The Big Shuffle, by Maarten Gielen
Maarten Gielen is one of the founders for collective Rotor, where based in Brussels. This collective is found by a group of architects, designers and professionals who interested in industry and construction, then particularly in relation to the resources, waste and reuse. Rotor distributes in a creative strategies to salvage the waste equipment through workshops, publication and exhibitions. They have collected over 600 objects carrying claims of sustainability from over 200 architecture offices, companies and environmental organizations across the world. In 2014, he curated together with Lionel Devlieger the Oslo Architecture Triennale and awarded the Rotterdam-Maaskant prize in 2015.
Maarten also mentioned that they spent over a year to looking at the ‘sustainable architecture’ today. Then, his approach consistently and often visually emphasizes the effects of human planning, oversight or extended use on the built environment. So, Rotor continued to realize many kind of design projects, often interventions in existing architecture.
In the public lecture, Maarten said the ‘relocation’ as a design strategy, which means design doesn’t means the things must be fix on the place that designer designed and sometime the arrangement of the material is a strategy to re-design yourself. Maarten define the ‘relocation’ is reuse the material in another way. As the photo below, we can see the timber floorboard is full of foot trace and color fade, but when Maarten put the floorboard to the white background, it seem like reflect some stories behind.
Brussels is based on the Rotor occupies the Belgian pavilion at 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia. The theme is ‘People meet in Architecture’, organized by Kazuyo Seiima of Sanna and Rotor explores wear as a reaction to use in architecture. For practical reason, Rotor used the materials that collected in Belgium to transform the building from full function to a state of disuse. They found the materials that are common and contemporary, showing mild wear as a result of moderate use.
In the exhibition, there was a fabric of heavily used office building to fading stair to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. ‘Wear’ can be the way of reading architecture since the gallery turned these architecture details into work of art.
Maarten told us, he prefer to go junkyard or somewhere that building is going destruction to salvage those materials have potential. It cost low but quality is better than those see in market. He also calculate with that [Cost reusable + handling cost < Market value].
We questioned him about what is the role do him think architects will play in when not just defining sustainability but also putting it as practice? He answered us, perhaps the idea of project in the name of sustainability will scare certain people because they think it cannot be work in comfortable way. So architecture has to succeed it that when comfort and density are combined, it will create a new options to the world, and also show that architecture has the power to do it and it will not just an idea.
