Tipping Point East（英国首个循环建筑中心）丨英国伦敦

Design studios Yes Make, Resolve Collective and Material Cultures have overhauled a warehouse in London to create Tipping Point East, the UK's first dedicated circular construction hub.

Yes Make, Resolve Collective and Material Cultures worked with Newham Council and the Greater London Authority to open Tipping Point East, which will organise construction waste materials to be reused for other buildings.

The UK's first dedicated circular construction hub has launched in London

Yes Make led the transformation of the warehouse in Newham's Royal Docks, which had been left derelict for nine years.

"By harnessing our skill set and our access to materials, we were able to deliver a remedial plan, electrical fit out and full factory control process to ensure it remains a great building for years to come – one that can serve the material revolution that we are driving at Tipping Point East," Yes Make founder Joel De Mowbray told Dezeen.

It is located in a renovated warehouse in Newham

Tipping Point East is divided into zones that help facilitate the material sorting process.

For waste materials coming into the hub, there are initial loading zones, a quarantine area for pre-inspection, and an area for inspection, inventory and material passporting.

After the materials are inspected, they are then brought into the building and placed in storage areas, ensuring contaminants do not enter the hub.

Tipping Point East is divided into areas for sorting and distributing reclaimed materials

The second half of the warehouse is used for processing materials according to client specifications, including cleaning, respraying and cutting, and preparing them to be distributed for reuse.

Elsewhere in the hub is a community workshop, events and training spaces, an electrical testing facility, a collective office space, a materials store run by Resolve Collective, and an assembly space for large-scale group builds.

According to De Mowbray, London produces 10 million tons of construction waste a year, and construction and demolition make up 62 per cent of the UK's waste.

He believes that preventing this waste from going into landfill will reduce the construction sector's carbon impact and make the cost of building materials more stable.

The hub also contains workshops and training spaces

"The scale of available materials can and will have a significant impact on domesticating the means of production," he said. "In short, we have all the materials we need; we just need to stop smashing them into bins and skips."

"At a national scale, this can have a stabilising influence on the price volatility in material markets that has arisen from global political instability," he continued.

It is hoped that the hub will reduce the amount of construction waste in landfill

Following the launch of Tipping Point East, De Mowbray hopes to see more circular construction hubs established across the UK.

"Physical space, the risk appetite to take on this immense challenge, and the practical mindset to overcome barriers, are fundamental to successfully establishing reuse hubs," he said. "The problem is national, so the solution must be, too."

"Five years ago, Yes Make was a small box of tools and a travelcard," De Mowbray continued. "In five years, we will absolutely be leading the charge nationally to scale out this infrastructure and normalise reuse, much in the same way that recycling has been normalised."

Yes Make plans to open more circular construction hubs across the country

Tipping Point East forms part of the first phase of a Circular Economy Village in the Silvertown district, and aims to support the London mayor's goal for the capital to be a zero-carbon city by 2030.

Recently on Dezeen, architect and writer Smith Mordak criticised circular economy strategies for being too vague.

Other warehouse transformations that have featured on Dezeen include a youth centre located in a group of disused Victorian warehouses in Grimsby, and a London warehouse complex that was expanded to form a creative hub.

The photography is by Henry Woide.