Challenging the Construction Industry: A Conversation with Rotor, Part 1

[Photo by Andrew van Leeuwen]

Rotor is a Brussels-based cooperative that has reshaped how architects think about materials by turning reuse into a functioning market. Known for salvaging, conditioning, and reselling reclaimed building components, their work makes reuse reliable and specifiable at the pace of real projects. This past winter, BUILD sat down with Michaël Ghyoot and Cécile Guichard at their Brussels facility to discuss how they are building the infrastructure for a reuse-driven construction economy.  Read part 2 here.

Talk about how Rotor started.

Michaël Ghyoot: Rotor was founded in 2006 as a non-profit organization—Rotor ASBL, which is the French acronym for a non-profit in Belgium. It’s a very flexible status and it’s easy to establish. You don’t need capital or a heavy business structure. Once it exists, you can apply for funding, organize events, and run projects. From the beginning, the intention was not to limit ourselves too narrowly in terms of activities.
The first projects were a mix of exhibitions, design, and research—very experimental. At that time, it wasn’t a professional practice. We were driven by curiosity and by the feeling that something was missing in the design and construction industry, particularly around material flows and ecology.

Cécile Guichard: Over time, the organization became more structured, but it happened organically. We never set big goals or a clear trajectory at the start. One project led to another, depending on opportunities and requests. Around 2013, this gradual evolution led to what would later become Rotor DC, the for-profit operating arm of the organization.

What is the focus of Rotor DC?

MG: From the outset, we approached reuse through many lenses. We did research, exhibitions, and small design projects. In 2008 the Brussels government asked us to study whether a business model for reusing building materials could work in the city.
We spent a lot of time visiting companies in Belgium that were already active in reuse. What we observed was a gap between the ambition of the Brussels authorities—who wanted to promote reuse—and their assumption that everything had to be invented from scratch. That was only true if you looked narrowly at Brussels as a region. If you looked more broadly, there was already a lot happening.

CG: We suggested documenting what already existed before creating something new. The authorities supported this with funding, first for one year from 2011-2012 and then for a second from 2012-2013. We began by surveying companies within about an hour of Brussels, and later, in 2018 we expanded the study to include the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, and collaborations with a UK-based organization.
This research was foundational for Rotor DC. On the one hand, we saw that many materials were already being salvaged and reintroduced to the market. On the other, we identified large quantities of materials in demolition flows that never reached reuse markets. There were clear gaps and we took on an opportunist mindset.

MG: At the same time, there was still political will to develop a regional solution. So, we decided to act—but cautiously. We started with small tests and pilot programs to dismantle sites rather than trying to scale too quickly.

CG: In the beginning, around 2013-2014, the warehouse had no showroom and was only open by appointment. Later, in 2017, we moved to a more central location with a showroom and a shop. Today, the website functions both as a webshop and as an extension of the physical space, allowing us to think more long-term about how materials circulate.

Was there a particular project where you felt like you had “made it” as a firm?

MG: Because Rotor operates across many fields, there wasn’t a single moment when we felt we had made it. Recognition came in different ways. One early milestone was a temporary project which was a hanging office structure attached to a façade on a site in the city center, built mostly from industrial waste.

[Photo by Eric Mairiaux]

At that time, Rotor was more focused on waste from manufacturers than on demolition waste. The project received significant attention—twenty-five or so publications and inclusion in Philip Jodidio’s volumes of Green Architecture. Even today, journalists occasionally ask about it, although it only existed for one year before being dismantled.
Another milestone came in 2010, when we represented Belgium at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition focused on wear and tear in architecture: how buildings age, what this reveals about use, and how wear can affect material value. Sometimes wear increases value—what we call patina—even though physically it’s the same process as deterioration.

[Venice Biennale, photo by Eric Mairiaux]

Do you see the city—or certain projects—as a kind of urban mine, where materials are already in place and simply require the right tools and time to be carefully recovered?

MG: We’re actually not big fans of the term urban mine. We’ve written about it because the metaphor comes directly from the mining industry, and that’s not necessarily a model we want to follow. It implies an extractivist relationship to the built environment—seeing buildings purely as resources to be exploited for use or profit. What interests us more is developing another way of relating to the city. When you start paying attention to materials—their history, how they were installed, where they came from—the urban experience becomes much richer.

So, did you come up with a better term than urban mining?

MG: Not really. That’s part of the problem—these terms are extremely powerful and efficient, which makes them hard to replace. In a book we wrote, we devoted an entire chapter to explaining why the mining metaphor is limited. A mine usually has a single concession, a single owner, and a single organization managing it. A city is the opposite: it’s owned by many different entities, far less predictable, and much more diverse.

CG: For me, the key issue is the diversity of a city. With a mine, you expect homogeneity and stability. In the city, it’s completely different. You might find a batch of 1,000 square meters of tiles—that’s rare, and you might reuse it once. The next time, there will be fewer usable pieces, more breakage, and diminishing returns. Conditions vary enormously too: tiles from a damp room behave very differently from those from a dry one. That lack of uniformity is fundamental, and it makes the city very different from a mine or a quarry.

Given your focus, you must feel like you’re walking around with X-ray goggles in the built environment.

MG: When I first started working at Rotor, I felt something similar to seeing ghosts. Suddenly I realized that someone laid that paver, that this stone came from a quarry I might recognize or have visited. You begin to make connections that make the built environment richer, more vivid.
I think that’s something architects can embrace. There are already many stories present in buildings—you just need to uncover them and make them appear.

[Tile at the Rotor DC material yard in Brussels, photo by Andrew van Leeuwen]