Whole House Reuse: Deconstruction.
Whole House Reuse: Deconstruction
Christchurch
2014
Bronze Award, Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Awards
Whole House Reuse takes a house originally slated for demolition and demonstrates the extent to which every part of a building might be reused or repurposed—making explicit the scale and breadth of the materials of one modest home, in order to convey the waste produced by demolition in Christchurch and across New Zealand, and to provoke problem-solving around future uses for materials currently treated as waste. This book documents the project’s first stage.
I have been involved in the project as a designer from the beginning, watching as its founder and project manager, Juliet and Kate, worked to find a house and then to deconstruct it by hand, cataloguing every material along the way. The publication tells the story of that house—its history, its past owners, and its demise within the wider story of the Christchurch earthquakes, the house having fallen within a red-zoned area where the land was deemed too unstable to rebuild on.
The book doubles as a materials catalogue, listing every salvaged part so that artists and designers might request access to them and make new work; a second phase, documenting that reuse, was to follow in a further set of exhibitions and a further publication.
