen
- LOW HUI YIH | 1001540522
- Mar 21, 2016
- 5 min read
MAARTEN GIELEN started his career at the age of 15, selling decorative items made from objects found at scrap merchants and flea markets to fashion stores and florists.
Arriving in Brussels in 2002, he set up BSF to offer technical assistance using salvaged materials to small cultural organisations. Two years later, the association merged with the organisations of Zinneke Parade, where he set up a programme for the reuse of industrial waste.
In 2005, he established Rotor where he works as designer, manager, and researcher. At Rotor he collaborated on exhibition projects. In 2012 he was appointed visiting professor in the HEAD in Geneva. In 2014 he curated together with Lionel Devlieger the Oslo Architecture Triennale. In 2015 he was awarded with the Rotterdam-Maaskant prize.
ROTOR
Rotor is a group of architects, designers and other professionals interested in material flows in industry and construction, particularly in relation to resources, waste, use and reuse. Rotor disseminates creative strategies for salvage and waste reduction through workshops, publications and exhibitions.
During the PAM Talk, Maarten Gielen shared 4 of the projects that Rotor has involved to explain the idea of "THE BIG SUFFLE". The 4 case studies he shown are mostly related to resources, waste, use and reuse of materials.
CASE 1 | The Belgian Pavilion
The exhibition Usus/Usures occupied the Belgian pavilion at the Giardini. The project explored wear as a reaction to use in architecture (relationship of materials and its user). By focusing on the mundane and the overlooked details of architecture, the collective brought poetry, history and emotion to the biennale. The exhibition investigates a specific phase in the life of construction materials. Maarten Gielen mentioned that the marks that human body leave reflected the user respond towards it. For example, the stained carpet, we can easily noticed the function of the particular space.
. double flights stairs . stained carpet . tired stair .
Traces of wear play a crucial role in this and it helps to investigate the life phase of construction materials. Materials are gradually re-shaped by human beings passing through them, walking on them, touching, pressing, stroking, scratching or holding them. Thus, it gains a new dimension that is both physical and situational. Because of this exhibition, Rotor has carried out the accounting for this research, listing the different wears, framing the typologies, seeking a confrontation with the sociological, emotional aspects, even with the tales and the superstitions. Therefore, the Rotor collective spent years touring public buildings in Belgium to document and collect sections of walls, banisters with chipped paint, wooden floors, stained carpets, tired stairs, elevator cabins, plastic chairs, door handles, windows, and other worn out fragments of buildings before the exhibition.
Collection of the building's fragments
A scarred parquet, a banister run through by thousand hands, a fitted carpet cut off next to furniture
Some of the objects are no more existing or taken out of their original context and it looks like minimalist sculptures (stairs) and even it looks different from the original. Besides, fabric of heavily used office buildings to faiding stairs are highlighting the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. The exhibition, preceded by an interesting work of research, stages used (worn out) materials, on which wear worked in different ways, bringing in unexpected drawings and small stories.
Case 2 | Student project at HEAD, Geneva
There are some unused materials are ready to discard. While waiting for the local authorities to collect those building parts, the students decided to put the materials along the street. Unfortunately, these unused building parts become an installation at the street and the pedestrian is taking photo for this "artistic" scene. Actually, these unused materials are not bad as what we think before and it has the potential for reuse in other purpose even for installation.
Case 3 | Cultural Centre Bomel, Namur
This project is mainly related to reused of materials and equipment. The building was a freshly renovated 1940’s former slaughterhouse, in Bomel. The renovate work in mainly focused on the interior as the owner wish to preserve the exterior facade of the building. Rotor’s brief was to provide equipment, but also to reflect on how the place would be used and run.
Due to budget constrain, rotor resorted a lot to reuse the materials and existing equipment that found on site or get from the regular second hand market. For instance, Rotor collected the recycled materials from the luxurious CEO bar of a bank which already bankrupted. This project is something like adaptive reuse building that we should practice more nowadays.
Case 4 | Rotor Deconstruction
After almost 10 years of research on the flows of materials in industry and construction, Rotor is proud to launch a spin-off, Rotor Deconstruction. This project, that soon will become a separate cooperative company, dismantles and sells reusable materials from quality buildings undergoing transformation or demolition.
Rotor Deconstruction sells two categories of materials. On the one hand generic construction elements such as doors, windows, lowered ceilings, lighting divises, etc. On the other hand more exceptional batches of materials from landmark buildings.
Q&A
Question: Buildings account for approximately 40% of energy consumed, therefore it should be given extra attention to architects in discourse around sustainability. Yet as you've pointed out, a lot of what is stated on the topic of sustainability is pretty shallow. Do you think architecture's role in this discourse has been irreparably compromised?
We are making a critique, or trying to take some distance from the subject in order to observe it more clearly. We're not nuking sustainability - we are sincerely interested in the architectural discourse with regard to this topic. Obviously, asking the question whether sustainability can be taken seriously as a concept is controversial in itself, and it is sufficiently controversial so that we can use quite nuanced answers. We don't want to push it to the other extreme either, because there is enough promotion already, but we are not acting as terrorists on this issue. We find all the projects we include in our research genuinely interesting in some way.
PERSONAL.PERSPECTIVE
In conclusion, “THE BIG SHUFFLE” is about material flow in industry and construction, in relation to resources, waste, use and reuse. Material can be defined as a formed or consisting of matter; physical; corporeal. According to Maarten Gielen, a waste exchange, or virtual exchange, facilitates the use of a waste product from one process as a raw material for another. As with new life reuse of finished items, this avoids the environmental costs of disposing of the waste and obtaining new raw material, and may still be possible if the nature of the process makes avoiding production of the waste or recycling it back into the original process impossible. The reuse of materials is a very sustainable practice that should practice in all kind of field. Lastly, a used material can be something meaningful or useful instead of just throw away since some of them are still in good quality and condition
PAM Public Lecture held on 16 MARCH 2016
located at Black Box, Publika Solaris Dutamas.
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