Recyclage

Abstract

The project site in Anderlecht, Belgium exists a fragmented urban fabric in terms of morphological evolution in the post-industrial period, functional mix of the urban plot, connection with the immediate urban grains and the ephemeral state of ownership of spaces around the site. However, the nomadic site actors practise informal ‘urban mining’ which enables material flow despite physical distance of the urban fragments. The flow of resource becomes the immaterial spolia that gives experiential qualities and grants adaptability to the neighbourhood. The urban planning proposal thus endeavors to orchestrate the process of urban mining from collection, disassembly, extraction, recovery, consumption and reinvention within the site plot, challenging the status quo of recycling industry as infrastructure. The site is re-zoned into a production strip, mixed commercial and production public interior strip, and a cultural strip, forming a sprawling alley-yard internally that connects the major urban nodes of the plot at its periphery. The organization stitches the urban fragments thematically and functionally with narrating the process of urban mining. “Everyone is equipped by nature to receive and to assimilate sensory experiences,” (Lehmann, 2017). Recyclage is a hybrid that encompasses a material library, makerspace for material experiment , exposition space for new prototypes, auditorium, meeting rooms, office space for researchers and archive, providing a converge point for inhabitants, entrepreneurs, researchers and everyday makers. Being juxtaposed with teaching space of Le goujon and confronting the street of institutions, the recycle learning center serves as an extension of the educational cluster. The programmes are devised in zones that foster a pedagogical environment based on the observation of how a person understands and approaches material when I conducted the sensory experience mapping for the research. The spatial arrangement suggests exploratory and ascending movement with constant sightlines towards Le goujon which predominantly constitutes to the site context. The center interpreted materials as interlocutor between people from all walks of life, unleashing the inherent material literacy of individuals, reinventing architectural opportunities between traces of events, time as well as memories. The materiality of the project illustrates the boundless possibility of materials and the humanized facet of urban mining. Aluminium at different states and forms are harnessed to showcase the time and traces material afford particularly in this site with occupants constantly moving in and out. Aluminium is highly available, omnipresent in ever-changing commercial and residential buildings, and associated with domestic life and the remembrance of Anderlecht being a post-industrial city. The architecture ensemble is depicted as a living life account of aluminium that it is finished with mainly reused aluminium which undergoes a myriad of transformation strategies: reuse, repurpose, reconfigure and transform to take up different expressions. The ‘patchwork’ language presents an amateur character and recognizes the potential of anthropocene waste in elevating the design outcome, manifesting the envisioned position of Recyclage in empowering a home-grown community of nomads.