50/50: Words for Reuse - A Minifesto

Text by Graeme Brooker

Published in 2021 by Canalside Press, Graeme Brooker’s book 50/50 Words for Reuse - A Minifesto is a lexicon of terms to describe ‘the transformation of the existing into something new’. Graeme is a designer and Professor and Head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art in London. His writing and teaching have been concerned with reuse and transformation in architecture for many years.

We’re very pleased to present an extract from Graeme’s book below and to recommend this fantastic lexicon and exploration of transformation and reuse in architecture.

Heritage(s)

Reusing existing things incorporates the exploration of heritage(s). In 2019, I led a group of students on my Interior Reuse platform at the RCA, with partners from Allies + Morrison, on a project entitled Radical Heritages. We embarked upon the examination of the burnt-out ruins of Clandon Park, a Neo-Palladian National Trust property, extensively damaged by a fire in 2015, one which started in a consumer-unit in the basement, and which soon engulfed and devastated the building. Whilst a shattering event, and fortunately no lives were lost, the ruinous state of the post-fire building was arguably more poetic than its completed forebear. The fire had taken the roof off, collapsed the floors into each other, and had scraped the walls clear of much of their statues, decoration and timber panelling. The fire had left selected areas of ornamentation intact. This scrape exposed all manner of hidden things, from witch- marks, left by the original masons, to secret spaces, concealed within the panelled skin. In our view, the fire afforded a tantalising glimpse of a new interior, one that presented an amalgam of its present with its past, which was brought together through the charred and fire-exposed structure. It was up to us to explore what could be inherited and formulated for the future of this building. In partnership with the National Trust, its aligned stakeholders, lobby groups, designers for the new use and so on, all vying to land their vision centre-stage, we asked a simple question; “what is the future of heritage particularly with regards to a building like this”? Look the projects up online. They are gorgeous.

My students’ role was to recognise the subaltern. The marginalised, and the dissenting voices outside of the dominant ideological discourses. Effectively describing under, and every other one, the subaltern was used to expose the stories of the unheard. The construction of the house by masons, wood-workers, artists making sculptures and ornaments, all leaving their marks in the material of the building, through panelling, witch-marks above the openings to ward off evil spirits before being hidden by the timber lining and so on. The landscaping, gardeners, the servicing of the houses through servants, the collectors, also the visitors,guests and so on. Multiple ethical, political, philosophical questions were raised, as well as the aesthetical. All centred around what should be preserved and to what extent, and how can new use, its reuse, be reconciled within this environment. In these questions of what heritage is, or could be, is implicit the sense of disinheritance: not everything can be retained, and therefore what gets left behind and discarded. Heritage is integrated with memories, values, politics and their continual reuse; processes that all engage with the disinheritances of what gets left behind.

Copying

“Human desires in every present instant are torn between the replica and the invention, between the desire to return to the known pattern, and the desire to escape it by a new variation....the whole of human experience consist of replicas, gradually changing by minute alterations more than by abrupt leaps of invention.”*

Just what is it about the copy? Plagium, the etymological root of plagiarism, is the Latin word for kidnapping. Its meaning reinforces the fear of using somebody else’s thinking and work. Its menace has infiltrated its close neighbour; the copy. Copy is a word that emerges from its description of

a transcript, but its Latin, copia, hints at something more bountiful than the ungenerous word it has become. Copia describes plenty, abundant, opportunity, as in copious, or cornucopia, the horn of plenty. It hints at
far more liberal un-hijacked possibilities. It is the demonization of the copy as a word that has held back discourses in creative design work and in particular reuse. When will the copy be liberated from its moral and legal guilt? Literature recognises the copy, primarily through translation, imitations and homage. Music loves the perpetual reinvention of the copy, through the cover version, or the transcriptions of classics. In painting Picasso said “Copy everyone except yourself”. If only building and design was less uptight around duplication, imitation, facsimile and the copy.

The copy becomes complicated precisely because of the charges of parody, imitation and criticism of the lack of innovation levelled against it. Innovation, there is another widely misused word. Often used to describe something new, its Latin etymology Innovare, actually describes the renewal of something, and in the 15th century it meant to alter, fix or restore
the existing. Reuse is therefore always bound up in issues surrounding preservation, conservation and the retention of the existing in its found form. By this very nature, the copy is central. It challenges the idea that, enshrined in almost all creative practices, are the perpetual obsessions of originality and novelty. Thus, a situation is created where reuse, i.e. a close understanding, imitation, retention, facsimile, is considered suspect. As we know, plagiarism is verboten. This is a relatively recent development. In built environment disciplines like Architecture, it was only really in the 20th century where this repulsion took hold. Earlier centuries would borrow ideas freely, and without recourse to rancour. Today, just take a look at the below the line comments in Dezeen. You’re a fraud if anything remotely looks like anything else. Phineas Harper made a very good point once when in an analysis of these responses, he noted how the main comment was based on the derision of the work as a copy of something else. This derision, he thought, emphasised a neurosis about being unoriginal. Not only was this silly, but it led to a far greater problem, one where the fear of being seen to copy may stop a good idea taking hold. He used Assemble’s Cineroleum project—the reuse of a disused petrol garage forecourt to become a cinema, to accentuate the stupidity of this position. Why not use the same idea and apply it to the 4,000 derelict garages nationwide? Because it would be seen to be unoriginal?

Copy-right, another eccentric term, was invented in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries in relation to protecting the owners of works which could be duplicated by printing presses. In 1790, in the US, owners of works were protected for 14 years only. After that, it expired and it became public property. It’s strange and silly isn’t it, copying, right? Where is copying cherished in architecture and design? The precedent lends authority and a legally-worded illusion of the charm of the copy. Precedents may include the technical details of junctions, such as where floors meet walls, joinery details for doors, their frames and surrounding windows and so on. The analysis of which can provide not only detailed solutions to technical issues not encountered before, but which are also, usually, free to copy. By this I mean that the structural and detail-level language of built environment work bears no condescension towards its repeated use. Quite the opposite occurs. The quoting of details from other sources is often seen as a mark of positioning the designer’s work in the milieu of others who have gone before them. The reuse of the precedent is copying’s respectable sibling.

So, the overbearing oppression of originality and authorship, the fascination with novelty, along with the tyranny of invention, the copy, through its constant reiteration, through meaningful alteration, provides continuity that illustrates traditions of innovation, through the interrogation of what already exists around us. In other words, like it or not, the copy is never really very far from our thoughts.

NOTES

Many thanks to Graeme Brooker and Canalside Press for sharing this extract with us.

Posted 28th February 2022.