Every delivery of glass or steel to a construction site in London comes with truckloads of shattered concrete and twisted steel scraps, remnants of the existing structures, being transported away as waste. The built environment in London is a site of material exchange; constantly importing materials for the construction of new structures, while exporting materials in the form of waste. These often find their way to distant landfills or are downcycled into subpar aggregates.

The dynamics of building waste are bound up in networks of capital, policy and municipal logistics. Working between the scales of the city, its buildings and their materials, the project explores and re-imagines London’s relationship to its ongoing cycles of construction and demolition, speculating ways in which the remnants of structures find new ways of inhabiting space. Oxford Street serves as a site of constant consumption, construction and demolition, shaping the life of buildings and introducing new cultural processes. The street becomes a ground for new material metabolism, revealing the extensive geographical networks that materials traverse and the dynamics of building and unbuilding.