Quartier Ecluse & Saint Lazare
Rotor did consultancy on this project to help a Brussels architecture office, Suède 36, improve the pedestrian experience in the Saint-Lazare-Ecluse neighborhood in Molenbeek, Brussels. Our task was to investigate reuse strategies for permanent equipment in the public space. The project was commissioned by the Molenbeek municipality, and frames in a larger urban revitalization program, or 'contrat de quartier'.
Reuse is often difficult to set up for a designer. Reclaimed materials are by nature idiosyncratic. They vary in composition, color, size; they are often only available in unpredictable quantities. In the context of a typical public commission, works are executed years after the initial idea, and little communication is possible between the designer and the contractor. This considerably adds to the challenge of using reclaimed materials.
Our first suggestion to Suède 36 was to design the furniture so that it could be realized with materials the municipality itself was discarding. We found that Molenbeek regularly gets rid of significant amounts of natural stone: sidewalk curbs, tombstones from the municipal cemetery, and other demolition remains. We proposed material strategies for making the most of such situations; Suède 36 then used these as starting points for their designs.
To compensate for fluctuations in the availability of materials, we suggested the use of waste from stone quarries. In Belgium only 10 to 30 percent of the excavated stone mass ends up being salable, leaving large quantities of 'low quality' stone available. This back-up plan proved necessary when the appointed contractor (Recyclart) investigated the use of tombstones: many of these where composed of laminated thinner stone slabs glued with epoxy, and cutting them to pieces proved too expensive. We assisted Recyclart in finding a suitable alternative source, quarry waste from the production of blue limestone tiles.
Text and images: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 by Rotor