As clients and specifiers alike look to material reuse as a means to help turn the tide on the client crisis and reduce environmental impact, it’s vital that novel but functional approaches to recycling continue to come to the fore. 

That’s something that London-based Studio Tip knows all too well.

The brainchild of design duo Katie May Boyd and Charlotte Kidger, the studio was born out of a shared drive to help fix the West's broken relationship with materials by tackling the ways that we deal with post-industrial waste. Working in collaboration with architects, engineers, and demolition companies at building sites, including 124 Theobalds Road and 180 Piccadilly, they have extracted and categorised waste with reuse in mind. 

But doing something with these materials is a core component of their practice, and the perfect vehicle to showcase the rich potential of the circular economy. This is underlined by their original use of stone in creating a series of benches. Various offcuts of stone, including marble and portland stone, have been harvested from demolition sites and selected for their inherent structural qualities and unique sculptural forms. The design principles deployed are simple but highly effective in creating functional seating with a value far beyond that which we relegate such materials to in the existing system. And the pair are not afraid to let the circular nature of their work shine through, as they explain about the benches:

“These pieces lent themselves to study seating, so we created a stacked design, drilling through each piece and assembling them on a threaded rod. All of our work follows the circular design principle to enable disassembly and reuse, so fixtures like bolts, lashing straps, knots and screws visibly feature in our design aesthetic. In the stone bench, we bolted and strapped a metal floor grill to the stone to create a seat, then added a softer element with plastic carpet tiles.”

The duo hopes that such interventions and reimagings of a system that is clearly broken can inspire on a local and global scale, and are on the hunt for more industrial waste, as well as those in the industry and beyond who are willing to join their material revolution.