Thalia
Vaughan
Designing with Decay
​
Decay is a constant factor in today’s urban environment, architecture is constantly being maintained to fight off any signs of ageing and weathering, a never-ending task. Most of the time it will go unnoticed, but, if you are looking for it, you start to notice it everywhere. The town of Poole is no exception, a trip down Poole’s high street will reveal just how decayed it is, corners of buildings are peeling, the pavement is coming up and in some places nature is taking over amongst graffiti and broken glass. Without maintenance buildings will eventually become abandoned ruins, waiting to be demolished and put in landfill.
This project aims to change the lifecycle of buildings and their materials by reusing materials from demolished buildings and the surrounding areas of Poole, connecting it with the past. This project attempts to recreate the familiar decaying high street by creating a new street on Poole Quay, unlike Poole’s current high street, this will begin with decayed materials and will embrace future decay until it’s disassembly. Designing for Deconstruction (DfD) is also a priority for the project, when the building reaches the end of its life, it should be easily taken apart enabling the materials to be reused, this allows easier maintenance over time, increasing the life-span of the building. The brief for the project is to create a hybrid building with living and business accomodation, this project will attempt to use the form of the street to connect these public and private activites.
Throughout the project, the overall aims of the design have been to design a pre-decayed public street that can be reused in the future, putting the words decay and reuse in the same sentance seems odd even now, but it is essential to design this way to keep building waste to a minimum. This method of designing and building architecture should be carried out more often in the industry, too many people want the newest thing on the market and never think that they could have something old that is one of a kind. This is one of the reasons why this method is rarely used, society has made up a notion that decay is bad and should be prevented and hidden in everyday life. Throughout the unit there have been a few buildings that have reused materials, mostly on a small scale, it would be more interesting to see a large scale project like the hybrid building or Columbia university come to life however it is hard to find the right materials for a design. The key to DfD is to have the objective in mind at the initial stage of a project, this will taper the design to materials available and standard measurements, it is a worry that if this were to continue then all of the buildings will look very similar due to standard measurements. There seem to be more projects that have reused materials than there are for designing for deconstruction, yet the two go hand in hand, we should automatically think of the buidings end of life, rather than forgetting about it after erection. The disadvantage of DfD is that some materials are very hard to reuse as found/salvaged and they can take alot of manual labour, concrete is one material in particular that is hard to reuse.
The concept of reusing materials on a street was particularily intruiging, unlike most streets that try and hide the decay, this street has been designed to embrace it and future decay. If the building were to realised would it be treated in a different way to modern buildings? Would it be vandalised and unappreciated or become a new landmark?
