Assembling Fragments: Designing with Salvaged Building Components

Introducing the practices of Rotor and Rotor DC, the lecture will ponder on how designing with reused building elements thoroughly restructures the established modes of architectural production and the roles of the protagonists: the client, the building materials provider, the architect, the engineer, the contractor, etc. Reusing building components then suddenly becomes subversive, despite the fact that it was common for millennia until the early 20th C, and that it is today, for environmental reasons, more necessary than ever.

Lionel Devlieger is an engineer-architect and historian. In 2006 he co-founded Rotor, a Brussels-based organisation specialised in the study of present day material culture. Rotor also coordinates large-scale dismantling operations, collaborates to architectural projects and realises design projects. Lionel has been teaching in universities across Europe and the US. In 2018 he co-authored Deconstruction et reemploi, a reference textbook on building component reuse (EPFL press). Since 2021, Lionel is fulltime associate professor in the material-cultural history of architectural practice at Ghent University.

The event is part of the lecture series Designed Orders. The lecture will take place in hybrid mode (in person and via Zoom) on the Westend Campus of Goethe University Frankfurt (Casino, Room 1.811) and will be held in English.