The broken fraction
Rebuilding the city from its own discarded ground
2026 — ongoing
Rotterdam, NL
Material research
Funder: Creative Industries Fund NL (Architecture Kick-start Grant)
Partner: The Green Village, TU Delft
Links: → Creative Industries Fund NL → The Green Village
Rotterdam already knows how to recycle its own ground. Street repairs and building renovations lift a constant stream of stone, brick, tile, and concrete - material that carries the history of the city's places - which existing processes crush into anonymous aggregate and return, out of sight, below the next surface. The loop is efficient, and in closing it dissolves everything specific about what went in.
The Broken Fraction asks whether that same material can keep its identity and become a surface in its own right. Can a city generate its own ground from its own waste?
The research recomposes discarded Rotterdam fragments into cast, terrazzo-like surfaces — paving, furniture, wall - bound with low-carbon alternatives to cement and ground back so the embedded pieces stay visible. A first, preliminary step toward closing a loop that today stops beneath the pavement.
The project runs over ten months, in a few clear moves. It starts by mapping the city's material flows - what gets extracted from streets and building works, what is reused, and which broken fraction falls through. From there it builds a material library: a controlled set of samples pairing foraged Rotterdam aggregate with commercially available low-carbon binders, tested for what holds and what reveals well when cut.The findings feed a visual atlas - imagining the city rebuilt in its own fragments - and a methodology others can pick up. The research is developed with The Green Village at TU Delft, whose two knowledge sessions connect the work to the wider field of low-carbon material research. What the grant produces is a foundation: a library, an atlas, and a method, ready to carry into public-space design.
This project is connected to...
The Broken Fraction
Note 3 - July 2026
The Broken Fraction is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL (Architecture Kick-start Grant) and developed with The Green Village at TU Delft.