The strategies on show range from the ad-hoc to the forensically planned. Along with office and retail refurbs, the projects include a rusting steel factory in Shanghai reborn as a striking exhibition centre, a water tower in Norfolk that was cleverly converted into a panoramic house in the clouds, and a children’s community centre in a converted warehouse, complete with a vertiginous new landscape that ripples its way around the building. The retailer’s bosses might do well to thumb through Lang’s book for some inspiration, and see how creative reuse is not just crucial for the planet, but can be even more alluring than the promise of a shiny new-build. Photograph: Taran Wilkhu, Building for Change, gestalten 2022
To put the scale of the emissions in context, Westminster city council is currently spending £13m to retrofit all of its buildings, to save 1,700 tonnes of carbon every year the M&S demolition proposal alone would effectively undo 23 years of the council’s carbon savings. They point to examples such as the former Debenhams in Manchester, a 1930s building which is being refurbished and extended. Campaigners argue the development proposals would release 40,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, whereas a low-carbon “deep retrofit” is eminently possible instead. Whereas heritage conservation would once have been the primary reason to retain such a building, the conservation of the planet has now taken centre stage. While the urgency of the issue has been occupying the industry for some time – the Architects’ Journal leading the way with its RetroFirst campaign – the topic recently made national headlines when Michael Gove, then communities secretary, ordered a public inquiry into the proposed demolition of the 1929 Marks & Spencer flagship store on Oxford Street. The critical onus on architects and developers, therefore, is to retrofit, reuse and reimagine our existing building stock, making use of the “ embodied carbon” that has already been expended, rather than contributing to escalating emissions with further demolition and new construction. As Lang notes, 80% of the buildings projected to exist in 2050, the year of the UN’s net zero carbon emissions target, have already been built. Written by the architect and teacher Ruth Lang, it takes in a global sweep of recent projects that make the most of what is already there, whether breathing life into outmoded structures, creating new buildings from salvaged components or designing with eventual dismantling in mind. The project is one of many such poetic places featured in Building for Change, a new book about the architecture of creative reuse. “But we instil our hope that this town questions our lifestyles anew on a global scale and that out-of-town visitors will start to question aspects of their lifestyles after returning home.” “The question mark shape can be perceived only from high up in the sky,” says the building’s architect, Hiroshi Nakamura. The hotel at the Kamikatsu Zero Waste Centre, Japan.
It even has its own recycling-themed boutique hotel attached, called WHY – which might well be your first response when someone suggests staying next to a trash depot. Villagers typically visit the centre once or twice a week, which has been designed with public spaces and meeting rooms, making it a social hub for the dispersed town. Residents now sort their rubbish into 45 different categories – separating white paper from newspapers, aluminium coated paper from cardboard tubes and bottles from their caps – leading to a recycling rate of 80%, compared with Japan’s national average of 20%. Since then, the remote village (with a population of 1,500, one hour’s drive from the nearest city) has become an unlikely leader in the battle against landfill and incineration. In 2003, Kamikatsu became the first place in Japan to pass a zero-waste declaration, after the municipality was forced to close its polluting waste incinerator. It is a fitting form for what is something of a temple to recycling.
Inside, rows of shiitake mushroom crates donated by a local farm serve as shelving units, while the floors are covered with cast terrazzo made from broken pottery, waste floor tiles and bits of recycled glass, forming a polished nougat of trash.
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A chunky frame of unprocessed cedar logs from the nearby forest supports a long snaking canopy, sheltering walls made of a patchwork quilt of 700 old windows and doors, reclaimed from buildings in the village.
N estled like a red question mark in the hills of rural Japan, the Kamikatsu Zero Waste Centre is a recycling facility like no other.