What If Yesterday’s Building Became Tomorrow’s Brick?

I’ve always liked construction materials that make you look twice.

Not because they are necessarily flashy or futuristic, but because they challenge something we have been doing the same way for a very long time.

A newly reopened museum in Ghent, Belgium, has done exactly that.

The new wing of Design Museum Gent is covered with more than 80,000 pale bricks. At first glance, they look like a contemporary interpretation of the masonry that has defined European cities for centuries.

But these aren't ordinary bricks.

They are made largely from Ghent's own waste streams—including material recovered from demolition and construction.

In other words, pieces of yesterday's city have literally become part of tomorrow's city.

And I think that's a construction idea worth paying attention to.

A Brick That Never Saw a Kiln

Traditional clay brick is an incredible material. We have buildings hundreds of years old that prove that pretty convincingly.

But manufacturing conventional brick also requires significant heat. Clay is typically fired in a kiln at very high temperatures, which requires energy and contributes to the material's embodied carbon.

The team behind the new museum wing asked a different question:

What if we didn't have to fire the brick at all?

Working with BC materials and other project partners, the team developed what they call the Gent Waste Brick.

Approximately 63% of its aggregate comes from recycled municipal waste streams from Ghent. Rather than being fired, the bricks are pressed and then lime-cured, allowing them to harden through carbonation under atmospheric conditions.

According to BC materials, the resulting brick has roughly one-third the embodied carbon of a typical fired clay brick. It was also tested against European standards and certified for use on the museum's exterior façade.

That's where this stops being an interesting laboratory experiment and becomes much more interesting to me.

Someone actually had to build with it.

82,000 Bricks. Made Down the Street.

One detail of this project may be even more important than the recycled content.

The bricks were manufactured less than five kilometers from the museum.

Production took place at Het Arsenaal, a former railway repair facility in Ghent. Over 104 working days, a small production team manufactured approximately 82,000 blocks representing about 230 tons of material.

And the manufacturing operation wasn't exactly a giant automated brick factory.

The process used relatively simple electric equipment, including a loader, conveyor belts and a custom mobile hydraulic press.

Mix.

Press.

Set.

Cure.

Repeat about 82,000 times.

There is something wonderfully practical about that.

We spend a lot of time talking about advanced manufacturing, robotics and giant factories when discussing the future of construction.

This project went in almost the opposite direction.

It asked:

What materials do we already have nearby, and how can we turn them into something useful?

The Dumpster May Be a Supply Chain

Construction generates an enormous amount of material.

Every renovation, demolition and redevelopment project produces concrete, masonry, glass, metals, timber and countless other materials that have historically been viewed primarily as waste.

We load them into containers.

We haul them away.

Then trucks arrive from somewhere else carrying brand-new materials.

If you describe that process to someone outside our industry, they might reasonably ask a pretty obvious question:

Couldn't some of those trucks just meet in the middle?

That is essentially what circular construction is trying to figure out.

And the Ghent project provides a very tangible example.

The museum's façade contains material that might otherwise have been treated as waste. Instead, that material was processed locally, turned into a certified construction product and installed on a new building.

Waste became inventory.

That's a significant shift in thinking.

The Building Goes Further Than the Brick

The new wing itself is also worth looking at.

Designed by Carmody Groarke and ATAMA, it connects a collection of historic museum buildings in the center of Ghent and forms part of a four-year renovation and expansion of the museum.

The structure uses timber, while the exterior uses the Gent Waste Brick. The museum says circularity and sustainability influenced not only the architecture but also many of the materials and design elements throughout the project.

The building opened to the public on October 3, 2026.

That timing makes the project particularly interesting because we're no longer looking at renderings and wondering whether an experimental material will actually make it onto the building.

It did.

But Can This Actually Scale?

This is where I think we have to be careful.

It's easy to see a project like this and declare that recycled bricks are going to replace conventional masonry.

They're not.

At least not anytime soon.

Construction materials need predictable performance, consistent supply, competitive pricing, certification, warranties and contractors who know how to work with them.

And making 82,000 bricks for one museum is very different from supplying millions of units for large-scale commercial or residential development.

But every established construction material had a point when somebody built the first real project with it.

The important question isn't whether Gent Waste Brick replaces conventional brick.

It's whether the method behind it can be repeated.

Could demolition waste from Madrid become façade material for a building in Madrid?

Could concrete removed from a project in Barcelona become material for another project nearby?

Could future cities develop small regional manufacturing facilities that turn local construction waste into certified building products?

Suddenly, the idea gets much bigger than one museum in Belgium.

Maybe Buildings Are Material Banks

For most of construction history, we've thought about buildings as permanent objects.

You extract materials.

Manufacture products.

Construct the building.

Use it for several decades.

Eventually demolish it.

Then start again.

Circular construction asks us to look at that sequence differently.

Perhaps an existing building isn't simply a structure waiting to be demolished.

Maybe it's a warehouse full of future construction materials.

Steel can be reused.

Concrete can become aggregate.

Glass can be processed.

Timber can sometimes find another life.

And apparently, yesterday's rubble can become tomorrow's brick.

That doesn't mean every material can—or should—be recycled indefinitely. Economics, contamination, logistics and performance will always matter.

But the construction industry consumes an extraordinary amount of raw material.

If we can begin viewing the buildings already surrounding us as part of the future material supply chain, the implications could be enormous.

The most interesting thing about the new Design Museum Gent isn't that someone invented a clever brick.

It's that the project changes the question we ask when a building comes down.

Instead of asking:

“Where do we dispose of this?”

Maybe we start asking:

“What can we build with it next?”