Words Duncan Baker-Brown
Photography Rachel Ferriman

Every year the citizens of the United Kingdom consume 600 million tonnes of 'stuff' creating a flow of waste weighing in at 200 million tonnes. About two-thirds of that unimaginable figure comes from the construction industry. Just about all these 120 million tonnes of stuff, comprising demolition waste, spoil and surplus building material, goes straight to landfill or incineration. We are literally paying for construction materials and then paying again to get them thrown away.

For the record, the UK doesn’t compare very well with other European countries where their construction industries create between 30-45% of their waste flows. Granted the UK does construct a lot of buildings compared with many European countries, although we can’t build enough affordable homes at the moment! However, we are still particularly wasteful, and that is in a time when resource security is a thing of the past, with the price of construction materials particularly hard to nail down (excuse the pun), due to everything from Brexit, weather-related disasters caused by climate change, war or the current unpredictable challenge of Trump’s trade tariffs.

So, what if there was a way to wholly or partially decouple from the current 'linear economy'? (Broadly, harvest raw materials/manufacture into products/throw ‘away’.) In theory turning a linear economy back on itself creates a ‘circular economy’, which is a system that all healthy natural ecosystems employ; where ‘waste’ from one system is ‘food’ for another, and nothing is ‘wasted’ or thrown away. Applying circular and closed loop systems thinking to one of the largest of all human-made linear economies, namely the construction sector, is something that has occupied my thinking, research, teaching and architecture practice for over 25 years. ‘Designing out waste’, ‘de-constructing’ buildings at the end of their productive lives rather than demolishing them, reusing second-hand building components, and designing new buildings to be ‘material banks’ for future buildings are all ideas we have pursued at BakerBrown Studio.

Talking rubbish: the Waste House

Buildings such as our Waste House ‘live’ research project, based on campus at the University of Brighton, came about because we wanted to prove that much of the waste flowing from construction sites was useful. At the time, for every five houses built in the UK, one-house-worth of material was being sent to landfill or incineration. (This situation is slightly ‘better’ now – today we build about six houses before throwing away one-house-worth of material.) The Waste House team, which included over 360 students and apprentices, created the world’s first permanent teaching space performing to Passivhaus levels of energy efficiently made from 55 tonnes of material other people had thrown away. The building has been an ongoing research project for over 10 years now, regularly attracting research grants testing ideas around the circular economy and regenerative design. It also continues to inspire students who use it as a learning space as well as the school pupils, designers and architects, and many other people that come to visit it each Wednesday.

The Waste House is relevant here because it has had a huge impact on our everyday practice at BakerBrown Studio, as well as that of many other architecture and design studios across the UK, Europe and even further afield. Today my practice applies this simple approach of finding different ways to consume less resources to all our commissions. And of course, this includes many renovation and adaptive retrofit projects ranging from bungalows to extending residential tower blocks. Over the years we have completed the low carbon retrofit of buildings as diverse as an Edwardian fire station, light industrial sheds and listed oak frame barns and houses. More recently we have worked on more contemporary concrete and steel framed agricultural buildings. In some cases, completely de-constructing the frame and re-assembling it, then transforming it into a low carbon classroom, visitor’s centre or home.

Mapping your resources

After developing the project brief with our clients, all our architectural commissions start off with our team undertaking a detailed ‘resource mapping’ exercise to understand what materials, components and structures can be gleaned from the site itself, the local surroundings and the region. This can range from adapting a building on site instead of demolishing it, or if it is derelict then looking at the option of de-constructing it instead of demolishing it so that we can reuse and recycle material for our new project. Our approach also involves using spoil from site such as earth, clay and chalk to create beautiful, rammed earth walls or clay plasters – material clients’ would traditionally pay to have removed from the site.

We also specify locally sourced timber and bricks – an approach that is supported by local planning departments as using local materials is historically (pre-1945) what everyone did when materials weren't so easily flown or shipped around the world. There are other benefits to this approach such as (re-) creating a local ‘vernacular’ style and approach to building, as well as perhaps a ‘sense of place’ and identity often lacking with mass housing schemes especially.

Constructing a new house from an old house

Streat Hill Farmhouse (as shown in the photographs here) is a recent new-build project of ours constructed from materials that have been ‘resource mapped’. It sits at one of the highest points of the South Downs National Park, nestled into the steep south-facing downland. The South Downs National Park Authority asked for a contemporary design, partially dug into the chalk slopes to reduce its visual impact.

It has been built on the site of a previous house that unfortunately bunt down in 2017. Accessed by a narrow track, the site had restricted access which meant that demolishing the remains of the previous house and taking it off site would have be very expensive. This gave the team (and it was a huge team effort) the opportunity to keep the material on site and either reuse or recycle it, constructing the new house from the old. The demolition contractors were instructed to separate material into piles of bricks, concrete blocks and concrete from the ground floor and foundations.

Rising from the ashes

The new house was constructed with an exposed glue-laminated timber frame made from ash dieback collected from the Glyndebourne Opera Estate about six miles away. This was a particularly satisfying environmental ‘win’ as currently 100,000s of ash trees in the UK are being felled because of this invasive fungal disease. Once felled these trees are chipped and burnt, adding to the UK’s carbon footprint instead of being transformed into useful stuff. The salvaged ash was also used to create a stunning timber staircase.

The burnt bricks already on site were crushed to provide aggregates for beautiful exposed polished screed floors. Crushed concrete was recycled into low carbon window cills and coping stones manufactured on site. Over 30 tonnes of surplus chalk spoil was graded on site, mixed with clay from nearby to form a beautiful soft white plaster which was applied to all internal walls and ceilings. Whenever possible new materials were brought in from nearby. For example, bricks used for the external walls were sourced from Chailey Brickyard which is only four miles away. To ensure that high carbon but extremely durable materials such as bricks can be re-used in the future, our magnificent contractors, Chalmers & Co., applied a traditional lime-based mortar joint that is naturally self-healing, but crucially falls away from the bricks when the building is deconstructed one day.

Do as the Romans did

And finally, the external timber cladding for the two barn structures housing the main bedroom accommodation and an annex, is untreated sweet chestnut sourced from Sussex coppiced woodlands. This timber is of particular interest because the technique of coppicing ensures that the root system of the host trees does not die. This technique was introduced to England by the Romans who brought the timber over with them due to its incredible durability – put a chestnut stake in the ground and it lasts for 10-15 years. Coppicing not only ensures that tree roots don’t die but allow for a crop of timber poles (normally 8-10 per root system) culled on a 20–25-year cycle. Research conducted in the early 1990s by our colleague Nigel Braden proved that quick growing and young (25 years) sweet chestnut is more durable than 300-year-old oak. So, leave those beautiful oak trees standing so that they can support 2,500 species (a fact) and re-work the extensive areas of sweet chestnut coppice still standing in Sussex and other counties surrounding London. One last amazing fact about sweet chestnut: if you manage coppiced woodlands on a 25–30-year cycle, you create a greater level of biodiversity than if you leave the woodlands alone. Surely this is one of the only true examples of authentic ‘regenerative’ design?

A conscious decoupling

I hope that this brief introduction to adaptive re-use has inspired you to apply this approach to your own construction project, however large or small. All that is required is for you and your architect to look at ways to decouple from a supply chain that is modelled on the lie that there is an endless supply of cheap materials and components. Avoid unpredictable delivery dates, tariff-impacted prices and the extraction of raw material from the landscape (the main reason for the current mass extinction of species). Adapt, retrofit and re-use what you already own, whether that is the ground below your feet or an existing building. Then specify locally sourced, organic, sustainably managed and regenerative materials before you revert to the norm. And remember that there is no such thing as waste; just stuff in the wrong place.