Making with Repurpose: Finding Architectural Value between Waste and Landfill

Donna Cohen; Charlie Hailey; DK Osseo-Asare

doi:10.6092/issn.2612-0496/9554

Authors

Donna Cohen

Donna L. Cohen is Associate Professor of Architecture, Affiliate Faculty of the Center for African Studies, and liason for the African Architecture Working Group.
She is co-founding principal of Armstrong + Cohen Architecture, focusing on community initiated projects.
Charlie Hailey
Charlie Hailey is Professor of Architecture and Distinguished Teaching Scholar in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. A registered architect, Hailey has received numerous awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, and Graham Foundation grant. He is the author of Design/Build with Jersey Devil (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), Camps: A Guide to 21^st-Century Space (MIT Press, 2009), Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place (LSU Press, 2008), and most recently Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place (MIT Press, 2018) with photographer Donovan Wylie.
DK Osseo-Asare
DK Osseo-Asare is co-founding principal of transatlantic architecture and integrated design studio Low Design Office (LOWDO); co-founder of Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP); and assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Penn State University, where he directs Humanitarian Materials Lab.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2612-0496/9554

Keywords:

architecture, design/build, pedagogy, making, technology/science

Abstract

This project rethinks architectural work in the context of waste. Fourth-year students designed and built a mobile maker-space at the Repurpose Project, a last stop for cast-off materials before the landfill. This essay argues that the material ecologies found in such places provide a critical context for understanding architectural work as a collective body of knowledge and practical know-how. The rejected and scrapped materials themselves had agency, carrying legacies and future potentialities, not just for the project but also for the larger collaborative project of evaluating and addressing work and waste in and out of academia and the architectural profession. Building the maker-space recast the process of making as a series of critical ecological acts and explored the Repurpose Project model as a knowledge commons for alternative architectural practices.

References

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Eglash, Ron and Ellen Foster. "On the Politics of Generative Justice: African Traditions and Maker Communities," in What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa, ed. C. Mavhunga. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2017.

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Making with Repurpose: Finding Architectural Value between Waste and Landfill

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