AOD Origins Part I: LEGO

The Art of Diversion origin story dates back to the 1980s. It’s a story about a kid with a vivid imagination.

I was the quintessential LEGO Maniac as a child, but I had a love-hate relationship with the step-by-step instructions that came with each set.

On the one hand, I adored the little staple-bound booklets. I thought they were the coolest thing ever. The diagrams themselves were a thing of beauty (exploded axonometric projections are still fascinating to me today for their elegant explanatory power as a communication device). I found them mesmerising. There was no avoiding getting caught up in the moment once I started building.

On the other hand, after the fleeting satisfaction of that initial build, it was never long before some deeper innate desire took over. I would quickly ditch the instructions (by which I mean I neatly filed them away with all the others in some OCD organisational folder system that probably only made since to me, which in hindsight was pointless because I don’t think I ever revisited the instructions again).

Having created what was intended for the pieces provided, I was now compelled to create something new. Inevitably, I would take apart the newly completed set piece-by-piece, and these pieces would then get mixed in with heaps of other pieces from previous sets.

My imagination could now run wild.

What I found most intriguing were the endless possibilities for the fusion of different LEGO themes and time periods. Town pieces and Castle pieces and Space pieces, to name a few, could all be mixed together. Classic LEGO minifigs like knights and forestmen and pirates and astronauts could all collide in my own personal dreamt-up LEGO universe.

I spent hours constructing wondrous, medieval, galactic castles, acting out an elaborate, epic adventure involving bow-and-arrow-wielding, Robin Hood-like space pirates who somehow always evaded the laser-wielding, jetpacked police. It all unfolded on a moonscape dotted with little LEGO pine trees.

I can remember LEGO-ing away in my childhood home like it was yesterday. Eventually I was furnished a nice big folding table to use as my building surface… probably because floors are for walking and dining tables are for dining (not LEGO). This soon became two folding tables which I could connect and rearrange. I was banished to—I mean allowed to take over a corner of—our basement. Thereafter, instead of asking for new LEGO sets for birthdays or Christmas gifts, I asked for more of the large, blank, square baseplates to literally expand my LEGO obsession using the many bricks and pieces that I already had. 

Side note: I consider myself unbelievably blessed to have grown up in a household where this kind of play was possible and encouraged. I was often gently reminded that LEGO sets aren’t exactly cheap, and I was raised to appreciate that not every kid was as privileged as me.

As a result, I took very good care of my LEGO collection. They were precious to me, and I organised, stored them, took them out and put them away accordingly. Pieces rarely, if ever, went missing, and if a piece did momentarily get misplaced or sneak under a sofa or table, I would notice (i.e. I would gasp or shriek as if something tragic had happened invariably freaking out anyone in earshot). Play would cease until said piece was located and returned to the appropriate tabletop position or storage tub.

Is LEGO-ification of the ‘real world’ built environment possible?

In my youth, I built and rebuilt vast LEGO cities. None of the new LEGO buildings that I built from my imagination really resembled any of the LEGO sets that I had previously constructed per the instructions.

Fast forward a few decades, and what does any of this have to do with the reclamation and reuse of building materials in the present-day ‘real world’? 

I suppose the point is this: I started Art of Diversion because today’s building industry just isn’t, well, ‘LEGO Maniacal’ enough for my taste, and I intend to change that. The building industry needs more LEGO maniacs, imaginative people who are interested in trying to solve the problem of waste by using design thinking, people who look at real buildings and building materials the same way they look at LEGO: as reconfigurable.

And perhaps it’s not just a matter of material reusability (practically speaking); perhaps it's a matter of reuse ability (as in, we need a fresh perspective to solve the problem and an application of care and ingenuity which is currently critically lacking). We need to treat the end of a building’s life the same way we treat the beginning, as a problem to be solved creatively. We need to treat materials not as ‘waste’ to be sent ‘away’ but as pre-loved resources that can be recycled or, better yet, reused, repurposed or upcycled.

Realistically, there are, of course, practicality and safety considerations to consider. Even if a modern building were to be dismantled entirely by hand with extreme care and precision, not all existing building materials are reusable (at least not in the same way that LEGO bricks are reusable). Ultimately, this is a design issue. We obviously need to change the way we design buildings from the start. Enter DfD.

Disassembling our future (and our past?)

Thankfully, there is a very encouraging trend towards Design for Disassembly (DfD), and this is something that I hope to see become much more mainstream in the near future. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll even have robots assembling, disassembling and reassembling buildings all around us all the time. Perhaps the buildings themselves will be constructed using programmable materials and be capable of self-assembly and self-repair. This is not at all sci-fi farfetched, by the way; we’re very much on the verge of this happening with more regularity right here on Earth (check out some of the ’self-assembly’ tagged articles on ArchDaily) and probably even more so in outer space (at least smart people at places like MIT seem to think so). By the way, there is a wonderful discussion about how LEGO relates to robots and the future of fabrication in Lex Fridman’s recent interview with MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld (if you listen to the whole interview, prepare to have your mind blown).

Whether you find the prospect of self-replicating robots exciting or terrifyingly dystopian, they are undoubtedly relevant to the future of building construction. But the problem, as I see it, is just that; it’s that most conversations about DfD focus almost exclusively on new buildings that will be built in the future.

What do we do about all the old buildings from the past?

Unfortunately, we’re not going to run out of buildings to demolish anytime soon.

The question we should dare to ask is this: If the future of construction is likely to be much more modular, is there any way that we can somehow treat past construction as modular, too?

As far as Art of Diversion is concerned, the answer is a resounding Yes. With enough time and by applying energy in the right places, there’s no reason why we can’t do a better job of carefully taking apart old buildings (even buildings that were never intended to be taken apart) so that their components can be reused more easily.

This is something that we really need to take seriously. The harsh reality that we must face is that the overwhelming majority of the buildings we already have on the planet were not built with disassembly in mind, nor are the ones we’re currently building.

Stop for a moment, and think about the urban fabric of any major city. Take Sydney, for example, and think about the challenges that we face (even as a relatively small, young city by global standards) in mitigating building and demolition waste. Then consider the fact that there are hundreds of cities around the world which are not only much larger but also considerably older in terms of building stock.

According to United Nations estimates, there are currently over 500 cities in the world with a population of 1 million or more (including 81 cities with a population of 5 million or more), and by 2030, a projected 662 cities will have at least 1 million residents. We already have hundreds of millions of buildings on the planet and continue to build more every day (in both developed and developing countries alike) that have no degree of ‘reversibility’ (that is, no DfD) baked into their design. Some estimates place the average number of buildings that the construction industry needs to build through 2050 at around 13,000 buildings per day… Per day!!

So, regardless of your stance on climate change or the extraction of non-renewable resources, it should be abundantly clear to anyone that the construction demands of continued global urbanisation are problematic, to say the least. It’s a massively complex problem, in fact, and one with no immediately obvious solution.

You might be thinking, ‘Wait, I know of at least one thing that would help.’ But if you ask me, the solution is not: Buildings are bad! No more buildings! Although slowing the pace of new construction is probably a good idea, and although preservation and adaptive reuse are certainly preferable options, there is no getting around the fact that we need to continue building new buildings.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish we could Ctrl+Z most new building construction. I often see some new high-rise going up and think to myself, ‘Who the heck approved that?!’ I’m also all for building conservation, and building repositioning and adaptive reuse projects are by far my favourite kind of architecture. But…

I’m also shamelessly pro-development. Like it or not, we need new buildings. At the very least, we need them to serve basic human needs (i.e. shelter, one of our most basic needs of all). If you agree that everyone deserves access to affordable housing, then you can’t also insist that somehow banning new building construction altogether is a legitimate solution to the problem.

I say all of that with one major caveat: the most sustainable buildings (and building materials) are the ones we already have. We should always ask ourselves, ‘Do we really need to build this building in the first place?’ Likewise, ‘Do we really need to knock this building down?’

That said, if, at the end of the day, new buildings are necessary, and demolition (or decommissioning) is ultimately an inevitable fate for the majority of buildings, where does that leave us?

What goes up must come down… better

As they say, what goes up must come down, and the built environment is no exception. It’s how they come down and what happens next that we need to figure out. This, I believe, is where the property development and construction industries are truly ripe for disruption.

The fact that most of the world’s existing building’s were not designed for disassembly is not inherently a bad thing. Buildings built centuries ago that are still in use today arguably represent some of the best architecture that humanity has produced, and just as those buildings were designed to stand the test of time, as it were, one could certainly make the case that we ought to continue designing and constructing buildings to last us for as long as possible.

On a related note, as cliché as it sounds, I also believe in ‘timelessness’ as a design principle. I think it’s something very much worth aspiring to both stylistically (in the sense that we should probably try to avoid design that goes in and out of fashion) and functionally (in the sense that built-in obsolescence designed to artificially increase consumption is objectively stupid).

Still, well intentioned though it may be, I suspect that simply designing all buildings to last forever probably isn’t a sensible approach either.

This conflict between durable and degradable often rears its ugly head in the similar debate over plastics. A well-known ‘wicked problem’, we rely on plastics in more ways than we realise, but they are messing with the health of the planet in unimaginable ways, and they will outlive us all. Petrochemicals serve a lot of very useful purposes, but they are also some of the most toxic substances known to man [insert Lord Business Octan reference here].

‘All I'm asking for is total perfection!’

To DfD, or DfF, that is the question.

Do we want out buildings to be built to last, or do we want them to be able to be disassembled at a moment’s notice?

Wouldn’t it be perfect if we could have both?

This tension between Design for Disassembly (DfD) and what we might call Design for Forever (DfF) is as ancient as human civilization (this is probably a topic for another series of blog posts on philosophical concepts like permanence vs. impermanence, or inflexibility vs. flexibility, in relation to architecture, but it’s worth a quick detour in this context). We find examples of both ends of the spectrum at various points in history and in connection to various cultures.

On the one hand, while DfD might seem futuristic, it’s actually a rather primitive notion. Many nomadic peoples, for instance, built shelters using whatever materials were at hand (and still do so today), lightweight structures sufficiently durable to withstand the elements but which could also be relocated or left behind (with, I might add, minimal impact on the local environment) if a group moved on to other sources of sustenance.

On the other hand, several places in the world are full of examples of DfF, structures which were intended to last for centuries and, unsurprisingly, have managed to do so. This is undoubtedly due in part to ongoing conservation efforts, but there is nonetheless evidence of past peoples effectively ‘willing’ their buildings into the distant future through the use of specific materials and techniques intended to ensure structural durability. These structures were, of course, astonishingly labour-intensive to build, and their scale and longevity is in many ways attributable to the religiosity of the cultures and the purpose of the buildings (tombs, temples, etc.).

Some would argue that a civilisation is not defined by its monuments or aesthetic achievements (or lack thereof). As one archeologist put it, ‘There can be no justification for the wanton destruction of ancient monuments. But let’s not confuse that with the living pulse of civilisation, which often resides in what at first glance seems small, domestic or mundane. There we will find it, beating patiently, waiting for the light.’

To which I say, sure, civilisation is, of course, about people and relationships and ideas, but it’s also about the things that we create and make, both physical and intangible, which reflect those ideas. Ideas manifest themselves in stories and art and, indeed, for better or worse, in material things and buildings.

Not a question of what, but a question of how

Perhaps now is the time to think not just about what we want to make and build as a civilisation, but how we want to make and build it, and in many ways, that starts with better ways of unbuilding and unmaking things. The building industry desperately needs an upgrade from the linear system of take-make-waste in favour of a more circular system of take-make-reuse. We need to close the loop between the unbuilding and building process.

Maybe a clever toy like LEGO is just an abstract metaphor for framing the problem and solution. Or maybe it’s actually a perfect jumping-off point from theorising about the future to actual real-world applications. Maybe we could and should shape the future in a way that more closely resembles LEGOland.

Again, this is why Art of Diversion was started. It is intended to serve as a platform for the exploration of these kinds of ideas, for (hopefully) generating meaningful discussion and debate about possible futures for the built environment and, more broadly, for the world of art and design. AOD was created to facilitate connections. The hope is that it will enable experimentation (thought experiments, sure, but the real-world variety, too) to help us figure out a way forward that involves the realistic reclamation and creative reuse of building materials on a large scale. 

Just as LEGO afforded a tangible exploration of several seemingly disparate themes, so too, will Art of Diversion. Ultimately, I believe it is possible to reconcile the ideas of DfD and DfF in a meaningful way. For starters, just because something is inherently modular, like LEGO, doesn’t mean it can’t remain standing for a very long time. Modularity and ‘built to last’ are not mutually exclusive. In future blog posts, expect further explorations of other seemingly contradictory concepts – minimalism and maximalism, biological systems and technological systems, monumentality and modesty, and so on – always in pursuit of a beneficial synthesis that can hopefully be applied to solving real world problems.  

What if we made demolition obsolete?

Carefully deconstructing buildings isn’t impossible, but we have to find ways to make it more attractive as an alternative to conventional demolition. The way I see it, we essentially have two options:

1. Deconstruction/disassembly would have to become more economically feasible than demolition. That means we would have to fix the current system so that deconstruction becomes just as easy, if not easier, than demolition.

2. If we can’t do that—if deconstruction/disassembly remains more time-consuming, more labour-intensive, more logistically challenging and more costly than demolition—then the only alternative is to somehow make up for all of that.

I’m inclined to think that we need to explore both options aggressively and concurrently. Put another way, we should at least pursue Option 2 until Option 1 is resolved. What do I have in mind?

The short answer is that Art of Diversion is what I have in mind.

I’m admittedly appealing to altruism a bit heavily here, but surely anyone can see that faster doesn’t always mean better. Quite the contrary, when it comes to demolition, it often means being unnecessarily destructive and wasteful. Nevertheless, conventional demolition is about getting it done as quickly as possible, and expediency is a very difficult temptation for any developer or building contractor to overcome. Why would any developer or builder prioritise material recovery if it’s more expensive? The ones who do—and they do exist—do it because they’re determined to find a way, because it’s the right thing to do and because they have found partners to work with who are happy to help them. Check out the legends at Revival Projects and their work with developers like HIP v HYPE down in Melbourne.

What LEGO teaches us

Current efforts to curb the building industry’s wasteful tendencies and insatiable appetite for resources are insufficient. Something needs to change.

We can do better. We are capable of significantly reducing the building industry’s dependence on non-renewable resources by making urban mining the norm instead of the exception. We can make the use of virgin materials a last resort, and we can treat every existing building as a renewable resource.

Getting there will undoubtedly require some balance between carrot and stick in terms of policy and incentives, but I think it’s less about mandating change and more about inspiring change. I think it all starts with creativity, with capturing people’s imaginations, with rekindling the LEGO Maniac and childlike wonder in all of us. Call it naivety if you like, but I, for one, am looking forward to LEGO-ifying the building industry, one reclamation and reuse project at a time.

I came across the following phrasing on the About Us page of The LEGO Group’s website:

‘ … Constantly innovating, never compromising. Building, rebuilding and striving for the best. Is it this resilience and permanent sense of renewal that drives us forward. We are never still. We will always be creating, inventing and having fun.’

That’s what this is all about. Renewal, and a permanent sense of renewal, at that. Well said.

In a way, those exact words nicely sum up my motivation for starting Art of Diversion. I started this with one goal: to put an end to waste by harnessing the power of collective creativity. The aim is to significantly reduce Construction & Demolition (C&D) waste by: 1) encouraging more people to divert building materials from landfill and 2) inspiring and empowering more people to get creative in repurposing and upcycling those materials, be it in the form of art, architectural applications or new products. It’s about accelerating the adoption of regenerative design principles and circularity within the building industry.

AOD’s mission is to reimagine the ‘end’ of a building’s life and to help others do the same, to change perceptions, to take that which typically has a reputation for being the very antithesis of creativity (e.g. demolition) and turn it into something as creative as the beginning of the design process.

If that sounds like something you’d like to support, let’s work together and make it happen.

And, yes, in the spirit of LEGO, let’s have fun doing it.