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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how building parts become reusable through practices of “unbuilding.” Based on ethnographic observations of asbestos removal, it shows how cleaning and repair practices transform materials and blur the boundaries between construction and demolition.

Paper long abstract

In this proposal, I argue that an ethnographic account of reusing building parts renders visible how practices of repair blur the lines between construction and demolition. At the center of these observations is an old building under deconstruction and the cleaning practices involved in removing asbestos from materials intended for reuse in a new building. These practices fall somewhere between the making of a new building (Mommersteeg 2023) and preserving materiality through repair and maintenance after their artefactual status has been established (e.g. Edensor 2011).

I propose that reuse practices foreground this intersection of construction and repair through “unbuilding” a building (Cairns and Jacobs 2014) and through investigating practices that pull buildings apart (Jacobs et al. 2008). I exemplify this idea with ethnographic observations of a specific moment in an architectural project in which construction and deconstruction are entangled through renegotiating the presence of past materials for future use: the determination and removal of asbestos.

I interpret asbestos removal as a form of cleaning and thus of repair (Edensor 2011: 246; Graham and Thrift 2007) that transforms the building into a site of material negotiation: an iteration of a building under deconstruction, a site of material investigation and separation (Lynch 2022; Siscarenco 2025). These practices show how building parts that were never intended to be reused may bcome usable again. In doing so, they raise the question of how and what forms of order are maintained or transformed through processes of unbuilding and taking buildings apart.