Swiss Designer Sees Building Blocks in 200,000 Junked Cars a Year

Switzerland retires roughly 200,000 cars every year, and two-thirds of them leave the country as exports to places with weaker environmental rules. That figure sits at the center of It all remains, an art and architectural installation by Swiss designer Giona Bierens de Haan that asks a blunt question: what if those dead cars stayed home and became buildings instead?

The numbers behind the project are stark. Nearly 5 million registered vehicles circulate in Switzerland, averaging 0.5 cars per inhabitant. Each year, another 200,000 come off the road. Rather than dismantling them for scrap or shipping them abroad, Bierens de Haan wants to treat them as a domestic material bank waiting to be tapped.

What does the installation actually propose?

Bierens de Haan frames the work as a response to Switzerland's reliance on foreign markets for its own waste. Instead of exporting the problem, the conceptual installation proposes local material revalorization. Decommissioned cars stop being waste and start being structural resources — foundational building blocks for future construction.

The timing isn't accidental. The designer anticipates a post-fossil-fuel transition in which automobiles, at least in their current combustion-driven form, become obsolete. When that happens, the stream of retired vehicles won't shrink — it will surge. It all remains positions architecture as the industry ready to absorb that surge, turning car bodies and components into the raw stock of buildings rather than the residue of consumption.

A wider lens on auto waste

The installation arrives amid a broader reckoning with what happens to vehicles at the end of their lives. Exporting used cars to countries with less stringent environmental regulations shifts the burden but doesn't eliminate it. Bierens de Haan's argument is essentially logistical: the material already exists, in known quantities, within national borders. The 200,000 vehicles retired annually represent steel, glass, and components that could enter local construction supply chains rather than foreign dumps.

Visually, the installation makes that case materially. Images of the work show car-derived forms stacked and arranged as proto-architectural assemblies — less a polished proposal than a provocation about scale. If Switzerland's fleet turns over at this rate every year, the accumulating stock isn't a footnote. It's a building resource on par with a small quarry.

What changes for architecture if the idea catches on? Designers would need to treat vehicle components as standard structural units, and demolition or de-manufacturing would become a design discipline in its own right. For now, It all remains stays conceptual — but it points to a near future where the car's afterlife is measured in floor area, not export tonnage.

Project info: It all remains — designer: Giona Bierens de Haan (@giona_bh).