Jan Jongert of 2012Architecten

Last night I heard Jan Jongert, of 2012Architecten, at an Architecture Foundation talk about his firm's work.  2012Architecten has done some very interesting work in re-use of components.  This is very different from using recycled materials, the more obvious process in which materials are broken down, recycled into a raw state, and then formed, shaped, or worked so as to appear as virgin materials; 2012Architecten use ready-made, already-formed components - washing-machine doors (evidently Miele makes high-quality products which, being properly screwed or bolted together, are easy to take apart), unused automotive windscreens, pieces of wood from the centres of large cable reels - and thus avoid the energy involved in, say, melting down recycled glass and forming it into new sheets, not to mention the transport required to move the materials around.

The ideas are fascinating but raise a host of questions:  Can this work on a large scale?  Don't you need a major exchange for materials?  (It turns out they implemented such a thing years ago, but the idea was probably ahead of its time - the website no longer exists.)

A house they have recently built with a facade made of wood from cable reels (it took them 10 years to go from realizing that this wood could be a construction material to figuring out how to successfully recover and treat it so that it can be used as such) look good, but the pictures he showed the audience were of a suburban subdivision that could be Surbiton, or Phoenix, for that matter.  It's all very well and good to reduce the embodied energy in buildings, but what about the automobile use implied in the location?  Even in Holland, the land of the bicycle, the tram, and the train, some 70% of all journeys are made by car.

The biggest issue, as ever, is one of speed and scale.  If the challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation are what we think they are; if we do need to reduce our carbon emissions by something between 60% and 80% by 2050; if sea levels are already rising - and never mind crises, real or imagined, in the availability of energy or raw materials - we don't have time to spend on small interventions.  We need to be rethinking all the energy and resource flows in our economies, as well as the spatial implications of reducing the size of those loops, and we need to be doing it now.