Practices of salvage and reuse promise a radical new building system but risk appropriation by extractivist market forces Renovation of a 1970s office tower in a European metropolis begins. A team of salvagers carefully dismantle several hundred square metres of interior wooden panels, raised flooring and aluminium panels, as well as fixtures like lighting and sinks. Some of these will be reused on site and some will be reused in other buildings via professional reclamation channels. The renovation project will also use several hundred tonnes of reclaimed stone slabs in its landscaping. The foundations and core of the original building will be preserved. However, despite the efforts of the design team, the floors of the structure will not be retained: analysis of the concrete did not provide the guarantees that it could meet the new load requirements. These structural elements will be demolished and the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rubble will be transported by lorry to a nearby crushing plant, where it will be turned into aggregate for backfilling works. Small bulldozers tear down partitions and interior fittings; metal parts are removed and sent to the scrap‑metal industry while the rest ends up in incinerators or landfill. To meet the most recent energy requirements, the facade will be entirely replaced.  The attention paid to material flows marks the project as a frontrunner of circular construction. The developer’s communications team eagerly promotes its pioneering role. But though this project indicates that steps have been taken towards circularity – the building was not entirely demolished, for example, and the material reclamation and reuse is significant for a sector that is mostly confined to modest material flows – it is evidence that circular construction efforts remain largely subsumed within an inherently linear, extractivist and growth‑oriented economic system. A genealogy of circularity can be drawn back to the degrowth thinkers of the 1960s and ’70s; the economist Kenneth Boulding, for instance, put forward the concept of a ‘spaceman economy’ in 1966, in a text entitled ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’. This idea refers to a steady‑state economic system that is in tune with the finite nature of the Earth’s resources, and caught the imagination of Buckminster Fuller, who made it famous among architects. In The Closing Circle from 1971, environmentalist Barry Commoner drew attention to the need to think about material flows in their entirety, in a closed system: ‘Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.’ These visions of circular economy outline a way out of the productivist economy – one of the pillars of capitalism since the industrial revolution. In these models, the production of new goods is slowed or even stopped, to be replaced by activities related to keeping existing assets in use, through maintenance, repair and reuse. Such activities could be a source of economic prosperity while being far less polluting and energy‑intensive than the industrial production system. By ‘reconditioning loops in the life cycles of industrial materials or products’, Walter Stahel and Geneviève Reday‑Mulvey wrote in Jobs for Tomorrow: The Potential for Substituting Manpower for Energy in 1981, ‘life cycles of industrial products will replace traditional linear production‑use‑disposal patterns’. In the building industry at that time, recycling granulates in new concrete and early examples of recycled gypsum wallboards were in their nascency.  Stahel later played a crucial role in popularising the concept of the circular economy. With this popularisation, however, circularity was increasingly reconciled with the productivist capitalist system – some even going so far as to coin the oxymoronic term ‘circular growth’. A clear indication of this fusion is how ‘circularity’ is now associated with a call for ‘digital innovation’, without questioning the impact that digital innovation has on the use of resources and the environment – involving intense mining for electronic components and enormous amounts of energy to maintain server farms. In fact, genuine circular practices, such as salvaging building materials for reuse, do not require much technological innovation. Edo‑era Japan, between the 17th and 19th centuries, went to great lengths to conserve its natural resources in the wake of a strict isolationist foreign policy. Needless to say, there was not a single circular economy consultant, material inventory application or digital marketplace. There had to be relatively simple but well‑organised material depots, similar to those found in today’s salvage stockholders; skilled craftspeople capable of dismantling and reassembling buildings; and intelligent design that allowed for these forms of reuse. Of course, in Edo‑era Japan this also relied on a strong administration, backed by a totalitarian centre of power and an extensive bureaucracy, capable of organising the management of materials on a large scale. The work involved in salvaging and preparing materials for reuse is not well suited to automation, due to the diversity and heterogeneity of salvaged elements. When 6,000 terrazzo facade slabs arrive in a warehouse, each slab must be sorted according to size and condition; if the same kind of slabs arrived regularly, investment in semi‑mechanised equipment could be considered, but the typical incoming flow of a salvage organisation is usually very diverse. This diversity of incoming material is also why attempts to scale up reuse activities can fall short. Much of the capitalist economy has developed around the principles of industrialisation and standardisation, that is, the mass production of identical goods that can easily be shown to conform to a set of characteristics (at least when they come off the assembly line). Reuse, on the other hand, involves a wide variety of materials, all of which, under the influence of time and use, have deviated from the uniform state they were in when they left the factory. But even this can be exploited for profit: in Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (2020), French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre explore a mutation in the ‘spirit of capitalism’, showing that new forms of value extraction can precisely draw on attaching unique stories to used objects. ‘Tweaking material flows runs the risk of becoming a substitute for socio‑economic reform’ The generalisation of material reuse requires a redesign of the economic framework. It is here, more than in technological developments, that the main barriers to reuse are currently located. The reuse economy is mainly local and intensive in manual labour, which makes it highly uncompetitive with mass‑produced materials imported from contexts where labour is cheap. Reducing VAT on reclaimed materials, for example, would make them more competitive. In Brussels, circularity is soon to be adopted into the legal framework. The first line of Article 4 of the Regional Urban Planning Regulations (RUPR), updated in 2024 and waiting to be approved, reads: ‘Every existing building will be conserved and, if necessary, renovated.’ Henceforth, if an owner wants to demolish a building in Brussels, they will bear the burden of proof that the demolition benefits the surrounding area and the overall environmental impact of the project. In this sense, the RUPR aligns perfectly with growing calls for a radical retention of existing buildings, such as those promoted by the pioneers of adaptive reuse Lacaton & Vassal or the European Citizens’ Initiative HouseEurope!, which proposes an EU‑level legal framework to enforce the retention of buildings.  However, the Brussels real‑estate sector is well practised in seeking compensation for the loss of value that would otherwise be extracted through new construction. In the highly competitive office market, for instance, developers look to extremely short refurbishment cycles to extract value that would have otherwise been offered by state‑of‑the‑art new buildings. Classifying refurbishment as premature is less straightforward than classifying premature demolition; buildings of the late 2000s, even if impeccably maintained and in many ways complying with modern standards of comfort and energy use, are beginning to be considered outdated by a market segment of tenants looking for premium offices. Around half of interior fit‑outs are replaced every six years by rotating tenants, escaping administrative control altogether.  Densification, too, is seen by developers as a necessary trade‑off for refurbishment. In cities, where land use is the subject of constant and fierce negotiation between market forces and public interest, vertical expansion is a relatively cheap bargaining chip. The RUPR is an excellent case in point; while it comes close to a general ban on demolition, it has also loosened height restrictions compared with the previous legislation. In large‑scale developments, extensions can sometimes reach the scale of medium‑sized buildings in themselves. Design practice Rotor – of which we are members – are supporting the reuse strategies in the renovation of the office building Centre Monnaie in Brussels, which will be vertically extended by 6,500m², or roughly 10 per cent of the original floor area. The extension will account for the lion’s share of the approximately 30,000 tonnes of new materials consumed by the works. It can hardly be considered a frugal project, simply by virtue of classifying as a renovation. These tactics are in addition to ways of recouping loss of value production that require close to no material consumption. Through strategic vacancy or forced evictions followed by rent increases, building owners control supply and increase returns without even filing for a building permit.  Short renovation cycles, densification and supply control, often combined with other tactics, ensure that the market can absorb a ban on demolition without much disruption to business as normal. It could be suggested that this phenomenon could be mitigated by a better, more ‘holistic’ piece of legislation. It is more likely, however, that the current capitalist configuration simply does not tolerate curbing exploitation. Undoubtedly, conservation is an important pillar of a frugal construction sector, and policymakers do well by enforcing it, while architects do well by demonstrating its potential. However, current debates on renovation versus demolition, or reuse versus virgin materials, do not address the necessary reconfiguration of the socio‑economic relations that are as foundational to building practice as the materials it consumes. Tweaking material flows runs the risk of becoming a substitute for socio‑economic reform, which is always more controversial, as it addresses fundamentally unequal relations of governance and ownership. Circular practices in general are always struggling to move away from linear reflexes, and even risk reinforcing them by way of ‘circular‑washing’. But circular practices also provide more ecological ways of dealing with unwanted building materials and elements than the current practice of disposing of them as waste. Two things can be true at the same time, and coming to terms with this contradiction is a continuous exercise. Just because the idea of circularity is rather hollow within our current capitalist economic system, that does not mean it has no impact at all. Initiatives based on the salvaging of materials – grassroots in nature and experimenting with new forms of organisation – have developed in some contexts thanks to the political momentum generated around the popularised concept of circularity. In addition to our spin‑off co‑operative RotorDC (for Deconstruction), organisations around the world have taken up this task: the co‑operative BatiTerre and the Materialenbank initiative launched by Atelier Circuler also operate in Belgium; the collective Zerm, non‑profit organisation Minéka and co‑operative Bellastock work in France; practice Materialnomaden is in Austria, the Brda Foundation in Poland, Recursos Urbans (URRU, Urban Resources) in Spain, Nada Novo in Portugal, and Archivo in Brazil. Major construction projects in countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark have earmarked a fraction of their budgets to support a local circular economy. From a strategic point of view, the momentum generated by the circular economy must shift the current organisation of the construction sector. Brussels‑based Rotor has approached the practice of reusing materials, since its inception in 2005, as a means of revealing, understanding and, in the best case, reconfiguring a niche of building practice and the material flows that pass through it. In this sense, reuse – or more generally our curiosity about material flows – has allowed us to diagnose this building practice with fundamental obstacles to a circular logic, be they financial, legal, social or cultural. However, reuse in itself has not necessarily proved to be a panacea. The activities of RotorDC, which has been involved in the salvage and sale of reusable materials since 2013, provide tangible evidence of this point. The creation of RotorDC was based on a ‘primitive accumulation’ in the form of a large concentration of valuable interior fittings that we were able to salvage from a 1970s bank building that was slated for demolition. It so happened that some of these elements, designed by well‑known Belgian designers, had a very high resale value and were crucial to the launch of the RotorDC project (incidentally, we have never since come across another building with such a high concentration of high‑quality elements). In a still largely ‘linear’ construction system, salvage – still consisting of mainly small‑scale operations – remains closely intertwined with large‑scale, often premature and always controversial demolition. The Centre Monnaie project, known today as OXY, will consume an equivalent of 50 times the amount RotorDC processes every year in terms of mass. It is delusional to expect circular alternatives to satisfy current demand – even only in renovation projects.  If an architectural paradigm is to play a significant role in mitigating climate catastrophe, it should actively engage with the limits of the so‑called solutions it offers. Material and technological ‘fixes’ proposed in ‘circular’ thinking run the risk of serving as a useful distraction from the necessary reconfiguration of fundamentally unequal socio‑economic relations. Lead image: In the US, the Cornell Circular Construction Lab orchestrated the careful dismantling of a house from 1906 in Ithaca, New York State, in 2022. (Felix Heisel, Circular Construction Lab) 2025-05-06 Beatriz Colomina Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now