Build-up to the Waste House: The development of building projects to explore the use of recycled materials and the enhanced engagement of student builders

The Waste House was completed in 2014 - built almost entirely by the collaborative work of some 300 young people including school children and students studying construction trades, architecture and design. “The building was Europe's first permanent public building made almost entirely from material thrown away or not wanted. It is also an Energy Performance Certificate ‘A’ rated low energy building.” (Baker-Brown 2017).
Parallel to the production of this pioneering building, students from the architecture courses at the University of Brighton built a number of developmental pavilion structures. These pavilions, used to exhibit the work of students at the annual Graduate Show, helped build the knowledge and experience that supported and enabled a proposal to have the Waste House constructed largely by an “unskilled” workforce of students. Three key Graduate Show pavilions built between 2011 and 2013 were large enough in terms of scale and complexity to simulate the ambitions of the Waste House. These pavilions were developed following material searches that revealed an abundance of waste and locally sourced materials and as a result explored the use of unconventional construction processes such as rammed chalk, structural straw bales, tensioned birch and reciprocating structures.
This paper describes the School of Architecture and Design’s (SoAD) approach to these pavilions and how they helped inform an emerging attitude towards the (re)integration of technology and design in architectural education with a view to producing graduates who are in a position to direct more sustainable attitudes to construction in the future.