Abstract

As we promote the idea of building material reuse to a wider audience of designers and architects, we mustn’t forget that both Reuse and Recycle terms are still used interchangeably in the AEC industry without yet a clear distinction between them. The use of arbitrary descriptions to distinguish reuse from recycle has caused nothing but more confusion to the public. This study argues that the real distinction between reuse and recycle exists in Knowledge and Information. This suggests that design with reuse requires a paradigm shift in the required knowledge base and the way information flows within the design process. Unfortunately, the structure of this paradigm shift is not known and hasn’t been well defined yet. Since knowledge forms the core of building a Decision Support System (DSS) for architects in order to consider reuse, it is necessary to capture the required knowledge and information from the building material reuse experts through a Knowledge Acquisition (KA) process. This knowledge can then be used to 1) identify the building material reuse criteria and 2) to build a prescriptive decision model and 3) to map the process design of the current architectural design workflow and the proposed one. The overarching goal of the study is to use the building material reuse knowledge for 1) building a Unified Virtual Repository database which to be connected to all available physical repositories and share same standards of information. 2) When the unified virtual repository be integrated with Building Information Modeling (BIM) database, the DSS acts as a feedback and feed forward support for architects and designers as they consider reuse.