On Approaches 127 Temporal processes in research, green building and material reuse Bradley Guy 1 and Diana Nicholas 2 1 The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 2 Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA ABSTRACT: Design to reuse materials has been difcult to systematize in the built environment. Incorporating reclaimed materials pushes the boundaries of the processes of standard materials selection, sourcing, and use. Tis paper will examine the melding together of a process of building deconstruction and an intensive group design process, to create a way for materials reuse to become more universal while not losing the trans-mutational qualities of reclaimed materials as they evolve from one building to the next. Tese tandem processes allow designers and builders to develop an attitude toward salvaged material that leads to an integrative method to guide the design, and conversely, the design to guide the reclamation process. Te practice of design / build is a strategy to link sustainable design methodologies to the harvest of discarded materials and buildings. Design and building are often a process of reconciliation between process, material and vision. Quantifable processes are a mode of operation that can be overtly included in the visioning for such projects. In the deconstruction of a 150-year old barn addition and the building of a mobile shade structure at Yestermorrow Design / Build School in Warren, VT in the summer of 2010; the students and instructors engaged in a tandem process of deconstruction and design / build. Te project led to a method in which assessable results and methods were considered in depth and were laid out within a larger structure for conveying the temporal possibilities for salvaging and designing with reused materials. It was the confuence of that practice and the group design / build procedure in a compressed amount of time that led to a materials transformation and use schema that hints at more universal possibilities in the future. CONFERENCE THEME: Ecology, sustainability, and changing societal and political economies. KEYWORDS: deconstruction, design / build, reuse, sustainable design, life-cycle INTRODUCTION Tere is a gap in sustainable building design research and practice with regard to one of the most efective means of reducing environmental impacts while engendering cultural and aesthetic possibilities. Tis gap exists between the frst end-of-life (EOL) of buildings and the potential for their reformation; it is a potential to generate a systematic and yet creative practice embodied in the extended use of materials that might otherwise become waste. Built works can be seen as temporal products of an on-going process of building, as opposed to fxed artefacts. Tis stance incorporates the perspective of design in service to time-based processes of collaborative design, construction, use / users, change, and end-of-life to reconstruction. Te transition of materials from deconstruction to reconstruction can become a phase where investigations take place to more fully realize ecological life-cycles of building. Deconstruction can be defned as the selective dismantling of building structures to recover the maximum amount of primarily reusable and secondarily recyclable materials in a safe and cost- efective manner (Guy 2006). Tandem deconstruction / design / build and materials-use processes can provide exemplars for sustainable design methodologies. Stewart Brand writes of architecture being “trapped” by insisting that it is “the art of building”, when it could be redefned as the “design- science of the life of buildings.” (Brand 1995). Te reuse of materials has been hard to quantify and replicate in a universal manner in construction. Incorporating reclaimed materials into designs pushes the boundaries of the basic processes of materials selections, sourcing, and use. A rare example of taking on this challenge is the Materials Testing Laboratory by Busby + Associates Architects. Tis project utilized reclaimed materials from structural to fnish systems and was eventually commissioned as a project management team with the responsibility for the reclaimed materials more or less placed entirely on the design team (Taggart 2007). Breaking with traditional roles for the architect was key to this project’s success.