The growing use of reused materials in construction projects in recent years has prompted new arrangements of architectural practice in Belgium and the Netherlands. Because reuse entails material recovery – whether sourced from reuse yards, waste containers or directly from the construction site itself – the act of salvaging is becoming an integral part of the building process. This has prompted some practices to treat material harvesting as part of the constructing process, exploring it as architectural detail methodology in its own right. By combining deconstruction with construction, these practices challenge the traditional sequence of first designing and then building, calling for a fundamental rethink of the relationship between the two. As a result, detailing emerges as a practice that is negotiated between architect, builder, client and structural engineer.

To explore different approaches to the process of detailing, this article focuses on two offices, one Belgian and one Dutch, both designing and building with reused materials. Verloren Bekisting is an architectural collective from Ghent, while Studio Tepe and Rogier Franssen are a contractor and architect duo from Rotterdam. Both practices spent time at the studio of Enzo Valerio in Rotterdam, whose design-and-build practice provided them with hands-on construction experience and skills. In the selected projects, Verloren Bekisting was motivated to utilize the existing as a material source, following a tight budget. For Studio Tepe / Rogier Franssen, reuse simply resulted from the client’s request to construct a building entirely from second-hand materials. The two projects allow us to study in what ways exactly building with material reuse reshapes the design and construction process and how each practice wants this shift to become legible in the architectural detail.