REGISTER NOW FOR FREE FOR THE SCHOOL OF RE-CONSTRUCTION TALKS & DEBATES AUG 2nd - AUG 13th 2021

Do you feel overwhelmed by the Climate & Ecological Emergency? Us too! So, with positivity in mind we wanted to draw your attention to the digital Summer School Duncan Baker-Brown been working on for the last couple of years as part of an NW Europe INTERREG project lead by Rotor DC of Brussels. It’s called the School of Re-Construction and focuses on considering the challenges and opportunities the de-construction of buildings, or elements of buildings, and crucially the re-use of these in the construction sector, present us as designers, constructors and architects. We are running the summer school from Monday 02^nd until 13^th August, and due to COVID it is all on MSTeams. This has allowed us to attract over 80 students from across the world, as well as over 25 brilliant academics, consultants and practitioners from the world of radical low carbon design and architecture; a world where designing beautiful considered low carbon environments involves the careful de-construction of buildings (due for demolition) for re-use, where waste flows are identified as valuable resources and the circular economy prevails.

Our students are divided into 11 teams who have two weeks to respond to the brilliant briefs set by our team leaders. To give you an idea of the themes our students will be pursuing our teams have thought-provoking names such as RAW, USELESS, BYPRODUCT, HYBRID, and OFFCUT .

To compliment the summer school we have a packed couple of weeks of keynote speakers and lunchtime debates, and it’s this programme that I wanted to draw to your attention as I think you will find it of interest. With the construction sector responsible for 60% of UK’s annual waste (that’s 120 million tonnes of stuff thrown away) and the consumption of over 50% of all raw materials harvested and mined around the world, understanding ways to re-use instead of throwing away; to appreciate the often over-looked, will go a long way to relieving our host planet of the burden of supplying our insatiable appetite for new resources. Our speakers will inspire and uplift you and help create a positive environment during what has been a challenging 18 months or so for the whole of humankind.

So if you have a moment please take a look at our speaker programme on our School of Re-Construction website (link below) and sign up of one or more of the free sessions over the next two weeks. We have presentations from Rotor DC of Brussels, Metabolic and Maurer United from the Netherlands, SuperUse, Flores I Prats Architects from Spain and many others.

https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/schoolofreconstruction/