The German contribution Reduce / Reuse / Recycle – Resource Architektur to the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice propagated a pragmatic and affirmative attitude towards dealing with existing buildings. The energies and potentials stored in the building fabric – including the substantive, aesthetic, cultural, social and historical ones – must be reassessed.
A successful model for this could be the revalorisation of waste into valuable raw material, as the environmental movement has succeeded in doing with its most internationally successful slogan, the 3 Rs: Reduce / Reuse / Recycle. Could this ‘waste hierarchy’, which ranks reduction and avoidance before reuse and recycling, be a new approach to dealing with existing buildings? This was the question posed by the exhibition – in content and design.
The book Reduce / Reuse / Recycle – Resource Architektur delved into the exhibition themes, showed numerous examples from practice and sorted them into the newly created ‘hierarchy system’. Sally Below developed the contents of the publication with Muck Petzet, Florian Heilmeyer and Franziska Eidner and was responsible for the editing with her team.
Petzet, M., Heilmeyer, F. (eds.): Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2010
Reduce Reuse Recycle at Hatje Cantz