Digital School of Re-construction

About

The University of Brighton’s School of Architecture and Design are hosting a digital Summer School aimed at students from the worlds of design, architecture, construction and engineering. The digital School of Re-construction (SoR-c) will demonstrate ways to re-use materials and elements from the built environment.

Course leader

Our team at the University of Brighton includes Anthony Roberts, Nick Gant, Dr Ryan Woodard, Siobhan O’Dowd and is led by senior lecturer and architect Duncan Baker-Brown best known for coordinating the building of the Brighton Waste House, “Europe’s firs

Target group

Students currently studying: design, architecture, construction and engineering
Due to funding coming from Interreg NWD, priority to those studying at Universities in North West Europe which includes: includes Ireland, United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Course aim

Students from different regions will work in teams with designers and makers to re-think and re-use, through the re-construction of disassembled materials to create a series of thought-provoking digital design interventions, that will prove that “there’s no such thing as waste, just stuff in the wrong place!”

Drawing on the partners and work of the Interreg FCRBE project the Summer School will include discussions and debates on topics relating to urban mining, resource mapping, deconstruction, re-use, and buildings as material banks.

Drawing from their immediate environment’s, each participant will survey a chosen artefact, room, or building with a view to digitally unpacking and deconstructing them. Each of the eight teams will create their own digital library; to be shared, interrogated, understood and re-imagined as a ‘new’ proposition.

Since the rise of modernity, design usually precedes construction. Consequently, designers generally develop their projects around standardized, stable and predictable construction products or they order specialised production of bespoke elements that will match their requirements. In essence, reclaimed products are the exact opposite of this: they are largely heterogeneous, unpredictable, and situated. In this sense, they question the habits of designers.

We will tackle this question by challenging each team to design and realise a small construction out of reclaimed elements in response to one of the workshop themes as detailed below.

These themes pose questions and provide a particular ‘lens’ for re-structuring elements that are usually discarded or re-worked. Each team will have an array of digitally reclaimed elements sourced from across the Interreg FCRBE region to choose and experiment with.

All these realisations are small living laboratories that will allow you to have direct experience with these challenges. The two-week-long workshop will culminate in a carefully curated online exhibition of these experimental design interventions.