RECYCLED REALITIES
REIMAGINING A CONSTRUCTION SITE THROUGH REUSE
Recycled Realities is an augmented reality installation that proposes a dynamic, interactive, and participative environment for redefining spatial transformation through public engagement. Sited in the square in front of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, the work challenged the conventional image of the architectural construction site — typically a closed zone of demolition and waste - and reframed it as an open laboratory for reuse, advocating the creative repurposing of materials and building parts in architecture.
Through their smartphone, visitors encounted digitally scanned architectural fragments - Corinthian capitals, fluted shafts, ornamental drums, sculpted reliefs - drawn from the Ferdinandeum's own facade and the wider classical vocabulary surrounding it. Normally fixed in stone or hidden in museum depots, these elements are released into a state of suspension: they hover, tilt, stack, and recombine, treated not as untouchable heritage but as a living material library the public is invited to handle and re-author.
Developed within the Forum Museum festival (2023/24), the project entered into dialogue with Anna Scalfi Eghenter's Cantiere Tempo, whose yellow construction chutes stage the museum's facade as a site of transition. Where Cantiere Tempo declares the museum a construction site, Recycled Realities invites passers-by to act within it - engaging contemporary debates around circular construction, urban mining, and the afterlife of building components, and posing a quiet question: what if we designed with what we already have?
The project was financed by Land Tirol through the Tiroler Wissenschaftsförderung and supported by the University of Innsbruck, Faculty of Architecture.
