Swiss architect Barbara Buser has spent decades proving that the greenest building is often the one already standing. When one unscrews a section of the bright red sheet metal façade from K.118, a former carpentry factory in Winterthur, Switzerland, the interior reveals something few people expect to find inside an award-winning contemporary building. Behind a gypsum fiberboard panel sit tightly compressed straw bales, packed as neatly as if they had come straight from a farmer’s field. Local clay coats the interior walls. The steel staircase once belonged to an office building in Zurich. Massive beams that now support the structure previously carried the roof of a supermarket distribution center in Basel. Eighty windows were salvaged from another building slated for demolition. The post What If We Never Built Another New Building? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.