#refunc

After two years of living in a camper with his young daughter, architect Jan Körbes wanted something better suited to their active lifestyle, so he decided to realize a longtime dream of turning a grain silo into a microhome. With the help of his team at REFUNC, specialists in creative recycling, they bought an old grain bin from a farmer and set to work making it habitable.

MDIL wanted to send a huge shout to Community Forklift for donating materials for the ReFunc workshop!

Community Forklift is a nonprofit thrift store for home improvement & architectural salvage. Receive a tax deduction for donating renovation leftovers like cabinets, appliances, hardware, lumber, and doors. Or come shopping and save up to 90% on modern and vintage building and landscaping supplies!

Refunc

REFUNC is a laboratory for economical life-cycle extension and creates experimental structures based on waste material streams.

Refunc is providing a second life for found or thrown-away objects. We operate on the borders of architecture, art and design and create new products from old materials.

Origin for designs are found in the object itself, by listening to its own composition, history, or local and social context.

We we need a problem to play with, creative improvisation with locally available waste materials lead the way to our often unpredictable results.

Superuse Studios - Manifesta 9, January - May 2012

My main work during my internship at 2012Architecten, now Superuse Studios, was on Manifesta9.

Manifesta 9 is the 9th edition of the famous contemporary art bienale “Manifesta”.

This year, it was held in Genk, Belgium.

They contacted us to realize all the facilities in the building of the exhibition. 

The example of the Methodology for this project was split in 3 phases : 

1. Understanding the place and industries around the project. I had to understand what kind of left overs these industries were producing. After the research an “Harvest map” is created which is the main sourced tool with all kind of information about industries and their left overs.

2. Creating the main lines of a concept with simple sketches by selecting some materials found and discussing with client to decide what has to be done. 

3. Designing on site. This phase was a real design process, where I learned to think and solve problems at the same time as building the design.

Harvest map

The Very First step was to understand the left-overs around the city of Genk where was held Manifesta. 

I had to call many companies around to understand what available and create relations between us and the project and industries. 

In a small scale project the area of harvesting is maximum 50km radius but for this one I had to go further. 

Concept Design

BLACK COAL and WHITE TRASH

From the program we derived that we need to harvest volumes, flat surfaces, a lot of seats and one special object. Since there is a lot of transport involved in the industries, hundreds of Industrial Bulk Containers are stacking up in the area. 

These white plastic volumes are ideal to quickly build lightweight structures. They create identity for the facilities and light sculptures in the dark spaces. A company building furniture, has an immense amount of waterproof cut-offs. Another company can supply big bags. Ford motor company is the biggest ‘new’ industry and can deliver Ford-Mondeo parts with little scratches that we will sculpt into an expressive and functional information desk. Because of this the info-desk will be the most evident, attention attracting object on the ground floor.

All waste that we sourced turns out to be primarily white, most prominently the IBC-tanks with surfaces assembled from white advertisement board, seating consists of white big bags filled up with shredded waste. This creates a strong contrast with the black coal and the dirty, deteriorated building.

LIGHT and DARKNESS

Since we are working in a former mining building, working with darkness is an important feature of the design. The main location for our work will be the basement of the site. 

Building on Site / Designing on site

The building on site part has been done in cooperation with “Refunc”.

Once everything was on site, we began to create and design the real project. This phase is incredibly rich of designing, understanding the material and solving many little problems.

This project has been created and designed by 2012Architecten & Refunc and organize by Tak Production & Manifesta Team.

http://2012architecten.nl/

http://www.refunc.com/

The book Cradle to Cradle stresses that current "recycling" should correctly be termed "down-cycling" as the materials are rarely utilized in their second life as productively as they were in their first life, a subject of increasing relevance.