Professor David Farrier

So they thought, what can we do with them?

And they gathered up.

I don't know, 100 of these, and they disassembled them, they deconstructed them, and they used every single part, right down to the keyboards, the lids, the nails, the cast-iron harps, right down to the nails, and they made this performance space called Pianodrome.

It's like an amphitheater.

a series of stats and you sit on them and you're sitting in a piano these reconfigured pianos yeah and they've kept the soundboards inside them so the whole space resonates right and it's a wonderful example actually of accepted architecture as it's sometimes called because um accepted features retain their old their old affordances you know feathers still insulate you know we um

evolved bones to store phosphorus and that, you know, we still store phosphorus in our bones.

You know, these older forms just don't dissipate.

So the piano drum remembers its life as an instrument.

I mean, yeah, I'll pick up with the waste house if that's all right.

Yeah, yeah, it's exciting.

The waste, you mentioned that earlier.

It's a two-story domestic home.

It's like a model home, really, because it's been designed.

Yes, and it's been designed as a kind of teaching instance, really, about what you can do with domestic and construction waste, because 98% of it comes from household waste, construction waste.

It is extraordinary.

It's very cosy.

It's a wonderful space.

And it's designed by an architect called Duncan Baker Brown.

And he designed it both to show what can be done and also to show the difficulties we make for ourselves when we design things with only one purpose in mind and how difficult it becomes then to find new uses for them.

So a good example of that is the insulation in buildings.