James Melville

Speculative project description

In recent decades, the construction industry has fuelled a continuous chain of building demolition and new construction, consuming vast quantities of carbon, devouring raw materials at an alarming rate, and placing great strain on the planet’s health.

In stark contrast with these linear processes, and with the ‘take-make-waste’ culture they promote, the project proposes to use derelict and at-risk buildings to establish a network of hubs for the re-processing, storage, and circulation of building materials and components. This would keep these at-risk buildings in use and reskill local work forces. It would also address current difficulties in implementing a circular economy, such as the relatively short window available for deconstructing materials and components, the timescale moving them between demolition and construction sites, and the discrepancy between available materials and the dimensions and designs specified by architects.

To Me...To You...—a title inspired by a popular children’s game show—is a Circular Economy Hub that aims to capture much of the materials discarded on building demolition sites and to extend their lifecycle, making them available to architects at the point of design; curating different material flows depending on quality; and promoting their repurposing, reconditioning, and reuse. For the materials that can no longer be fully restored they can enter a downcycle for construction and eventually become materials for artisans to upcycle into art to be sold. The site also features a digital hub capable of documenting all materials that pass through and the creation of a BIM database, thus improving access for architects to specify unique, restored materials. 

 On the site of an old Gasworks in Leith, the project develops one such hub for the reclamation, cleaning, and repurposing of carpet, inventing an architecture that promotes the collection and treatment of water, the passive drying of wet carpet, and its transformation into flooring, insulating and cladding components. The project aims to only inhabit the site for 15 years before deconstrucion and relocation to another derelict building in Edinburgh thus following the city’s construction activity. After inhabiting the site for this period, there should be no trace left by the project.

As visitors, consumers, Architects, contractors and artificers roam the site they experience materials granted a new life, witness an evolving flow of large materials navigating tight spaces and hear shouts of;

“To Me... To you..” 

Performing Earth Building—An Exercise in Exaptive Design

This Group live-build element of the course was completed by myself, Peter Brewser and Coll Drury

Our live-build project inhabits Plan A, a vacant industrial warehouse that is being transformed into a creative and circular hub,  and that has a central role to play in the regeneration of the Granton Waterfront. Plan A will provide space to support a variety of creative and circular industries, artisans, and social enterprises. As one of the first interventions within this vibrant context, Instrumental Earth Building acts as a unique signpost to index the building’s changed identity, and provides an interface between its inhabitants and the public. The rammed earth structure of Instrumental Earth Building is accompanied by a radical reimagining of the piano—the instrument in the title’s ‘instrumental’—through the language of formwork developed from discarded and reclaimed piano components. These once-beloved and finely tuned musical instruments are diverted from landfill and given a new purpose through deconstruction and experimental reuse, first as frames and spacers, and then as shelves and aerial displays. Traces of the distinctive features of the pianos are found in the recesses and extrusions imprinted on the earth surfaces, and the layer lines and ramming courses are a stark reminder of the effort and time involved. The installation is a product of distributed authorship––a considered set of improvisations born from the dynamic interplay of site conditions, human bodies, earth mixes, piano components, tools, formwork, ramming methods, spontaneous choreographies, and intuitive call-and-response.