Victor Meesters - Renewal in Remnants & End of Life Innovations

The Hearing Architecture podcast, proudly sponsored by Brickworks, presents Again and Again and Again, a mini-series hosted by Hilary Duff.

Each week we bring you interviews and conversations as we seek better ways to understand, harness and deploy the expertise and knowledge of professionals currently within the design community, at home and abroad. Our guests are all experts on circularity within the building industry and share the aim to display that waste is not an accident, but the consequence of decisions made at the design stage. Here is our opportunity. We as designers have an opportunity to do better.

The built environment sector, notorious for its resource consumption and waste generation, faces a pivotal moment. In a world where 'away' is a luxury we can no longer afford, the linear economy's destructive ‘Take, Make, and Throw Away’ model demands reconsideration and urgent action.

In this episode, I speak with Victor Meesters, a Paris-based architect working with the Belgian collective Rotor.

Since 2005, Rotor has operated as a multidisciplinary group of architects, designers, and other professionals interested in the processes that shape a building. Specifically, they are interested in the flow and transit of materials in the industrial and construction sector and the industry’s relationship to resources, waste, use and reuse. 

Their research is disseminated through publications, critical writing, workshops, and conferences. And they work with the expanded construction industry to produce exhibitions, books, economic models, and policy proposals. 

On a practical level, they work to combine their research with the design and realization of architectural projects, coordinating large-scale dismantling operations of reusable construction elements and collaborating on architectural projects. Since 2014 their commercial spin off: Rotor DC ,or deconstruction, has been an active arm of the studio, which oversees deconstruction projects in end-of-life buildings with a view to finding them a new use. In practice, the team goes into buildings slated for demolition and sells off parts of those buildings. It documents building elements, creates a catalogue of the items, estimates how much it would cost to salvage the materials, and delivers them directly to the client. At the conception of the business, Rotor DC almost exclusively sold materials dismantled by its own workers, however the shop now also trades materials from several other suppliers such as demolition contractors and real estate companies.

Back in June 2023, I got to explore the salvage yard and the store houses which surround the offices of Rotor and Rotor DC. They are based within the urban setting of Brussels. A tactical metropolitan locale, working with the studio’s goals to become a central part of a regional ecosystem for large scale reuse.

As I walked through the ‘house of doors’, past the neat piles of salvaged stone, and through the aisles of plumbing fixtures, it was easy to understand the convenience and appeal of the organisation to ‘mum and dad’ renovators, to other architectural studios, or to developers alike.

The business is proud to announce that many of the stocked materials are cheaper than new for the same quality. Some materials may be equally expensive as new, but come with a great story, a deep patina or simply a clear conscience. And then, from time to time, they offer pieces or materials that were conceived by renowned designers, created by skilled craftsmen, or made using technologies now out of reach. On the day of my visit, there were pieces of a gothic cathedral from Antwerp available for someone to snap up, whilst later in the week I saw some rare and well-kept mid-century desks by an iconic local designer. These pieces are priced a bit higher, but Rotor notes their hope that the economies made with the more generic materials help bring them in reach