Recycling disused spaces: An alternative to transform architectural waste into resource

Amongst the issues 21st century cities are facing today, abandoned and disused spaces have become a challenge for architects. Due to structural, economic and social changes cities went through in the last 50 years, rates of vacant structures have become drastic enough to be stated as a problem in many European and North American cities, and to be researched upon by professionals and scholars. Growing amount of ordinary disused and abandoned structures with no planned futures have created a stock of architectural waste all around the world. While conventional methods like demolition is the first approach in dealing with these type of structures, these methods can be costly and their results can make a considerable impact on the environment along with disrupting the memory of a space and its users. With the turn of the 21st century, architects have been working on an approach to recycle abandoned and disused spaces through tools of contemporary design, which would provide a new life cycle to the existing structure with a contextual basis and respect the memory of the space while giving it a new meaning during the process. The aim of this thesis is to explore the phenomenon of rehabilitating disused spaces and getting them back into the city's circulation, through a series of key artists, architects, projects and events, which had noteworthy effect on the development of recycle approach around the world. Later, a series of studies, exhibitions and works made by scholars, professionals and institutes in the 21st century are presented to show the development of recycle approach in dealing with the issue of vacancy. Fifteen examples from a collected data of recycled projects from the literature are analyzed to show that recycle approach is a scaleless practice with no common design criteria, forming based on environmental factors on a contextual basis. The collected data from recycled projects is used to create an atlas and to present the global density of recycle approach. Based on the studies made in recent years, the possibility of recycle approach becoming a new aesthetic device and a prospective theory of architecture is evaluated in the thesis.