The Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship

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City Center Collaboration

Salvaged building materials display recylcing potential

“In sustainability we’re always thinking about how the architectural picture fits into the bigger picture. Sometimes it makes more sense to renovate instead of building new, sometimes it makes more sense to not build at all.”

— John Klingman, Tulane School of Architecture

In addition to her work at Providence Community Housing, Carey has teamed with the Tulane City Center to address issues of architectural salvage, community involvement, and green (re)building. One exhibit piece produced by the partnership highlighted the amount of building waste generated by Hurricane Katrina, and called for an innovative, city-wide, architectural salvage program.

The intent of the exhibition was to show that a comprehensive building material recycling program could divert waste from overwhelmed landfills, while providing the rebuilding effort with a plentiful source of high quality building materials.

To test this theory, Carey’s team investigated the real-world logistics of incorporating salvaged materials for architectural reuse. They targeted one typical trash pile along a street in a flooded mid-city neighborhood. Initially, they picked apart the heap of debris to determine the amount and type of refuse generated by a typical gutted house. Then they looked at what they could construct with the materials from one single trash heap—and the process of rebuilding by diverting this waste from the landfill.

The contents of this pile included one set of drawers, two crutches, two sets of suspenders, one ball of twine, one bag of rusted nails and screws, one ball of fishing line, 500 linear feet of tongue and groove pine flooring, one box of glassware, two mirrors, several lamps, one fluorescent light, one singing, big mouth bass trophy, eight strands of Mardi Gras beads, 36 hangers, one pair of lace curtains, one ceramic paperweight, three chairs, one bicycle, one bag, 150 feet of miscellaneous wood scraps, two solid wood doors, and two brooms.

After cataloging these resources, the team developed a design for a table that would illustrate the new potential embedded within old woodwork, then built the display entirely out of the materials found in the trash pile.