The 2019 City of Ecublens Prize for a project carried out at LAST
REUSE S TO XL © EPFL / PDM Célia Küpfer
Célia Küpfer's master's project, carried out at the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST), received the City of Ecublens Prize, which was awarded to her during the recent Master's degree graduation ceremony 2019. Her work focuses on the theme of re-use in design and construction processes.
Currently, the construction sector generates up to 40% of westernized countries waste. Faced with the accumulation of increasingly complex waste and the reduction of raw material reserves, the architecture is questioned by the need to change some of the logic inherent in the current construction systems.
In this context, Célia Küpfer's theoretical statement work proposes to study the reuse of materials and components in architecture as a significant contribution to these issues. Often misunderstood with recycling, this architectural design mode works with second-hand items and aims to extend their life by using them again for a similar or different function.
In the continuity of the investigations carried out within the framework of the theoretical statement, her master project consisted in designing a regional re-use hub using reused architectural components. The supervision group who followed this Master Project, entitled « REUSE S TO XL. A center for research and redistribution of used materials in Ecublens », was constituted of Prof. Emmanuel Rey (supervisor, LAST), Prof. Corentin Fivet (professor, SXL), and Aleksis Dind (teaching assistant, LAST).
Celia Küpfer, "REUSE S TO XL.Un "hub" pour la recherche et la redistribution des matériaux d'occasion comme activateur de durabilité à Ecublens (VD)", Master Project in architecture, 2019.