Renowned architect and author, Catriona Shine recently led a workshop for Architecture students at SETU.
She held round-table discussions with the undergraduate students, who presented their current projects and their materiality, whilst guiding them into the possibility for re-use of building materials or elements in their projects.
She also presented a pilot project on which she worked, which had a focus on re-use and circular architecture in Oslo. This building project, at Kristian August gate 13, was the largest scale application of circular principles in Norway at the time. Through the thorough documentation of the project for the FutureBuilt database of reference projects, it continues to be a primary reference for new building projects in a growing re-use and circular sector.
Catriona explained about the wide range of materials, from construction to surface materials, which were re-used in this project, as well as the need for a robust and flexible design, the process of sourcing materials, redesign to suit found materials, design for re-assembly, and how a re-use project differs from a traditional project. Together with the students, they explored and reflected on how a selection of materials, sourced and documented by a re-use warehouse in Norway, could be applied to their own projects. They were also asked to consider if they could re-use any original materials that would be demounted within their projects, within parameters of dimensions, quantities, fixing, etc.
This caused the students to consider the materials in their projects more mindfully, for example how to increase the longevity of the materials they had chosen by design decisions, and how to use the physical characteristics of the materials they chose in their designs.
