As Beate Engelhorn explains in her introduction to the exhibition "Material Loops α:The Circular Economy - Buildings as a Material Resource", the building sector accounts for an incredible 40 per cent of waste, primary energy consump-tion and CO_2 emissions. In the face of continuously growing popula-tions accompanied by increasing migration to cities, there is no sign that these dramatic values will decline any time soon. This is alarming not only in terms of magnitude, but also because in industrialised societies, waste does not just accumulate and then merely need to be dealt with afterwards, but is delib-erately produced in order to maintain our globalised economy. The inherently paradoxi-cal term "waste production" has a quite bitter aftertaste. Future generations rejoice! Yet they can be genuinely grateful for projects that are a few steps ahead in terms of rethink-ing this issue and can demonstrate to the imprudent rest how raw materials are now able to be used in a circular rather than linear way. The exhibition "Material Loops α" brings together a full dozen internationally dispersed examples of best practice to illustrate this conceptual approach. One such exemplar, the oldest project of the bunch, comes from the Dutch office Superuse Studios - which, more than ten years ago, renounced the wrecking ball and integrated the search for second-hand elements, preferably from nearby sources, as an integral part of the design process. This not only leads to the conservation of resources and energy and to the reduction of unneces-sary transport routes, but also provides ample aesthetic Stimuli, as strikingly demonstrated by the Wikado Playground in Rotterdam's Oude Noorden (Old North) district, completed in 2007, in which scrapped wind turbine blades are transformed into an adventure landscape for children. The Villa Welpeloo in Enschede, which was completed in 2009 by the same office and consists of 60 per cent recycled materials both inside and out, like-wise owes its unusual but thoroughly convinc-ing Visual appeal to the found items it incor-porates. The villa's look and feel is dominated by distinctive components such as curtains sewn from aluminium (originally made for greenhouses) and a lifting platform (formerly used for industrial purposes) at the core of the single-family house. One of Austrian's pioneers of reuse is material-nomaden GmbH of Vienna, which has already processed and resold roughly 60,000 parts since its founding in 2017. Of this, 13.6 tons alone went to the new building for the Caritas subsidiary magdas Social Business in Vienna. The facility, designed in collaboration with ATP architects engineers, has a "harvest map" that does not extend far beyond the city limits. Despite the complexity of the selected projects, they are presented in a way that gets right to the heart of matter. Portrayed on cylin-drically curved surfaces, the displays coax visitors to wander more playfully through the exhibition and, moreover, help to internalise the meaning and necessity of circular thought and action.
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