In a time of circularity, re-use, upscaling and urban mining, the architectural element has morphed from the architectonic towards a more intrinsically material artifact. In urban mining material is ubiquitous and omnipresent, providing the ‘As Found’, as defined by Alison and Robert Smithson and Reiner Banham in the 60s, with a deeper ontological meaning. The transformation of ordinary elements into architecture, where design intention was disguised as non-designed bricolage, turned them into something sublime. When material is emancipated from the form of the element, in itself expressing a cultural or philosophical intention, then indeed what is dwelling? What are architectural elements such as doors, porticos, thresholds, columns, windows, walls or ceilings, defining spatial figures as passages, enfilades, in-betweens, rooms or houses, when they are not designed through form but reformed through matter? In this Material Turn within Object Oriented Theory or Thing Theory, Otero-Pailos’ Ethics of Dust (2009) or Hélène Frichot’s Dirty Theory (2019) liberate the already there, where material culture is the human entangled with the more-than-human beyond form or design with an emphasis on deposited rubble, natural materials, bacteria and fungi. What does the architectonic element have to say to that? How can it participate in the currency of this discourse? Retrieved as part of a whole, not designed or detailed anew, from the gentle dismantling or deconstruction of existing architectures, recent years saw a new realm of assemblages. Thus, architecture engages in a conscious relationship not only with the history of its making as a crafted thing, but with the history of its sourcing, environmental impact and labor processes. In a time of digital sophistication in which manual work seems to be rendered marginal, schools of architecture and young architectural practices are rethinking what low tech, short circuits and the architectural detail could be (Voet, 2026). For the Recypark project in Brussels, TEN and Babina Geysen with Tiphaine Abenia defined a mixed strategy of reuse, where in situ AI scans of the existing buildings envision possible outcomes of their demolished parts, reconstructing them into new architectonic elements. This attitude that embraces demolition as part of the design process rethinks the superimposition of ethics and aesthetics, searching for a form that involves memorability as an image, a clear exhibition of structure and valuation of components in the traces of the ‘as found’. Imperfect elements of existing structures, traces of use as deformations or obsolete details are cherished for the hapticity the memory of their former handlings brings. It equally involves a return to the ontology of the element as an ‘as found’ spolia, and a new understanding of craft and use in relation to care, maintenance and repair.
How can we be ambitious, with the aim to increase the impact of the aforementioned intellectual perspectives, where the preacher is preaching to the choir? How can we challenge the hegemony of the contemporary building practice which focusses on economic capitalist systematics? Outside of any architectural culture or a philosophy which could render the architectural intellectual or even just human, the building industry is still predominantly defining the architectural element as the standardized thing for sale. As Salmaan Craig explains in Log 64: ‘When architects use the word threshold, they usually mean a liminal space between inside and outside. A threshold in everyday construction, however, is something much more mundane. It is a product you find in aisle 17 of Home Depot: an extruded aluminum profile with a simulated wood grain.’ (Salmaan Craig, 2025) As industrialized building processes have rendered construction increasingly complex in technical terms, the architectural element has been stripped of its symbolic and spatial agency, reduced to an economic optimization within a hegemonic construction logic. Alarmingly, this mainstream construction is taking over the narratives of circularity and sustainability, with the immanent threat of green washing. Generic concrete structures are clad with industrial paneling and automatic sunscreens, sealed airtight with tapes and PU-kits, and regulated by mechanical air conditioning. Yes, paneling is made from Eastern European CLT wood, and insulation from paper residues, probably from Asia? This building logic is far removed from the generic part-to-whole relationships of structural and typological expression given by the vernacular, classical, or modern traditions, where a column, corniche or corner stone is the smallest constituent—elemental—unit.
AR Volume 9 invites contributors to reflect on the design of the architectonic element in the era of urban mining, questioning/rethinking its history and its future. How to think through and design architectonic elements within the current architectural culture of circularity? When thinking beyond modular container-spaces grown out of assemblages from material catalogues or fake organicism, what is the language of this new architectural culture? What is its formal expression? How are architecture and space designed? Where does scale come in as related to experience, place and impact? What new stories can be traced, the architectonic element being the story or the storyteller? Moreover, what if the architectonic element is given a voice full of possibilities and narratives; what if it is unstable, stubborn and taciturn? How does it react to or induce displacement or superposition? What design methodologies can embrace this kind of architectonic element?
AR/Architecture Research Volume 9 is guest edited by Caroline Voet.
Caroline Voet is an architect and Associate Professor at Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, and founder of VOET architectuur + objects. Her practice focusses on scenography, cultural installations and public interiors. Voet researches and teaches architectural design with a focus on young heritage and creative re-use. She published papers and chapters with for example Architectural Histories, OASE, MIT press, Routlegde and ARQ. Her book Dom Hans van der Laan. A House for the Mind received the DAM Architectural Book of the Year Award 2018. She was co-editor of volumes as The Hybrid Practitioner; Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (LUP, 2022) and the forthcoming book Dialogues on Transformations (LUP, 2027). A House to Live With is recently released with Park Books (2025), and Dom Hans van der Laan in Practice just came out with nai010 Publishers (2026).
Alison and Peter Smithson (1990), “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’,” in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 201.
Robin Evans (1997), “Figure, Doors and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, edited by Robin Middleton, 54–91. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997.
Hélène Frichot (2019) Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture, Bamberg: Spurbuchverlag.
Jorge Otero-Pailos (2009): The Ethics of Dust, Köln: Walter König.
Salmaan Craig (2025), “Thermal Thresholds,” in Log 64, Towards a Newer Brutalism, Or the Undecorated Shad, Summer 2025.
TEN and Babini Geysen with Tiphaine Abenia and Oliver Campagne (2025), “Nobody Leaves the Party”, in Accatone 9, December 2025.
Caroline Voet (2026), “Detail/Non-detail. The detail as cultural mediator,” in A+317, JOINTS AND DETA+ILS, March 2026.