When the family-owned factory closed last spring, Ross MacMillan inherited a thousand square feet of junk. Progressive Engineering Works had manufactured metal machine parts for steam winches, mining conveyor belts, and bridge building cranes since WW1. What he was excited about - and had been since he was a teenager - were the endless shelves of beautifully aged molds hand-carved from centuries old pine, cedar, mahogany, redwood, cherry and maple. Molten steel had been poured into these oddly shaped patterns to cast the shafts, gears and cogs of heavy-metal industry. MacMillan save all that industrial arcana from the scrap heap and turned it into a collection of furniture called Industrial Artifacts. "I don't like to manipulate the original pattern too much," he says. "I want to appreciate the workmanship and see what its intended use was." A club chair built out of tugboat propellers however, kicks the design element up a notch from simply placing a thick glass atop a blacksmith's swage to make an instant coffee table! MacMillan's propeller chair is low, sleek and modern. An asymmetric construction of intersecting black lacquered blades, it is curvy cubism. By creating a tag for each salvaged piece, noting its description, year and function, Industrial Artifacts resurrects a dying lexicon of blue-collar terms. Ever heard of a core box, a mounting collar, or a spiral conveyor? "Vancouver has moved from being a very industrial to a tourist-based, high-tech town," says MacMillan, "What I like about these pieces is that the patterns were used to build the infrastructure of Vancouver." One lacquered end table of Georgian pine, plywood and glass includes what had once been the mold for the cable anchors of Vancouver's Lion's Gate Bridge. "These are recent artifacts of our industrial history," he explains. "Being in the new world, we don't have much history."What little history there is in Vancouver is continuously being destroyed. As soft lumber gives way to software and wrecking balls swing through century-plus-old buildings, salvaged-based design has not only an ecological purpose, but a memorial one. Salvaging, scrounging, or reclaiming has spread to the building demolition industry, where, rather than leveling heritage buildings, small "deconstruction" companies go in and strip them of their antique fixtures, doors, windows, flooring, bricks and old beams, which they resell to designers and contractors. Furniture designer Karl Simmerling traces the recycling trend back to the timber frame/post and beam revival of the late '60's, a corollary of the hippie movement. His company, Vancouver Timber, specializes in reclaimed Pacific Northwest indigenous Douglas Fir vintage wood going back to the beginning of time, hewn from virgin forests and a rare commodity in today's glued-together, chip-board constructions. He sells the planks and beams to building contractors but uses the smaller pieces - massive by today's standards - in his furniture pieces. "I deal in old wood," says Simmerling staunchly. "None of it should be wasted. I'll strip lead square nails out of old boards that are too brittle to be reused, weld five of them together and make Christmas decorations out of them. I'll turn washers and bolts into candle sticks. You have to reinvent everything. There should be virtually no waste."