gjG House / BLAF Architecten

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Text description provided by the architects. gjG House is one of the experimental houses BLAF architecten is known for in Flanders and beyond. It is part of their research called ‘Brick Wall City’, that addresses the precise relationship between material, construction, and the appearance of brick architecture. Since the introduction of energy performance standards ‘EPB’ in 2006, thermal insulation in building skins gradually got thicker, causing a shift towards light and low-cost facade cladding materials such as putz, scales, tiles, textiles, etc. As for brick buildings, this meant an evolution towards brick tiles glued onto buildings as ‘exterior wallpaper’. BLAF noticed in an early stage that a construction method with layers glued onto each other would lead to the impossibility to separate the materials at the end of the building’s life cycle, resulting in huge amounts of non-re-usable waste.