For additional information, contact: Anahita Khodadadi
The end-of-life phase of buildings, which may include deconstruction, transportation, waste processing, and disposal, significantly impacts the waste crisis and climate change. Consuming natural resources and transforming them into a product with a limited life-span, exporting garbage to locations where rules and regulations are less rigid, dumping waste on lands without any protection system, and jeopardizing the people who live close to the garbage sites are all our today’s socio-environmental crises. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2018, six hundred million tons of debris produced by excavation, demolition, construction/renovation (C&D), and site clearance. This amount of C&D debris was more than twice the amount of generated municipal solid waste. The C&D debris includes diverse building materials, including wood as well. Moreover, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reports that 92% of new homes completed in 2021 were out of wood frames. According to the wood waste management practices reported until 2018, it is anticipated that most of the wood materials will be directed to landfill, used for combustion with energy recovery, or subjected to recycling processes. Hence, re-using or recycling wood materials reduces the socio-environmental impacts associated with the extraction and consumption of materials, supports the circular economy and creates employment, reduces fewer disposal facilities, conserves landfill spaces, and decreases the overall building project expenses.
Moreover, the World Green Building Council indicates that the building's structure and shell have the greatest contribution to Global Warming Potential (GWP). To date, different avenues have been explored to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings' structures and shells, such as manufacturing building materials by recycling or upcycling the waste materials or developing bio-based materials with minimal or negative embodied carbon. An emerging approach is maximizing the possible useful life of buildings' structures and shells by designing them for disassembly and re-using them to construct new buildings for two or multiple lives. Modularity, standardization, simplicity, reversible connections, clear labeling and documentation, selection of proper materials, end-of-life planning at early design stages, adaptability, and reverse logistics are key principles and considerations underpinning the DfD approach cycles.
The Disassembly Studio aims to familiarize students with effective practices and methodologies for designing buildings with disassembly in mind. Knowledge acquisition occurs through field research, design through making, and computational modeling and life cycle assessment of the prototypes. Students will explore material recovery requirements and layering techniques, aiming to conceptualize various structural systems with dimensions and joinery systems conducive to adaptation and re-use across multiple life cycles. Then, they practice Design for Disassembly (DfD) techniques through prototyping. Their findings inform the evaluation of successful prototypes, encompassing orthogonal frames, roof systems, wall systems, and integrated shells—all designed with DfD principles in mind.
As the term progresses, students develop prototypes of two structural and shell systems, with the second prototype primarily constructed from re-used materials sourced from the first iteration. This approach enables students to comprehend and apply design strategies that elongate the life-span of buildings, thereby minimizing their carbon footprint through multiple cycles. The second structural system may feature variations in function, dimensions, and form compared to the initial one, allowing for minor modifications to integrate disassembled components into the new structural design. To validate the practical implementation of this concept, student teams are assigned the task of disassembling their initial systems, making necessary adjustments to structural components, and utilizing them in the assembly of their second system.
