Waste and end-of-life materials become beautiful car park facade

Old fishing nets, discarded sheets of glass or waste from punched-out sheet metal - can it become the facade of a newly built house? This is what FOJAB is exploring for Parkering Malmö, working on a new mobility house in the Hyllie district.

Parkering Malmö will build a parking garage in Hyllie with a facade in recycled material. FOJAB has been commissioned to design the building and thus find products that can be reused as building materials for the approximately 2,400 square meter facade area. Several demolition projects have been investigated as well as the possibility of using different metal fractions in collaboration with Stena Recycling.

One hope is to use the glass panels that are now being removed from Orkanen, one of Malmö's university buildings. Lund University of Technology has been engaged to carry out tests and investigate whether the glass can be used. The glass will be supplemented with steel skeletons from the manufacturing industry, i.e. the residue left over from punching shapes out of sheet metal. The steel skeleton can be used to create beautiful patterns.

- We have scouted around Skåne to find possible materials and partners. The difficulty is not knowing for sure what materials are available, or exactly what the hole pattern in a metal sheet looks like. This challenges the entire design process," says Anders Eriksson Modin, architect and development manager at FOJAB.

- It's a new way of working, to start entirely from what already exists and find possible areas of use. This places new demands not only on us as architects, but on society as a whole to make different materials more accessible for reuse. We also need courageous clients like Parkering Malmö, who dare to explore new methods of developing circular construction," says Petra Jenning, architect and innovation manager at FOJAB.

- Instead of seeing buildings as a storage of contents, you can look at them as a bank of materials. You have a great value in the building if you use it carefully and can reuse it again," says Annika Fernlund, property developer at Parkering Malmö.

The construction process will be monitored and co-financed by the Vinnova-funded research project "Center for Circular Construction", also known as "CCBuild". The aim is to see how the use of reused building products affects the design process.

The parking garage is expected to be ready for opening in the first quarter of 2024.