The CO2-absorbing building made of old sinks, windscreens and toilets: Ghent’s £17m design museum is a green marvel

Inspired by a gothic cathedral partly built using human bones, this gleaming monument to recycling boasts 62,000 bricks derived from construction waste – each made by the public during a two-day brick-making festival

Museums often try to reflect the world around them, but rarely are they made so literally of their surroundings as the new design museum in Ghent. Rising above the Belgian city’s medieval tiled rooftops like an angular white watchtower, the new building has vacuumed up the city’s condemned concrete frames, windows, car windscreens, sinks and old toilets, and transformed them, phoenix-like, into a gleaming monument to recycling.

“There’s nothing new about reuse,” says Andy Groarke, co-founder of Carmody Groarke, the London-based architects who designed the €20m (£17m) project with local firms Atama and Re-st. “We’ve just forgotten how to do it.”