Circular Construction Lab

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On August 7th 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is convened by the United Nations and involves more than 200 scientists and thousands of climate studies, published its Sixth Assessment Report stating that “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” [1] The report then continues that the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases released to date will result in a continued warming of the atmosphere until at least the year 2050, reaching the ambitious Paris Agreement limit of 1.5 degree Celsius of warming well before that. (Considering the 2023 record summer, we might have surpassed it already.)

The construction industry is the biggest consumer of energy and resources, as well as the biggest producer of emissions and waste. Buildings and construction together account for about 50% of resource extraction, at least 40% of carbon dioxide emissions and 40% of solid waste production globally. [2] Within the USA alone, 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris (CDD) are generated each year (twice the amount of municipal solid waste (MSW)), making up about 40% of landfill waste in the country. All these factors are dominant reasons for climate change and we – as architects – play a significant role in shaping the future of our planet.

The Circular Construction Lab (CCL) in the Department of Architecture at Cornell AAP houses a design research program that advances the paradigm shift from linear material consumption towards a circular economy within an industrialized construction industry. At the intersection of architecture, engineering, material and computer science, as well as economics, the lab investigates new concepts, methods and processes to (1) design and construct buildings as the material depots for future construction, and (2) activate the potential of the built environment as an 'urban mine' for today's construction. In circular construction, [4] the most effective strategies engage the smallest cycles. Local reuse not only preserves embodied values (carbon, water, skill, labor) of assets, products or materials within the community, but requires less emissions from transport and includes the potential of cultural and historic preservation into the development of a culture of care.

To scale reuse, both the demand and the supply of reused and reusable building materials need to increase significantly. To date, reuse in architecture is mostly a trade of “master builders” applied to unique “lighthouse” projects, and far from the scale of industrialized construction required for meaningful impact on the economy (and ecology) of the sector. While this aspect can be associated with a missing framework to support reuse in construction, it also clearly is a result of an inhomogeneous and unreliable supply of materials. Quantities and qualities vary within product batches as well as over time, and often code compliance of materials is not guaranteed or assessed. Most importantly however, not enough material is being harvested to generate and sustain a meaningful and trustworthy market. This seminar will take a closer look at the supply side of this equation, investigating the urban mine on material availability, quality and specification. The outcome is twofold, a set of archetypes at the level of the building detail and material joinery with associated metadata, as well as extrapolations of material flows within Ithaca and the region that initiate creative visualizations of the potentials of the urban mine.