This paper analyses the user safety of a playground built out of reused blades from a dismantled wind turbine. Located in Rotterdam and designed by the Netherlands architecture firm Superuse Studios, the playground, called “Wikado”, represents an example of the circular economy applied to the built environment. With reused materials, Wikado represents a saving in resources and energy, when compared to a standard playground built with primary materials. Furthermore, the playground creates a unique design experience for its users, who can still recognise the original rotor blades following their transformation into slides, platforms, and tunnels. However, the safety of the playground could be questioned. This paper will analyse the materials and products used in the playground and their condition some years after opening. The analysis focuses on the risks of human health during the use of the playground. It considers the shape and the sharpness of the rotor blades, its components such as glass fibres and epoxy resin. As a result of the analysis, two risk analysis conceptual models help to assess the health concerns regarding the contact with the materials, and some yellow drops leaching from the rotor blades. This analysis informs the contemporary debate concerning the reuse of materials, and more generically, the circular economy applied to the built environment: whether it is recommended and safe to reuse materials for a different function from that which they were originally designed. This paper will explain that in the analysed case study, it can be safe to reuse materials for a different function, but only with the appropriate precautions.
In 1969, English researcher Gordon Pask published an article named “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics”, defining a theoretical framework concerning a cybernetic theory of architecture. Throughout the 1970s, the Cambridge Research Group designed the Autonomous House, a self-sufficient dwelling in terms of energy and food. Part of the Cambridge group approach relates to cybernetics. However, the group did not regard several aspects of cybernetics described in the theoretical framework of Pask. Through a literature review primarily focused on 1970s architectural magazines, this paper analyses which cybernetic aspects were not regarded in the Cambridge Autonomous House and other similar houses as case studies. Through an innovative analytical method, it demonstrates that some limitations of the house design, such as the main focus on costs and technologies, could have been reduced if aspects of cybernetics had been more incorporated. Using cybernetics as a lens represents a method which can be beneficial also in analysing today’s examples of sustainable and autonomous architecture.
Today, the evident need for more efficient conservation, management and redistribution of natural and human-made common resources have inspired thinkers, researchers, and designers to redefine the organization of our societies. For example, Silke Helfrich and David Bollier argue that the common-pool resources (CPR) defined by Elinor Ostrom require new "practices of commoning" that reconsider the conventional discourses of market economy and state intervention. Several contemporary architectural firms have introduced innovative design strategies concerning the collective collection and reuse of local materials, the commons and the circular economy.However, already after the oil crisis in the early 1970s, practices like the Secondary Reuse Group (SUG) engaged with circular reuse of materials but did not correlate to discourses concerning the commons. This essay analyzes SUG's projects during the 1970s using a lens calibrated on the contemporary debate of the commons, to unveil and highlight some relevant aspects of their work. This lens will refer to Michel Bauwens and Tom Avermaete who differentiate between material commons, that is, human-made and -handled reserves of materials from our environments and cities; immaterial commons, knowledge and craft skills existing in a particular place; and commoning processes, social practices of mutual collaboration. The first goal of this research is to describe the work of SUG concerning its material and immaterial commons. The second goal is to inform the contemporary debate regarding waste and materials as a CPR to be unlocked by architects and users through commoning processes of materials reuse.
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