The exploration of the theoretical and linguistic potential of recycling in architecture is not new in project disciplines and has been the base of the international exhibition RE-CYCLE at the MAXXI Foundation in Rome in 2011. This paper traces a theoretical framework of recycling approaches applied to architecture, urban design and landscape design, considering the debate of oppositions in terms of modern-postmodern, utopia-realism, collective-individual; contrarily it represents a strategy that is able to collect unlimited individual tendencies, able to absorb the past and the identity of context without imitating them or being overwhelmed by their value.