The Pedagogies of Re-Use: The International School of Re-Construction

The Pedagogies of Re-Use captures the amazing digital gathering of students, academics, practitioners, and activists that happened at the International School of Re-Construction. Involving over 100 people, from countries as far apart as Brazil, Canada, Ireland, UK, Spain, Germany, Greece, UAE, and China, the participants spent two weeks working in eleven teams to consider architectural propositions responding to the current climate and ecological emergency. This book documents the work of the eleven teams, considering the themes they pursued, the student projects proposed, and the final design ideas developed by each group. Supplemented with images of the work, the book also includes leading academics and professionals who supported the school and contribute their voices to these crucial issues of deconstruction, re-use, and adaptation. It is ideal reading for students and academics looking at the issues created by the climate emergency to which architecture must respond.

The Pedagogies of Re-Use is part of an EU ERDF £4.33 million Interreg NWE project entitled ‘Facilitating the Circulation of Reclaimed Building Elements’ (FCRBE), Interreg NWE 739, October 2018– December 2023. Online publication: June 2024, London.

The FCRBE project aims to increase the amount of reclaimed building elements in circulation within its territory by +50% (in mass) by 2032.

http://www.nweurope.eu/fcrbe

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Duncan Baker-Brown is a practicing architect, academic, and environmental activist. Author of The Re-Use Atlas: A Designer’s Guide Towards a Circular Economy, he has practised, researched, and taught around issues of sustainable development and closed-looped systems for more than 25 years. He recently founded BakerBrown, a research-led architectural practice and consultancy created to address the huge demands presented by the climate and ecological emergency as well as the challenges of designing in a post-COVID world. Over the years Duncan’s practices (and academic ‘live’ projects) have won numerous accolades including RIBA National Awards and a special award from The Stephen Lawrence Prize for the Brighton Waste House – the prize money has since been used to set up a student prize for circular, closed-loop design at the University of Brighton, UK, where Duncan teaches.

Duncan was the University of Brighton’s principal investigator for the North West Europe's Interreg Facilitating the Circulation of Reclaimed Building Elements (FCRBE) project. He was responsible for curating the pedagogic outputs for the FCRBE team (lead by Rotor). Said outputs are the subject of this book, which he has co-edited with the wonderful Prof. Graeme Brooker.

Graeme Brooker is Professor and Head of Interiors at The Royal College of Art, London, UK. He has published numerous books on many aspects of the interior including the recent publications 50|50 Words for Reuse (2022), Brinkworth: So Good So Far (2019), Adaptations (2016), and Key Interiors Since 1900 (2013). He has co-authored/edited ten books on the interior including the highly acclaimed Rereadings (2005; Volume 2, 2018). He has led interior programmes in Cardiff, Manchester, Brighton, and London institutions and has been a visiting professor in Antwerp, Berlin, Istanbul, and Milan. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of the journals Interiors: Design: Architecture: Culture, INNER, IDEA, and DESIGN&. He is the founder and was the director of the charity Interior Educators (IE), the national subject association for all interior courses in the UK, between 2006–2018 and 2023–present. He is a trustee of United In Design (UID), a charity set up to address the lack of diversity in the profession of interiors. He is currently working on the funded project – ATLAS, an archival-based work with the European Council of Interior Architects (ECIA) and the books The SuperReuse Manifesto (2024) and The Story of the Interior (2025). The latter is a history book that moves beyond standard chronological accounts and, instead, retells thematic histories of inside spaces through narratives of the room and the private and public interior.