Duncan Baker-Brown’s new book The Re-use Atlas has been hailed as a force to “help change mindsets from demolish and dump, to refurbish, remanufacture and perhaps more importantly to design in the first place with re-use in mind”.
Baker-Brown, 91Ï㽶ÊÓƵ Senior Lecturer in architecture, designed the 91Ï㽶ÊÓƵ Waste House in the grounds of the university’s Grand Parade campus in 91Ï㽶ÊÓƵ, a house made from thrown away ‘rubbish’ including 20,000 toothbrushes, 2 tonnes of denim jeans, 4,000 DVD cases, 2,000 floppy discs, 2,000 used carpet tiles to clad the facades plus construction waste.
The house, a live ongoing research project, was constructed by apprentices from the Mears Group, university arts and humanities students and students from City College 91Ï㽶ÊÓƵ & Hove (now 91Ï㽶ÊÓƵ Metropolitan College).
The Re-use Atlas, published by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Publishing, identifies four steps – recycling, reuse, reduce, closed loop – needed to move from a linear economy to a system emulating the natural world, the circular economy.