The Guardian: The case for ... never demolishing another building

Photograph: Omar Marques/Echoes Wire/Barcroft Media

​“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse. There are now over 2.5m square metres of building matter logged in his Madaster database, and he is currently working with the city of Amsterdam to catalogue the components of every public building in the city. “Waste is simply material without an identity,” he says. “If we track the provenance and performance of every element of a building, giving it an identity, we can eliminate waste.”

"The architects of the latter project, Lacaton & Vassal, have a rallying cry that all our cities would do well to adopt from now on: 'Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!'"

"He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused. His firm recently put the principle into practice with its new headquarters for Triodos, Europe’s leading ethical bank, which he says is the world’s first totally demountable office building. With a structure made entirely from wood, it has been designed with mechanical fixings so that every element can be reused, with all material logged and designed for easy disassembly."

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