Reopening the Bin – conference report

Short report on the international conference on Waste, Economy, Culture and Society hosted from June 10 to 12, 2021 by the University of Gothenberg in Sweden. Continue Reading →

ON Deconstruction

Video from the ACO Toronto Speaker Series May 20, 2021 session ON Deconstruction.

Three schools in Vanier

This photo essay looks at schools in Vanier (Ottawa), which illustrate demolition, adaptive reuse, and more temporary occupations. This range of destinies for schools following closure highlights the material, landscape and community impacts embedded in quite different options for reuse.
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Sights of materials exchange

Although the impact of reuse centres on the diversion of materials from landfill is still minor, they play important educational roles, building public awareness and training for repair skills, demonstrating alternate journeys for material discards.
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A counter-monument to saving a ‘bricks and mortar’ hospital

Place Oh! commemorates the battle to save Hôpital Montfort, a bilingual hospital that has served the city of Ottawa and Eastern Ontario’s French-language communities since the 1950s.

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Movable: Immovable Heritage

The reuse of reclaimed materials from demolished/deconstructed buildings can challenge the distinction between movable heritage, that is objects, art, or artefacts, often found in museums, or private collections, and immovable heritage, that includes buildings, landscapes and ensembles.
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Heritage waste and the SDGs

Striving for “more responsible consumption and production” is United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12. But the impacts of wasting heritage buildings, materials and sites on the environment, society and economy are so much more.

Berlin’s rubble photography

The photograph was taken with limited knowledge of the site’s specific role in the city’s history. Nevertheless, it has had the capacity to evoke all that was buried in the fabric of the city, the construction, destruction, upheaval and rebuilding, concealed in the fragments of overgrown brick walls.

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Learning to lose buildings

There are more cases than ever of proposed building demolitions, where the heritage community is not involved, where there is no designation, and no interest in the contemporary use values, or potential impact of waste. This post looks back at the case of the Palais du commerce in Montreal, demolished in 2001.

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Material Exchange – contrasting Winnipeg and Chicago

This post considers the contrasting but related approaches to materials salvage and reuse embodied in two functionally and symbolically related structures completed twenty years apart: the Chicago Stock Exchange and the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.
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Conservation and waste

Conservation definitions that make reference to waste, or natural resources and their sustainable use, tend to be about what is thought of as ‘nature conservation’ or the conservation of natural heritage.

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Spolia and use/reuse values

While spolia is not usually linked to discussions of waste, the reuse of materials broadly connects them. A brief look at two books that together reflect a revived interest in spolia studies in art and architectural history, which could be usefully linked to the critical questions raised in discard studies.
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