Built Heritage & Upcycling
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The "Built Heritage & Upcycling" unit examines the material and immaterial resources of our built environment as well as strategies for their preservation, reuse and transfer to a circular economy.

Our work centres on the formulation of a moral question as an architectural and economic question, one that considers the architectural potential of preservation strategies and the sustainability of circular principles. It is not the primacy of free form but design through maintenance, repair, reuse and repurposing that fosters architectural identity and, according to our thesis, makes architecture formally and socially relevant (again). From this perspective, the building becomes a repository of material and cultural resources, a material bank, a storehouse of knowledge and memory for the time of its function and form

The conditions for architecture have changed. The building sector is the main cause of global waste and emissions, resource depletion and energy consumption from non-renewable sources. Architecture in the 21st century can no longer be built at the expense of the environment and future generations. "New" construction must break with the dogma of new constructions. Sustainable construction can no longer begin on white sheets of paper; it must start with existing buildings, components and materials.

Liechtenstein and the Alpine Rhine Valley are constantly transforming and renewing their building stock in relatively short cycles. In order to identify, examine and utilize this potential, their research unit focuses on:

• The building stock as a material resource and the processes of circular construction through disassembly, reuse & repurposing.
• The building stock as cultural heritage: strategies and methods of preserving value through maintenance, repair and refurbishment.
• Establishing a resource and knowledge archive by collecting and documenting (parts of) building stocks.