Making do with – rather than endlessly expanding – the staggering stock of what industrial modernity has already produced is an environmental imperative, awareness of which is gradually spreading through the world of architecture. Rotor has been committed to this imperative since its foundation, exploring from the mid-2000s onwards this new landscape of building practices, turning the established roles of the industry upside down. With the benefit of two decades’ hindsight, it is tempting to consider not only the constructive potentialities of such practices, but also the theoretical and aesthetic ones.

By reinventing the ways in which materials, components, elements and even buildings are reused, Rotor is seeking to reduce the construction sector’s impact on the global environment. To this end, it is constantly shifting the action of architecture from office to building site, from construction to deconstruction, from abstractly designing space to concretely engineering the trajectory of the elements of architecture. To bolster its exploratory practice of circular construction, the Brussels collective mobilizes the architect’s existing skills (design, representation) as well as at times neglected skills (surveying, building diagnosis), establishing new hierarchies between them, while also borrowing skills from other fields (mediation, management, etc.). Drawing on extensive research work and solid experience in the field, Rotor is active on all fronts, exploring not only technical matters (transformation, repair and implementation methods) but also economic (the reuse market, the economics of building sites) and legal ones (regulations, materials certification, insurance policies) as well as social and anthropological ones (working conditions, modes of production).