P-Prompt: Certifying bricks

This prompt emerged during a conversation with author, friend and architect Dubravka Sekulić. She proposed us to think with the certification processes of recycling materials, and more specifically with bricks, as a way to ask questions about agencies, processes, relations and positions involved in reuse.

Everyone speaks about reuse all the time but what does it actually mean concretely? What relations does it set up and which ones does it transform?

Download labels for printing (PDF)

Hello Reuser,

I have been manufactured in ................ (location) in the year .................... from the following materials ............................

I was produced using a high energy intensive process, but in relative vicinity to the construction site where I was first used. My production was a source of labour for the regional community. After being used by precarious workers for ............................. (type of building), the building was used for ........................... amount of time. The building had at least few more decades in it, but due to market forces the whole neighbourhood was marked for demolition to build taller buildings using environmentally harmful steel and concrete.

I am therefore not sure if I am materially OK to be re-used for .................... and ......................... but I would still appreciate it if you tried to reuse me. This time, I urge you to under no circumstances reuse me for building spaces that could be used to harm its inhabitants. To be concrete, no prisons, no detention centres, no unsafe buildings, and no environmentally nor socially damaging constructions.

All the best,

The Brick

Hello Reuser,

I acquired this brick here (location) ..................... on (date) .... for (price) ............

New construction regulation forced me to source 10% of building materials through reuse. I am required to document what happens with materials used on each project in my portfolio. I am also under scrutiny about the working conditions at my construction sites, because building with reused materials asks for more engaged and aware workers. 

This brick is certified for .................... because the working conditions on the previous construction site ensured that construction workers were able to handle it according to recommendations.

When using this brick, you will have to commit to create similar conditions so that it can be reused yet another time.

Sincerely,

The Developer

Hello Reuser,

The developer acquired this brick here (location) ..................... on (date) .... for (price) ....

I have used this brick in (location) .....................

We continue to fight for working conditions that are safe every day and on each construction site we work on. 

When I previously encountered this brick, I was working under fair and safe working condition that enabled me to install it in a way that ensures it can be used in the future.

Use this brick in solidarity with our fight for better conditions to make sure bricks can be reused in the future.

Best wishes,

The construction worker

Hello Reuser,

We certify that this brick has the following material qualities: .....................

We also guarantee it was used in ..................... (building type) and for .... years.

 This means that this brick is safe to be re-used to build small scale buildings up to .... floors or walls that are not load bearing. We certify that the brick can be used for a minimum of .... years, after which we propose on site inspection to re-certify its additional lifespan to avoid unnecessary demolition as long as possible.

Regards,

The Certifiers

Certifying bricks: A conversation

DB: When you asked me to think about reuse in culture, I started to think about this in relation to the growing conversation about the reuse in built environments at the moment, as a result of finally acknowledging the complicity of architecture and construction industry in the climate collapse. The industry started to turn to reuse, realising that the practice of continously relying on newly extracted materials to fuel the never ending cycle of demolition and construction of new spaces and using new materials is not necessarily compatible with sustainability and the big fight against climate change it was supposedly commited to... Of course, the reuse of materials for construction is not anything new. In London, where we are talking, there is a long history of reusing bricks, not just in small scale projects, such as the construction of the single family houses, but also in large housing estates. However, beside all good will that is starting to appear in the construction industry to reuse, there are a lot of hurdles especially when it comes to insurance and material standards. Material standards and building codes, which have been histrocially developed to protect people from buildings collapsing on their heads, or incinerating them, have to evolve and change to both allow for reuse but also to offer robust protections. This is not maybe that bad, as the trust in especially material specifications is already deeply erroded after recent construction scandals, and especially the Grenfell Fire Inquiry revealed the scale of corporate manipulation which burdens the field. But I digress, what is good is that in times of crisis requirements push to start reusing materials. This opened up a whole new space, which is now being transformed into, and thought through: what does it mean to reuse materials? What are the procedures you have to follow, not only in order to secure that you have access to this material, so that you can reuse it and make sure that not everything is thrown into a landfill? But also, how to get insurance for example, how do you get a certificate that the used steel beam will behave as expected under certain conditions?

Ideally when you buy any construction material, a pile of bricks, or cladding material, you get a certificate, which tells you, for example, how that material behaves under conditions of fire, what are its loadbearing capacities, how it should be installed so that it behaves within the specified parameters… in order to guarantee that it will be performing as expected. This ensures that when all diverse building components are installed, the building will comply to all health and safety regulations.

The more industry shifts to reuse, the issue to solve will be how do you combine differently standardised elements and how do you understand overall risks. The routine of specifying materials becomes the skill of design how to bring these different elements together. You're not specifying “make me this amount of this, this this way new fit new steel beams”, but you are kind of combining those that exist, even though these will be often standardized profiles.

I am interested in how do you then write such a certificate? Can this new type of specification include not just the history of origin but also the instructions of how to use something? You can't assume that they can be reused exactly the same way that brand new ones can be used. So you have to provide a different kind of description. There are further issues of scale, storage and material cycles that are connected to this process. This transformation is slowly underway, and already a number of cities, London for example, condition issueing of building permits by reuse. This This process shifts attitudes towards how materials are put into words, which also shifts an attitude towards how do you design because you have to then think beyond “I'm designing something to look as if it didn't exist before or design with a spreadsheet that makes most money for those who are financing”, but you're also here to enrich the design with materials which are there or readily available. You have to think materials in a more concrete way and all of a sudden it becomes much more important to know what actually these materials did before.

FS: Do you think this material practice of reuse maps onto authorial reuse?

DS: Maybe it's not possible to map them one on one. But I thought it could be interesting to think these two in relation, especially because cultural reuse has been, in a way, regulated longer. What does it mean to not just use something, but to reuse it? To look into the practice of architecture and construction to see what are the issues that we are missing when we think about reuse of immaterial, intellectual content?

FS: Yes. What would it mean to have an authorial practice that already prefigures reuse in its production. Where the understanding that materials were not yours to begin with, is already built into the practice that might be reused in the future.

EW: So I wouldn't go and buy a new brick I would take a reused brick. And that brings all the history and the conditions and the relationships implicitly with it, it's, that's really a nice way to connect the two.

FS: In these certificates, is there also thinking about reuse that would be restricted to certain purposes? Like … not for military use?

DS: Not that I know, but I think it's something really interesting. For example, would it be possible to specify that if you're demolishing council housing and that you can't like reuse the materials for a profit making space, right? The issue with this is that most new constructions are for profit, and that the industry anyway has to be incentivized to shift from new to reused materials, as they tend to shrink profit margins, because they require different storage, specification, detailing… The whole process of how buildings are designed and constructed has to be at least tweaked by this shift. Certification becomes even more important. I think the certificate to certain degree assumes that you don't need to have contact between those who used the material before and those that are going to reuse it. It has to be something that one can trust. What becomes really interesting is that in this culture of reuse that we are thinking about, mistrust is more on the side of the second, of the reuser.

FS: I think this is not so different from how Free Culture licences function, and why we are interested in them as tools for making the conditions of reuse explicit

DS: But there are many things that are being reused in cultural contexts that are not necessarily under Creative Commons? I think what I found interesting when I first encountered Creative Commons, is that it made one really ask oneself questions that you don't necessarily would ask about your work. Asking oneself under which conditions I want this work to be reused inevitabley makes one ask also under which conditions I am actually making this work to begin with. At least for me it also made me think... is any work ever individual to begin with… Under which conditions my work is mine to determine then also how it exists in the world. Who can reuse it? What can I reuse? I think it made everyone more literate in understanding what are any conditions, not just fair? What are the questions and issues?

The analogy to what is now happening in art in architecture, is that all of a sudden, people are much more concerned actually, how are materials they specify produced? Under which labour condition? How far they have travelled? Can I actually change some of these conditions in the way I specify materials? Do I need to use something that is produced here and then has to be shipped to there or I can use...

How do you frame these conditions ... how do you work with different materials and across different times and geographies. Or what groups are connected and what allows those who are negotiating to understand all the possible implications and how will they be able to interpret these relations?

London, June 2023