Hennes de Ridder, emeritus professor at TU Delft, recently launched the concept of 'legolization'. By this he refers to the enormous possibilities of Danish toys as a 'kit of parts', an idea that also forms the basis for our designs at cepezed. De Ridder propagates 'legolization' as a way to industrialize and make construction more flexible without becoming impoverished or monotonous.
In doing so, he has in mind precisely not the 'industrialized' rows of single-family houses of the current generation of builders, who want to answer Hugo de Jonge's housing shortage on the basis of large concrete panels. This is in fact the same inflexible building system that was much used in reconstruction, with then the same disadvantages: large unwieldy panels, monolithically riveted together, with fixed floor plans and neither expandable nor demountable.
We have plenty of such buildings in the Netherlands, and especially from the post-war period, many of them are scheduled for demolition. Fortunately, circular "demolition" companies are providing a ray of hope here. Their current practice shows that it is quite possible to reuse these buildings despite their monolithic massiveness. They saw such a building into "manageable" pieces that can then be brought in as building elements for another building, in another location. Finding, storing and putting these elements into BIM is quite a task. And an important one: we notice at cepezed that knowing what's available already from the first sketches is necessary to arrive at new applications.
All those sheds and bag fields that are now filled with second-hand building materials are a bit like a haphazard pile of Lego bricks. Now let there be a fascinating app developed for Lego: Brick-it. After scanning such a pile, the app comes up with a long series of "designs," which also indicates where the required Lego bricks are located. New opportunities for the playing field of 'legolization'....
column: playing field
