image © Rotor

Lecture: Rotor Deconstruction

4 February 2016, Canadian Centre for Architecture 

@6:00 pm 
Presented in English

Maarten Gielen presents the work of Rotor, a group of architects, designers and other professionals interested in material flows in industry and construction, particularly in relation to resources, waste, use and reuse. Rotor disseminates creative strategies for salvage and waste reduction through workshops, publications, and exhibitions.

Founded in 2005, Rotor represented Belgium at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennial in 2010. Their exhibition, Usus Usures explored wear as a reaction to use in architecture and as potentially creative process. In 2013 they curated the Oslo Architecture Triennale, including a vast exhibition on the challenges facing ’sustainable’ architecture today, Behind the Green Door.

Rotor’s approach consistently and often visually emphasizes the effects of human planning, oversight, and extended use on the built environment. In parallel with these exhibition projects, Rotor continued to realize various design projects, often interventions in existing architecture. This work has its equivalent in a growing series of deconstruction projects in which Rotor oversees the dismantlement of building components, in buildings slated for demolition, for reuse purposes. These dismantling and reselling activities are conducted under the heading of Rotor Deconstruction, a spin-off entity created in 2014. It is specialized in the dismantling of large-scale office interiors.

Maarten is a founding member of the collective Rotor where he currently works as designer, manager and researcher. At Rotor he collaborated on exhibition projects including OMA/ Progress (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2011), Usus/Usures ( Belgian pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale), or Ex Limbo (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2011). In 2012 he was appointed visiting professor in the HEAD in Geneva. In 2014 he curated together with Lionel Devlieger the Oslo Architecture Triennale. In 2015 he was awarded with the Rotterdam-Maaskant prize.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Other Architect.

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