Hey Man, Can I Use That Building When You’re Done With It?

Source: Wired, Nicole McElroy
Photo: STEVE PROEHL/GETTY IMAGES

Designers and architects are creating a new generation of buildings that emphasize reusable structures, recycled materials, and sustainable disassembly.

IN JULY 2028, Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympic Games. There will be years of prep before then: architectural plans, new construction, and infrastructure to accommodate the tens of thousands of arriving athletes, not to mention the millions of spectators trickling in from around the world.

But when the Olympics are over and everyone goes home, those new buildings—sports venues, athlete dorms, restrooms, souvenir shops, restaurants, and concession stands—will sit empty. Looming over the Olympics’ afterlife is the substantial and somewhat tricky question of what the event’s planning team will do with them.

“Those buildings don’t get used after the four weeks of the Olympics and Paraolympics,” says California-based architect Rob Berry. “They become obsolete. We are thinking about how buildings are made and really looking at it.”

Berry is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and principal at Los Angeles-based firm Berry and Linné. He says the setup presents an incredible opportunity to explore some very big questions about the stream of construction waste generated every year. To make that point, the students in his second-year undergraduate studio are hard at work on a project he’s calling Making LA. It focuses on designing structures for the LA 2028 Olympics that can transform, disappear, or begin a second life after the spectacle is over.

A few of the ideas the USC students have dreamed up include a concession stand that can be disassembled and recycled or reused after the games for a different purpose and a media center that can be transformed into a public library. The project is part theory, part design exercise, as Berry hasn’t been in touch with the LA28 planning committee … yet.

“I have discussed the studio with USC’s Office of Sustainability, and next spring we will likely involve members of the USC community that are involved in preparing USC’s facilities for the Olympics,” he says. “It’s more of an academic exercise the first go-around, but larger engagement will be emphasized more as I refine the brief.” Still, Making LA is very much rooted in reality: answering some perplexing and pressing questions about the future of architecture, construction, and building design. “How would a building work on day one?” asks Berry. “And what also happens in five years and 10 years when it’s outdated and its intended use has changed, not just becoming waste?”

Exploring Circularity

Globally, the construction industry creates about one-third of the world’s waste. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2018 that 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste is generated every year in the US alone. The related implications of these two stats are not only material (trash headed for landfills), but also environmental (carbon emissions, air quality, noise pollution). And as architects, contractors, designers, and policy makers unpack the issue, Making LA is part of a burgeoning focus on what’s called circular building—the practice of making buildings that can be more easily disassembled, moved, or repurposed. It also places a strong emphasis on materials that can be reused instead of ending up in a landfill.

A few recent examples of the approach in action include a waterfront Copenhagen bar and restaurant built for eventual relocation; Philadelphia architecture firm Kieran Timberlake’s innovative prefab, sustainable homes Loblolly House and Cellophane House; a 3D-printed home made entirely from forest materials at the University of Maine; and a timber frame office building in Oslo. Startups are fueling a shift toward circular building too: Rheaply is a Chicago-based resource exchange platform built to help companies and organizations reuse materials so they can reach sustainability goals, while Rotor Deconstruction is a Brussels-based co-op that dismantles, organizes, and trades salvaged parts of buildings.

While circular construction and design for disassembly is often practiced on a smaller scale, many architects and designers are pushing the idea forward and testing the limits of what’s possible with larger projects.

Charles Sharpless and Jessica Colangelo say their architecture and design practice, Somewhere Studio, bridges their professional interests with the work they’re doing as faculty teaching interior design and architecture (respectively) at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The pair’s approach has come in the form of what they’re calling temporary pavilions, structures designed and hand-built entirely from materials used during construction that often get tossed once the project is complete. The buildings are assembled from things like scrap shoring (wood used to support structures during construction) and offcut lumber (scraps of wood that remain after cutting a larger piece). These structures are designed in a way that allows them to be assembled, disassembled, moved, and reassembled in a new location for any period of time.

The projects are located in public spaces, where they are meant to provide shade or shelter—think bus stops or picnic pavilions. Some invite human interaction with their installed swings, benches, or even cell phone charging stations. “We’ve found it to be a valuable way to learn about the challenges and opportunities inherent in this approach, as well as a way to engage our students and the general public in thinking about the issue,” says Colangelo.

The duo’s most recent project to that end, called Mix and Match, was installed at the University of Virginia’s Biomaterial Building Exposition in 2022. The goal, says Sharpless, was to better understand the use of “the ubiquitous byproducts” of the building process to decrease waste. Colangelo is quick to point out that this work is very experimental and isn’t yet ready for large-scale projects. But it does begin to suggest what might be possible with more research and experimentation.

Leveraging repurposed material, Colangelo says, depends largely on what’s available at the time. Considerations such as dimensions and joint tolerance also matter and are contingent on well-timed, available resources, says Sharpless. “It’s driving an interest,” says Colangelo. With their work, Colangelo and Sharpless aim to influence the design process and answer questions like What does efficiency look like? How can we use fewer materials and create less waste? How can we do all of that while building something that’s both beautiful and useful?

Large-Scale Work

For Ona Flindall, CEO of Norwegian architecture firm Oslotre AS, timber frame construction has proven a reliable way to design a building for disassembly and lessen its ecological impact. Her firm recently completed an entirely timber frame office building in Oslo, called the HasleTre Project, which now holds the offices for Save the Children. The building is undeniably beautiful and was the firm’s third (and most sophisticated) effort of this kind.

“We see the material choice of timber as a key driver in the industry,” she says. “It’s a ‘Sustainability 101’ answer. This is the easy way out; the dummies solution and a starting block.” For HasleTre, Flindall’s firm teamed up with an ambitious developer that aimed to substantially reduce the project’s carbon footprint, and even went so far as to create a “guide for disassembly” to be used once the building’s life ends. Flindall says that while timber stores CO2 for the lifespan of the building, only 6 percent of timber waste is recycled.

Dan Stine is director of Design Technology at Lake Flato Architects in San Antonio, Texas, which has designed a few mass timber projects across the country. Part of his job is running the firm’s internal research program. He points out that timber is a great solution for making a building that can be more easily disassembled, but it still presents some unanswered questions. “One idea we are looking at is the end-of-life implications for mass timber in terms of the carbon sequestration,” he says. “What happens at the end of the life of that mass timber project?”

Flindall says the architects on her firm’s project looked deeply at climate concerns, as well as material scarcity, and ultimately arrived at a design that used as much timber as possible with optimal opportunity for reuse in the future. “If the value of the structure can be retained for the building’s owner, then this shifts the view of construction as a one-time-investment to that of a material bank account for the future,” she says. “An investment. This, we hope, will mean that there is a renewed appreciation for high-quality materials for a long life and a secondhand use.”

While the foundation at HasleTre is concrete, nearly every other surface (windows, framing, interior paneling) is timber. The team used standard dimensions, with no perforations in the wood, and timber-to-timber joints, all of which makes the wood more reusable. The building design includes a timber subfloor to house ductwork and electrical elements that can also be ready for resale, reuse, or reformatting down the line.

Policy’s Slow Grow

Berry points out that approaches similar to Flindall’s or his students’ within Making LA aren’t a huge part of architecture programs across the country just yet. “I think it’s being discussed,” he says, “but it’s not at the foreground of the conversations. It is particularly in design studios, materials classes, and building science classes, not necessarily the design. We are trying to bring that conversation through the curriculum and process.”

While education helps advance the circular construction agenda, in order for the practice to gain true momentum, municipalities and government agencies will need to enact policy change. And in some places across the country, that’s already happening. Los Angeles, says Berry, has policies in place to recycle 65 percent of construction waste, with a proposal in the works that would expand the policy further. Portland, Oregon, was the first to enact deconstruction ordinances and waste removal strategies in 2016. Milwaukee followed in 2017.

In San Antonio, where the population growth rate is among the highest in the country, Stephanie Phillips is at the center of a policy shift as the Deconstruction and Circular Economy Program manager at the city’s Office of Historic Preservation. The city adopted a deconstruction ordinance last year that focuses on residential property built before 1920 (citywide) and before 1945 (in historic and neighborhood conservation districts). “We have approached it incrementally,” she says. “We have made it very clear: There is a connection between deconstruction and affordable housing; it’s one of the biggest priorities for our mayor.” In fact, the office’s 2021 report shows that demolitions carried out in San Antonio in 2020 alone could have potentially salvaged structural framing to build more than 600 1,500-square-foot houses.

Phillips likens it to organ donation. A building may have reached the end of its life, but its parts can repair and renew life in other older structures. The process, she says is about “reversing the dependency on replacement products and the widespread disposal of valuable cultural assets while maintaining local cultural identity and a key source of generational wealth for our longtime residents: their homes.”

Phillips says her office started speaking with the area’s residents, contractors, and architects, talking them through the specifics of what design for disassembly is, as well as its related costs. She has even run three-week-long training sessions with Georgia-based Re:purpose Savannah to help local contractors level up their disassembly skillset. And when disassembly replaces demolition, there’s an opportunity to mitigate if not recoup some of a project’s cost through resale or reuse of materials.

“Demo is a sunk cost,” Phillips says. “You are paying someone to throw money away. That usually gets people listening right away.” Phillips says the conversation has shifted dramatically in the past year, with residents beginning to understand the value of deconstruction and contractors and architects seeing the real benefits of a different approach.

Stine’s firm, Lake Flato, is working closely with Phillips on San Antonio’s circular construction agenda. He says the biggest obstacle in this process so far has been establishing a shared understanding. People who aren’t involved in construction need to buy into the idea just as much as the contractors, government officials, designers, and architects in the city. There are the environmental benefits of circular construction and design for disassembly: less noise, less trash, less pollution, perhaps even fewer accidents. And, then of course, there are the numbers. “Cost is something everyone is always going to talk about,” says Stine. “That’s valid, but there’s a balance between that and these other aspects that we all need to continue to work on, and develop an agreement upon as a society.”

https://www.wired.com/story/construction-waste-circular-building-deconstruction