Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Circular Building (CB) is an approach that gained traction during the past decade. CB is rooted in concepts such as Circular Economy and Cradle-to-Cradle®, accentuating closing of material flows to establish sustainable resource cycles. CB implies that buildings and components are designed to retain value, tailor-made for their specific service lives and responsive to potential disruptions. This way, wasting of buildings and components can be reduced or avoided. This touches upon many aspects, such as co-design, resource management, and supply & demand logistics. Associated data are often not available or too rough to make statements about the sustainability of building designs and renovation strategies. This paper revolves around circular and flexible design, drawing on the concept of Open Building, with specific focus on the individual infill of collective building structures. The short to medium-long material cycles associated with infill components provide potential benefits for circular resource management, on the one hand, and living quality through flexible space-use, on the other. A design conceptualization trajectory is elaborated regarding materialisation and operation of an indoor partitioning scheme based on natural fiber composites. Two methods and tools guide this conceptualization stage: Circ-Flex assessment guidelines to inform the design preconditions, and an Activity-based Spatial Material Flow Analysis for sourcing local, renewable and/or secondary raw materials. Results show that recent innovations regarding renewable materials and reversible connections can contribute to the shift from linear to circular value models. Associated modifications in the value-chain occur, above all, in raw material sourcing, manufacturing, reutilization logistics, and data-sharing.