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2012Architecten Uses Google Maps to Build Villa Welpeloo

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Using Google to find sufficient quantities of local excess unused industrial materials – and then designing a house so as to make use of this surplus available near by – has to be one of the more novel ways to construct a building!

But that’s just what the sustainably inspired Dutch architectural firm 2012Architecten did in designing Villa Welpeloo.

During the design and engineering phase, they  researched the availability of sufficient surplus materials in the vicinity of the site, using a GoogleEarth surplus materials mapping overlay.

The material they found – such as these short cut-off pieces of wood – determined the construction techniques to build the house.

Industrial surplus is often discarded in vast quantities of identical objects like these short, identical pieces of wood.

Because enough of these were sufficient to build the entire job, the materials found actually determined the construction techniques and the visual aesthetics of the building.

The result is a far cry from the usual recycling that you see in construction – where perhaps just one or two old windows have been laboriously incorporated into a modern building, in a labor of love.

The short wooden slats were originally inside a thousand discarded cable reels. The wooden slats remain serviceable and undamaged long after the cable reel has no use.

These are a standard size, providing a uniform construction material.

Similarly, the load-bearing beams were constructed from the steel beams discarded from a textile factory machine.

Indoors, some of the remaining construction was clean and new, the cost offset by the savings of surplus materials use.

Though the intriguing shape of this sink suggests that it was a surplus industrial something in its previous life, doesn’t it? But what it was, I do not know.

The result: a very green new building for a couple who want to use it to store and show a collection of paintings and graphical work by young contemporary artists. And one that sits lightly on the land, having given back more than it took to construct.

Via Doornob