What do you do when you cannot reuse a building on its site? You take it apart, move it, and reuse it at the place where the facility is needed. That was the approach the Dutch architects Popma ter Steege Architecten (PTSA) tried when they were asked to create a new laboratory facility for the non-profit Biopartner group in a new research park outside the town of Leiden. They realized that an existing lab building, the Gorlaeus, was in the process of being torn down. Instead of letting its material go to waste, they used large parts of the existing structure, including the steel framing from two of its floors, stone that had made up the central staircase and now forms part of the new building’s floor, and tile and brick from its central shafts.
PTSA used this tactic in order to meet the EU’s so-called Paris Agreement, which in 2019 called for a conversion of the building industry into a circular process, in which as few natural resources (and their embedded carbon) that were not already part of the built environment were to be used, and structures were to be designed to facilitate the ease with which they could be taken apart and those components reused or upcycled again.
In the case of BioPartner 5, as the building is officially called, PTSA designed a simple and rather abstract structure with a central courtyard that brings greenery into what is by its nature a rather sterile environment. A two-story greenhouse acts as the entrance area, and connects the interior garden to the landscape around the building. It is unheated and does not have a concrete slab, thus saving both building and running costs and energy waste. However, it is in the collage of elements that make up the building’s exteriors and interiors that their strategy becomes most visible.
When visiting the Gorlaeus site, where much of the building had already been dismantled, the architects found not only the steel frames, but also stacks of bricks from...
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