This recycled brick house was designed to be recycled again and again

This curvaceous recycled brick house has been designed to be recycled again after the building’s use. Architects BLAF Architecten set out to explore the reuse of bricks alongside experimenting with curving the facade to create a standalone structure. The exterior shell supports the roof and the three levels of the interior of the house sit completely seperate to the brick walls.

Called gjG house, it is built in the grounds on a 19th century mansion and whilst it looks like it’s sitting in a tree-filled rural landscape it’s actually right next to a busy highway in Ghent, Belgium. The rounded brick exterior proved to be an ideal choice for this site as the shape curves to fit amongst existing trees, plus the thickness of the shell helps to block out any road noise, making the home acoustically comfortable.

Large timber framed double glazed windows and glass doors bath the home in natural light and provide views to the green canopy of trees outside. They also help to regulate the temperature inside the house and help with blocking out road noice.

Sustainability specs:
– Recycled bricks
– Bricks can also be recycled after the building is no longer needed
– Timber beams
– Timber kitchen joinery and storage
– Plywood ceiling lining
– Timber framed double glazed windows and doors
– Materials are left unfinished and are low maintenance
– Structural integrity of brick outer walls means it is not dependant on internal cross walls, columns or beams for bracing, therefore reducing construction materials

Since the introduction of energy performance standards ‘EPB’ in 2006, thermal insulation in building skins gradually got thicker, causing a shift towards light and low-cost facade cladding materials such as putz, scales, tiles, textiles, etc. As for brick buildings, this meant an evolution towards brick tiles glued onto buildings as ‘exterior wallpaper’. BLAF noticed in an early stage that a construction method with layers glued onto each other would lead to the impossibility to separate the materials at the end of the building’s life cycle, resulting in huge amounts of non-re-usable waste.