What happens when you choose reuse over demolition? In Østbirk, Denmark, a 30-year-old timber warehouse has been transformed into a 14,000-square-meter world-class innovation hub for nearly 500 VELUX employees. This article explores how the LKR Innovation House project challenges conventional building practices, preserves material legacy, and offers practical lessons for architects working with existing structures. A new book documents the process through essays, interviews, and photographs.
Set within the mountainous landscape of Zabbougha, Lebanon, Capsule Retreat by EAST Architecture Studio is shaped through the process of its making. The project unfolds through material decisions, on-site adjustments, and evolving conditions, allowing construction itself to guide its spatial logic.
The construction process played a central role in defining the project. Built during a period marked by economic collapse, material shortages, and ongoing disruption in Lebanon, the house developed through continuous adaptation. With no general contractor, the architects took on an expanded role, coordinating craftsmen, testing ideas directly on site, and responding to changing constraints. In this context, sociopolitical conditions became not only a challenge but a catalyst for rethinking design. "We were constantly testing ideas on site", say the architects and founders of EAST Architecture Studio, Charles Kettaneh and Nicolas Fayad, "tailoring these decisions economically while exploring what local craft could offer."
The construction industry today faces an unavoidable paradox: the urgent need for sustainable solutions for the future of cities collides with the exhaustion of the term "sustainability" itself, often reduced to a hollow commercial label. In this scenario, Arquivo – one of the winners of ArchDaily's 2025 Next Practices Award – emerges as a facilitator and mediator between different stakeholders in the construction field through disassembly – or rather, de-construction – and the reuse of building elements. Etymologically, if "construction" derives from the Latin construere (to heap up, assemble), the prefix "de-" imposes a conceptual inversion: it is not about destroying, but about disassembling with intelligence to understand the logic of the parts.
While conventional demolition practices generate a vast volume of waste and energy consumption, Arquivo proposes reuse as a viable alternative for the circular economy. The company operates in the gap between disposal and new construction, guided by a clear premise: "Reuse is only fully realized when the material gains a new life."
