The context of the Sewoon is continuously evolving and generates a significant amount of waste. The main idea of the project is to recover the elements coming from the modifications of the district, which are collected and transformed into new construction elements. After collecting, they’re analyzed in order to know which process will be used. The idea is to always maximize reuse rather than recycling, favoring processes that require less effort. After transforming, they are redistributed for the construction of new buildings or for the renovation of existing buildings, creating a continuous loop.
The distribution in the building is regulated by materials: each floor has a workshop based on a specific type of material. A central element, “the carousel”, connects all the floors and is the physical library of the scanned building elements. It’s organized in two parts: the left one (raw materials) and the right one (finished products). The verticality of the atrium is used in order to store and provide all the processing areas inside the building. At the ground floor, rail containers feeding the building with the raw building elements are found on both sides. On both sides there are stairs linking the neighborhood to the different process areas of the building, demystifying the work flow behind the finished product and bringing people to the rooftop to enjoy a meal and the view.
In order to catch the attention of the neighborhood and to showcase the finished products, different interventions on the façades use some recovered building elements, manifesting the potentiality of reuse. In order to keep the current building as much as possible in its current state, weak points were identified and small interventions were made with the aim of opening the Sewoon Makercity to the public and treating it as an element to be preserved and punctually modified.