The Beauty of Contaminant Renovations

The Beauty of Contaminant Renovations

The thesis of this work is that contaminant remediation can be beautiful if it is not simply left to engineers and consultants. Instead, it can become part of architectural design, bringing with it diversity, richness, and ambiguity. I believe that beauty can emerge when an architect takes on the remediation of a contaminated house. This is the overarching theme of my work. Additional topics include risk, material history, and a transformed culture of construction in the 20th century.

The subtitle of my thesis is “Five Designs for Morschweiler Straße, Büchel.” My grandmother lives in a house in Morschweiler Straße. The house she lives in is contaminated with pollutants and serves as a case study for my work.

I have compiled a selection of pollutant-containing products that could be present at Morschweiler Straße 29. I present these products side by side with the human inhabitants. […]

I have marked a gray area spanning from 1950 to 1990. According to the German Reconstruction Loan Corporation (KfW), 6.7 million single-family homes were built in Germany during this period, making up about one-third of the current building stock. Morschweiler Straße 29 is one of them. You can see that this period overlaps with the legislative lifespan of our pollutant products. One could create a similar overview for over 6 million single-family homes in Germany.

If we then make the reasonable assumption that a significant proportion of the owners of these 6.7 million homes have only limited financial resources, it becomes clear that this is an explosive mix.

For my work, I have made a selection and limited myself to five products:

• Eternit
• Carbolineum
• Woodlife
• Silan with diatomaceous earth
• Forbo Florentine pattern

I have retroactively located these five products within the plans of Engelbert Brauns, the designer of the “New House” and my grandfather’s nephew.

As an architect-turned-contaminant assessor, I draft a remediation concept in which I establish principles and goals for remediation. A fundamental principle of my concept is that contaminants may remain in the house as long as user safety is ensured. Freedom from pollutants is not an end in itself.

To avoid an immediate full-scale remediation, it is divided into two phases. The first phase consists of preliminary measures to ensure user safety. This phase is the fourth design for Morschweiler Straße 29.

To mitigate the impact of DDT-containing Woodlife, an automatic window opener is installed in the attic. Using a temperature-dependent piston-expansion fluid, this ensures the frequent opening of the attic windows. This aligns with the “increased ventilation” measures recommended by the Association for Contaminant Remediation.

The asbestos-containing Eternit drywall separating the New House from the Old House remains in place and is covered with a mosaic. The mosaic acknowledges the presence of Eternit and provides information about other hazardous areas in the house.

This is a “narrative” remediation measure. Since mosaics are generally considered culturally significant, it can be assumed that a message in mosaic form will last longer than, for example, a sticker or a poster.

The pipes under the basement ceiling and the cushion-vinyl flooring in the laundry room contain loosely bound asbestos. Here, a unique protocol is followed. A questionnaire is used to determine the urgency of remediation. Points are assigned to each component, categorizing it into one of several urgency levels.

I lower the points assigned to the pipe insulation by changing the “location of the product.” With a suspended Plexiglas ceiling, the location changes from “directly in the room” to “behind a suspended sealed ceiling.” Instead of 80 points, the insulation now receives only 55 points, placing it in the lowest urgency category.

The transparency of the Plexiglas also simplifies the future removal of the pipes.

The slate shingles salvaged from the demolition of the timber framing are reused to replace the asbestos shingles on the weather-exposed side of the house. Before the new shingles are installed, insulation is added to the wall, which had been skipped during previous thermal remediation due to the asbestos.

Ten years after the first phase, a second phase is initiated. This is the fifth design.

In this phase, a black zone is finally established. Black zones are sealed-off areas maintained under negative pressure by machines and accessible only through airlocks. People enter through a four-chamber airlock, while materials exit through a two-chamber airlock. In my plan, the entire basement is sealed off. Heating pipes can be replaced all at once with a new heating system. The Forbo Florentine pattern is finally removed.

There might even be a new staircase for a rental apartment. Perhaps the ruin garden will be covered with a roof to stop further decay.

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