On April 4 – 6, the international conference FABRICATE 2024 will be held at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Since its inception in 2011, FABRICATE has established itself as a global forum for new radical possibilities for architecture and welcomed thousands of participants from practice, industry, and research.
In this first article we meet architect Anders Lendager who is CEO and founder of Lendager, a front runner and one of the most influential architecture studios and strategic consultants within sustainability and circular economy. The text is an excerpt from the upcoming FABRICATE 2024 book and based on an interview conversation led by Co-chair Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen with Anders Lendager and Meejin Yoon, Dean of Cornell AAP. The book will be published on the opening night of the FABRICATE 2024 conference.
FABRICATE is a conference focused on the methods, technologies, and materials of making architecture. This year, our call has sought to extend the discussion to include new perspectives on how fabrication changes in a resource-aware world. This brings forth both ethical-ecological and design-driven questions asking what the future value systems and practices of making architecture can be. The conference themes will expand on questions of how to work with reclaimed materials, what bio-based thinking can drive in architecture, and how resource-aware practices can be formed.
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FABRICATE 2024 – Creating Resourceful FuturesMette Ramsgaard Thomsen: Anders, your work is about directly rethinking how materials can be reclaimed and reused through a second life in new buildings, what do you think are the future practices of architecture? How will material thinking change, and what are the methods by which these changes can be supported?
Anders Lendager: My whole practice started around a very similar question. It was a pragmatic start concerned with asking how we build resource-efficient and sustainable buildings, and how do they perform. We found a black hole with very few solutions for climate problems, political problems, and resource problems, which made us realize there was huge potential for design innovation in the use of materials as new tools for architecture in meeting its sustainable targets. Our investigations quickly identified the need for a new business model, which is not what I set out to do. However, to create the kind of architecture that was my goal, it became clear to me that a new business model was required.
In our model, we start to define what the premise and framework are for the project where each architect takes on a way broader perspective than usual, open to the possibility of creating new demonstrators that seek to address real and large impacts. We have gone from being part of the puzzle to defining what the puzzle is made of.
The other part of where we are I call ‘advanced low-tech’, is where we are rethinking discarded materials like concrete, wood, and glass, and reusing them as new materials. Ten years ago, when I did the prototype for a commercial building, I started to see that we could aim for high design standards and meet our client’s budget by reusing so-called waste materials. These value chains were new, as were the partnerships required, as well as the design control mechanisms and ways of building. I felt like I needed to go beyond getting paid to design a building but to also design a new process of building. So, we designed building materials and produced them as finished demonstrators for the contractor to match. Fees were paid in the normal way; however, we had created all these additional values of a circular economy. So, I found someone who invested a lot of money in all the ideas, and we are now scaling this approach as a product, like a new fabrication system out of waste. It’s become a business model for architectural design that didn’t exist before.
MRT: How do you generalize from the specific resource flows you have worked with to something that can have a broader scope?
AL: It’s a really good question. Over the last ten years, we have been refining the way we work with every type of reused material, from glass to wood and so on, and examining how they offer a new aesthetic and point us in a direction of measuring and adjusting performance. In this period, we have rethought our processes, shared them with industry, looked at their waste streams, and created greater efficiencies.
We are seriously interested in how these collaborations offer access to technology that can change what we can do. Right now, we are doing a project in Berlin in collaboration with INTERPANE, Europe’s largest glass manufacturer. They have a machine that can split double-glazed windows apart and reassemble them as new windows. All of a sudden, ten years of prototyping becomes scalable. It is so important to experiment, rethink models, analyze mistakes and performance, and work towards a solution that will come. This is similar to what our practice has done with concrete bricks, or our latest work on recycling window waste, converting these complex geometries into a building material for our high-rise in Aarhus. Scalability is the most important issue for me, to achieve the largest impact on architectural design.
MRT: The question of data is of course fundamental. You both work with data in integrated ways. Anders, your work relies on in-depth evaluations of your processes through Life Cycle Analysis and your very deep engagement with certification. How are your data practices evolving? What is missing from the tools you are using and how can future practice informed by resource awareness be guided by information gathering, by whom, for whom, and through what means?
AL: This is a super question. As a student at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), I was learning how to navigate a complex software program by manipulating data to manufacture form: in other words, how to make a physical translation of a datascape. However, this kind of design data alone is not sufficient to realize a building when we start asking challenging questions about how to address building legislation, client input, financial requirements, production, or performance. If we want to use something that has no formal value, something we today see as waste, and want to move it into being a valued asset, then an entirely different data set is required.
I’ve been asked to do a high-rise building in wood and waste materials, for a client who owns wind power parks. One of the biggest problems in the wind power industry is fiberglass waste. This drives many questions: how long do the turbine blades last? How do I take them down? Who is the demolisher of these structures? How do they transport them? Who incinerates them? What are the costs associated with all these actions?
All of these considerations necessitate a data set that we must build before we can develop a design that can later be approved by a municipality, by the fire department, by our client and contractor, and become a building component. What I’m trying to say is that our office is spending a lot of time on assembling information. It can be on air pollution or how corrosion classes limit the recycling of steel sheets in Europe. These data collection activities also necessitate a critical positioning. In our work, we are realising that much of our contextual data today is based on data from the 1970s. This data is not always relevant for the material waste streams that we are working with today. Our investigations take a lot of time but once assembled, the data allow us to design with what we thought would be useless, without value, or impossible.
FABRICATE 2024: Creating Resourceful Futures asks how rethinking architectural methods, technology, and construction can create a new societal position for the built environment, appointing a particular focus on questions of resource consciousness and bio-based design and fabrication strategies. This will be explored through four themes: RECLAIM: Circularity and Reuse; LOCALISE: Sourcing and Performance; INTEGRATE Systems and Context; and RATIONALISE: Elements and Assemblies. The conference is Co-chaired by the Head of the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture Professor Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen and Chair for Biohybrid Architecture Professor Phil Ayres. ArchDaily is collaborating with FABRICATE 2024 to share articles about the four-session themes and their respective keynotes: Zhu Pei, Anna Dyson, Indy Johar, and Anders Lendager to prepare for the opening of the conference.
