How did he end up being one of the USA's most prominent building salvage gurus? Brad Guy originally trained as a dancer and theatre designer which was a kind of introduction into the field of architecture. He worked as an architect for five years after graduating but even here he eventually got disillusioned with mainstream design practice.
 
"If you're designing commercial buildings and shopping centres for a living, that's all great, but it didn't seem to be making the world a better place, so I went to the University of Florida to study green building. This was in the early 1980s and there were no established programmes at that time, so I spent a lot of time in the library and learned that green building was much more than passive solar design. I met a guy whose goal was to open a reuse store. His name was Kevin Ratkus and we worked to put together the first deconstruction research projects at the university taking apart several homes, and then tracking and analyzing the results."
 
Brad is now an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC teaching sustainable design to architecture students of which reuse forms a part. "Deconstruction: implications on design" is one of his classes focusing on deconstruction, design to reuse materials, and design for adaptability and disassembly. His students have a live project to deconstruct a rural church and design a new building on the same site using the recovered materials which will take place next summer.
 
He teaches his students about design for deconstruction (DfD) - using mechanical fixings instead of glues and composites, demountable elements and so on. But digging deeper, he sees it more important that buildings should be made adaptable than deconstructible. In fact, he is currently writing a new book on design for adaptability. The recently issued LEED for Healthcare now has a credit for Design for Flexibility.
 
"I certainly will be looking at issues such as bolts instead of glues, but I think where I am going is that it is a misnomer to talk about 'DfD', but we should use the concept to design adaptable buildings which can last a long time. It is true that you can deconstruct composites and certainly plastics, thermally and in other ways, but that is very energy intensive. I am not sure that technology will solve our problems with an assumption that we can continue to produce 'wasted' materials. We need to keep materials in circulation in society - as buildings in situ, and as a last resort, the building parts.
 
"We already have an unbelievably skewed social and economic system where we subsidise resource extraction, pollution and waste but we don't really subsidise human beings. We pay for education but we don't actually support the development of people. So we need social and fiscal structures using taxes, as an example, which incentivise reuse so that people who do it professionally are paid a living wage. So I hope we will develop better social technology. Maybe it will all get worse but we have to believe it will get better or we must ask the question why are we all even doing this? We are all in the same boat."
 
Interestingly in the UK DfD has been relatively well-funded while in the USA research grants for DfD are not so readily available even though there is a specialist interest in the field mainly from post-graduate students in Brad's experience.
 
There is some confusion on terms between USA and UK. In England 'architectural salvage' is a general term which can mean old building material, fixtures and fittings. In USA 'reclaimed building material' means any product such as a fireplace and is not exclusive to things like bricks, walling stone, roof tiles and floorboards. 'Architectural salvage' mainly means fixtures and fittings but not 'reclaimed building material' which is the term used in the UK. 'Remanufactured' or 'reclaimed' is the term used for beams 'resawn' for flooring, which is also used in the UK although Salvo prefers the use of the term 'recraft' which suggests an element of low tech machine and hardworking rather than an industrial process.
 
Brad Guy thinks that reuse of surplus new material is as valid as reuse of old material. "Where do you draw the line?" he said. "Materials that are intended for use yet do not make it into a building will by default probably be disposed of, so their 'reuse' is also valid along with materials recovered from buildings."
 
He is on the US Green Building Council LEED Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group which is responsible for points related to materials use and C&D waste management and has introduced an option of one point for reducing the amount of waste generated to begin with in new construction. (LEED is the USA points system for accrediting new buildings for sustainability.)
 
If approved for LEED 2012, a commercial new building construction - excluding site clearance, topsoil, vegetation or anything beyond the building's footprint - will qualify for one point if no more than 2.5 lbs/sqft is generated by the project. Before this, a LEED building project could create an unlimited amount of waste for which a measurement was then made for the percent which was diverted from landfill. The average new building in the USA currently creates about 4 lbs/sqft of waste.
 
Brad looked at other construction waste systems around the world, including BRE's SmartWaste in the UK, which he has communicated to the USGBC and others as models for tracking construction waste.
 
The social housebuilder and entrepreneur, Habitat for Humanity International*, which has 700 or more ReStores across USA and Canada, largely relies on the disposal of surplus and used materials which provide an easy and convenient route for LEED building projects to achieve better waste management scores.
 
"This may not be perfect," said Brad, "but it does make the best of a bad situation. Otherwise this stuff would be sent to landfill. Materials are cheap, labour is expensive. Projects don't care if they buy twenty per cent more than they need because it is more convenient to have the stuff on site rather than running out and having to go to the local store to buy more. Time is worth more than the cost of the materials."
 
In 2006 Guy co-wrote the book 'Unbuilding' with another USA deconstruction and reuse luminary, Bob Falk. This looks at every aspect of deconstruction from a technical viewpoint, giving the DIY unbuilder everything they need to know about dismantling a simple old timber frame house. Guy is writing another book with the working title 'Design for Adaptation and Deconstruction' which will include information on the environmental implications of reuse for which he is currently seeking case studies, particularly those which are inspirational rather than mainstream.
 
In Unbuilding, Guy mentioned time spent living in Morocco. Did this have an influence? "Oh yeah, big time," he said. "You can't live across the street from a shack made of corrugated iron and cardboard without it affecting you. It taught me three fundamental things: one, the US is not the best country in the world, a lot of people hate the US and it's really not that big a deal to be American. Secondly there are unbelievable defences - cultural religious and economic - which every American child could do with learning; there are places in the world that are so different. Thirdly, it showed me the resource difference - you see true poverty."
 
Interestingly, Guy's class at the Catholic University in Washington has an international outlook, with Saudi Arabian and Algerian students.
 
Guy also teaches deconstruction to teams of young people who have joined the Americorps National Civilian Community Corps - a domestic version of the Peace Corps which is a government volunteer organisation that allows students to undertake community projects in return for a $5,500 grant towards student fees. Americorps NCCC helped clear up after Hurricane Katrina and also works with Habitat for Humanity around the USA.
 
Is deconstruction commercially viable in the USA? "On average it is not typically economical except for specific building types and specific materials - such as lumber (timber at least 6ins deep by 6ins wide). Many of projects are one-offs or pilot projects dependent on social funding and tax deductions. What level of deconstruction is systemic? If you do twenty million one-off case studies, at least there would be a lot of awareness. Five years ago around forty percent of salvage was non-profit and that figure has now increased to at least equal profit to non-profit. The recession has affected the building industry but even so sales of surplus and used material have done well in the not-for-profit sector but deconstruction is getting harder and people are shutting down deconstruction projects and laying people off. There is also less demolition because there is less new building overall in these economically difficult times. The cost of deconstruction is so high and you are back to the economics. It's feasible to salvage something which turns a profit, that applies to around ten percent of the material arising from deconstruction. But the other ninety percent of the material - that's not doing so well for reuse at the moment."
 
Habitat for Humanity, a religious organisation which now operates in over 100 countries, states: 'ReStore resale outlets provide an environmentally and socially responsible way to keep good, reusable materials out of the waste stream while providing funding for Habitat's community improvement work.' Guy wonders why HfH sells surplus material and then buys new materials for its own housing projects. "It sells materials that are donated to it for 50 cents on the dollar and then spends that money buying new material at full price," he said. "This doesn't make any sense when HfH could use the donated materials in its own housebuilding projects - which would make the materials in effect free - and show one true promise of materials reuse in the production of new and renovation housing."
 
Brad Guy was interviewed by TK in Central Park, New York in September 2011
 
Update:
Connect with Brad Guy on Linkedin: 'Architect, NCARB, AIA, conduct projects and research on green building and deconstruction and materials reuse, design for deconstruction, sustainable materials, and community design. LEED AP.'