Course led by Renaud Haerlingen, Nina D’Elia (trashmanship) en collaboration avec apropå (apropå)

How can we push the reuse of architectural structures and their materials? This question lies at the heart of an ongoing transformation at Route de Meyrin 49 in Geneva – an office building from the 1980s, originally constructed for Swisscom, now in the process of being reimagined as residential housing. The ambition of the project: to reuse the existing materials and structural elements wherever possible, promoting and testing the potential of circularity in architecture at scale.

For six days, MAIA students engaged directly with this question, not through theory but through physical, labour-intensive action. We were given access to the first floor of the building – a raw site where we could dismantle, intervene, and experiment. It became a space of learning and unlearning, of listening to the building through its materials. The process began with cataloguing and categorising the elements we encountered from walls to surrounding plantations. The act of reuse requires deep attention. It is a slow choreography of subtraction and addition: dismantling what was, so something else can take form. Each act is deliberate, and each gesture matters.

Ceilings were removed, walls opened, cavities revealed. A building, raw, layered, and full of stories. Taking it apart is not destruction; it’s a form of reading.