A lighting collection cast entirely from one demolished facade
Atelier Brut traces every lamp in its new range to a single source: 4.2 tonnes of aluminium mullions from a 1970s office block in Brussels.
Words Mateo Ruiz 9 Aug 2026 4 min read
Photography courtesy of the studio
When the Tour Botanique's curtain wall came down last year, Atelier Brut bought the mullions by the tonne. The Brussels studio has now recast them as Filon, a collection of 200 lamps whose provenance is stamped into each base: the building's coordinates and the melt date.
Single-source recycling is deliberately inefficient. Mixed scrap would be cheaper, but the studio argues that traceability is the product. 'People ask where their coffee is from,' says co-founder Thomas Renard. 'They should ask where their aluminium is from. Ours has an address.'
The design language borrows from the donor building: the lamps' fluted stems echo the extrusion profiles of the original mullions, a detail visible if you hold the two side by side — which the studio encourages, selling each lamp with a small offcut of unprocessed facade.
The collection sold out its first run in nine days. The studio's next source has been secured: a swimming pool roof in Ghent, coming down in November.