Hampton Avery Architects

How far can you push materials reuse on a little garage?

Hampton Avery Architects has designed a new two-car garage with rooftop garden/deck to replace an old existing wood-framed garage on a concrete slab-on-grade. There is effectively no such thing as demolition on this project.

NEW: See the online photo gallery.

The old garage has been deconstructed, and the material salvaged in one of four ways:
1. Windows, doors, wood studs and framing donated to the ReBuilding Exchange.
2. Metal such as gutters, wiring, and conduit taken away by the ever-present ‘junqueros’ (I call them ‘the alley gods’) who roam the alleys for recycled metals and other materials.
3. Onsite reuse: a new fence was built from roof decking, crushed concrete will be used as backfill or recycled aggregate for new concrete.
4. Reuse elsewhere, notably on some productive landscape projects by local nonprofit Urban Habitat Chicago.

The latter includes Joy Garden at Northside Preparatory High School, where chunks of concrete (known as ‘urbanite’) from the old slab and soil fill will be used on curving earthberms which help define space, give visual interest, provide space for dense plantings, and introduce enhanced accessibility features to include individuals all too often excluded from traditional garden environments.

For the new garage, some framing members are being repurposed from wood reclaimed during the previous deconstruction of a warehouse. Rather than have our structural engineer give a boilerplate design for walls and a roof to support a rooftop garden, framing members were designed specifically around reclaimed materials -this approach is somewhat unique.

In our case, wall framing was ripped by general contractor Green Cross from old 2×10 wood joists (we we able to make 2×5’s work, rather than 2×6’s, and get TWO from one 2×10 - geek out!!). Since each stud is incrementally taller to form the pitch of the roof, each has a unique marking for easy location in fabricating the balloon-framed wall (see Fig. 3 ‘east framing elevation’ above) The roof will be pre-existing engineered joists from Craigslist, each of which sit on angled mini-top plates.

It takes some time and effort to coordinate, but we think it’s pretty cool to use materials sparingly, be able to track their history, and have a good story about where this roof joist ended up or what’s under that earth berm and where it came from.

While we’re making a concerted effort to make a nice-looking new garage, the point is not that it’s an expensive high-design item: as architects, we’re kinda over Architecture.
We like buildings an awful lot.

One of the goal on projects we undertake, in general, is to push materials reuse as far as it can go, and let that help guide the design, rather than imposing an arbitrary form or look on a building.
This garage is a first step.