StoneCycling || Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland

Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland

Urban Mining

Together with Werner Sobek (architect), Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel, StoneCycling developed a brick specially designed for dry stacking and disassembly as part of the UMAR-project

The Urban Mining and Recycling (UMAR) Experimental Unit is one of the units at the NEST research building on the campus of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) in Dübendorf, Switzerland.

The building design, created by Werner Sobek with Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel, demonstrates how a responsible approach to dealing with our natural resources can go hand in hand with appealing architectural form.

The project is underpinned by the proposition that all the resources required to construct a building must be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable.

Location
Dübendorf, Switzerland
Application
Interior Walls

Impact

Waste upcycled with this project 4.520 kg
StoneCycling || Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland
Credit: Zooey Braun

Life Cycle Thinking

Urban Mining is, in short, the process of reclaiming compounds and elements from products, buildings and waste.

Life cycle thinking is placed at the forefront of the design: Instead of merely using and subsequently disposing of resources, they are borrowed from their technical and biological cycles for a certain amount of time before being put back into circulation once again.

Such an approach makes reusing and repurposing materials just as important as recycling and upcycling them (both at a systemic and a molecular/biological level, e.g. via melting or composting).

This conceptual emphasis means that UMAR functions simultaneously as a material laboratory and temporary material storage.

StoneCycling || Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland
We used different finishes of the same brick to create an exciting surface
StoneCycling || Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland

Custom WasteBasedBricks®

For this project, we developed a special variation on the WasteBasedBrick® using the Mushroom as the basis. We changed the recipe a bit to make the bricks fit better with the interior.

The idea was to create different colours and textures using one single brick. To do this, we worked with different finishes, such as Punched, Sliced, Raw – and we even polished a few!

StoneCycling || Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland
StoneCycling || Urban Mining & Dry Stacking Bricks in Switzerland
Test construction of the wall at the factory

Media Mentions

  • Die Wertstoffbörse aus dem Forschungslabor [espazium.ch]
  • The new UMAR experimental unit demonstrates how construction solutions can be completely eco-friendly [archello.com]
  • Mining & Recycling-Architektur [german-architects.com]
  • Die Bauwirtschaft soll nachhaltiger werden [nzz.ch]

A responsible approach to dealing with our natural resources can go hand in hand with appealing architectural form.

We are proud to be part of a team of highly professional people and institutes that are making great efforts to stimulate innovative building.