A construction and demolition waste processing centre on a brownfield site in East Berlin

'[C]ities ... are like organisms, sucking in resources and emitting wastes. When archaeologists of the future look at the deposits of the last quarter millennium, they will find a biological discontinuity as big as any in the past. They will expose a richness not of fossils but of plastic bags and other human refuse.'
Sir Crispin Tickell, Introduction to the book 'Cities for a Small Planet' by Lord Richard Rogers

Matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed. This principle of physics is perhaps one of the most underrated notions in our pursuit of progress. This project, then, is a commentary on the material cities consume and the waste they produce. It constructs a temporary waste processing centre on a brownfield site near Ostbahnhof station in Berlin. The complex consists of a construction and demolition (C&D) waste retail and processing plant, a factory for producing concrete panels from recycled materials and a transfer station for waste removal by train.

The buildings are temporary occupants, to be dismantled after ten years and rebuilt elsewhere, and were designed with deconstruction in mind. So they are themselves part of the material cycle of the city. This notion of temporality is particularly relevant to a city like Berlin, whose wartime devastation left piles of rubble that were used for landfills. The shrinkage in railway resources is illustrative of the changes that are also affecting infrastructure. This former railway yard alongside Ostbahnhof station is revivified by its new duty, with the condition of terrain vague temporarily exchanged for that of production. The choice of site underscores the twin essences of waste and temporality.

The centre brings the public into contact with the recycling process. Indeed, there are products for sale in the retail building which acts as a metaphorical billboard for the city. The 30-metre-high facade of perforated Corten steel gives a glimpse of the products on sale in the building and therefore also a statistical indication of the amount of waste produced by the city.

Place of education: TU Delft | Specialization: architecture | Tutors: Flip Geerts, Stefano Milani, Olaf Gipser