“We have been training people with barriers to employment in deconstruction and material recovery as a pathway to sustainable, living-wage jobs,” Goodman says. “We have partnered since 2016 with a non-profit called Georgia Works; they work specifically with men who are rebuilding their lives after experiencing homelessness or incarceration. We’ve provided over 6,000 hours of training to 60 men over the past five years and hired several as full-time employees. Deconstruction and reuse can help create rewarding and impactful jobs.”
“We train groups to do this work all over North America and a good example was when we were in Buffalo, which had experienced a mass exodus of people over the decades, leaving thousands of vacant buildings,” Bennink recalls. “Those buildings can become a blight on their communities. We came in to help a client who had a heart for unifying the population of Buffalo around their efforts. The idea was to remove the blighted buildings, hire people from the neighborhood who were unemployed and sell the materials at a low cost to those in need. The money being spent to remove those buildings, instead of going toward demolition and landfilling, stayed in the community and created a circular economy.”
Look and Feel
More architects also are looking to utilize salvaged material in their projects, ultimately achieving multiple goals simultaneously. Wong’s firm has been involved in several projects that gave buildings and their components a second life.
“One project in which repurposed materials are especially appropriate is the Alcatraz Photography Studio,” Wong says. [Editor’s Note: Alcatraz Photography Studio won a retrofit Metamorphosis Award in 2019. Learn more about the project and the Metamorphosis Awards.] “The existing building was constructed of unreinforced brick walls, wood flooring, a wood upper floor structure and wood roof framing. Working with the structural engineer and client, we designed the project to use deconstructed and refurbished structural material in the roof structural system, as well as in the newly constructed mezzanine and recycled wood stair. The fir and redwood salvaged from the original building are about a century old. They are beautiful as exposed finishes, retained by design as a testament to the endurance of wood.”
For this project, it was important to salvage as much material from the original structure for reasons of aesthetics and function, as well as sustainability.
“The use of recycled and local materials not only embraces the many positive characteristics of wood as a material, including low embodied energy, low carbon impact and sustainability, but it also helps achieve the architectural sensibility that the client and architect envisioned,” Wong says. “Recycled wood, existing unreinforced brick and new steel braces for seismic upgrading form the palette of architectural and structural materials in the project. The structure is exposed to create a spatially dramatic context for the exhibited photographic art without overwhelming it.”
“There is a wonderful project at Georgia Tech, the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design,” Goodman says. “The project pursued Living Building Challenge certification, which prioritizes material recovery and reuse. The project uses about 10 different kinds of recovered materials.”
To support the Kendeda Building’s achievement of the Living Building Challenge, Lifecycle Building Center spent a year collecting reclaimed 2 by 4s from multiple sources, including TV and film sets, for use within exposed nail-laminated timber panels forming the upper floor and roof structure. Although the project team was unable to use the salvaged lumber for structural purposes based on local code restrictions, a strategy emerged in which the reclaimed 2 by 4s were used as spacers between the structural 2 by 6 members, which met code requirements.
“The Living Building Challenge also includes requirements tied to equity,” Goodman explains. “Only one out of 13 subs bid on the nail-laminated timber panels because they did not want to work with salvaged material, and the price of the submitted bid was too high. One of our board members serving on the project team personally organized a self-perform initiative to construct the panels in a donated warehouse on Tech’s campus, and his company, Skanska, hired six men from Georgia Works to do the work. Not only were they able to put these materials back into use, provide workforce development training and create a beautiful aesthetic effect inside the building, they were able to do it at 25 percent of that sub’s bid and save the project money.”
Reclamation Considerations
As deconstruction and reclamation techniques and technology continue to improve, the availability and use of reused materials will keep growing. There are, of course, some limitations and considerations to weigh before deciding how and where to best utilize salvaged material.
“One challenge in using repurposed or retained components is determining their structural integrity and strength, particularly when the history of the material is not fully known or the building has been unmaintained for an extended period,” Wong explains. “For example, with the Alcatraz Photography Studio project, the function and year of construction of the original building are lost to history, though it appears about a century old. The seismic resistance of the original unreinforced brick masonry walls was highly inadequate and needed reinforcement.”
PHOTOS: Billy Hustace unless otherwise noted