Decoding Circular Architecture: Design for Reuse and the Whole-Lifecycle Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The conventional approach to building design and construction aims to optimise the process for quick, financially feasible construction while taking into account the technical requirements of the building and its intended use. However, this approach does not consider what happens to a building or its materials when its use or technical requirements change. Nor does it consider the modification of buildings and the recovery of materials for reuse once they reach the end of their initial lifecycle. Consequently, every modification to a building involves demolition and waste disposal or material degradation.

Buildings designed and built within this conventional, linear (take–make–waste) framework of resource consumption are designed for demolition rather than reuse. Moreover, manufacturing processes are not optimised for take-back systems or refurbishment processes to ensure an effective supply of components and materials for remanufacturing. Rather, they are optimised for mass production and sales of building components and materials that ultimately end up as waste or in low-value applications. Consequently, the construction sector greatly contributes to the degradation of the planet's biocapacity and the transgression of planetary boundaries. In Europe, 50% of the resources taken from nature and 40% of the CO₂ emissions are building-related; 39% of all waste comes from the building sector (EU, 2015), yet only 3% of building materials are reused—despite the fact that consumption of raw materials has tripled over the last decade (Circularity Gap Report, 2022).

Conventional buildings are not designed with the capacity to transform or reuse building components and materials in mind. On the other hand, it is this capacity to transform and reuse that unlocks the multiple uses of buildings and their materials in the future.

To reverse the negative environmental, economic, and social impacts of conventional construction, it is necessary to understand and highlight the potential of multilayered capacity of buildings and enhance the multiple value propositions these (spatial, technical, and material) layers could offer society.

Concepts like buildings as material banks, reversible buildings, circular architecture, design for disassembly, and adaptive reuse demand a paradigm shift in the long-term performance of buildings and are shifting the focus from the conventional and static to the dynamic, reversible, and circular.

This Special Issue welcomes papers that explore these concepts of reversible, sustainable, circular building design and construction and highlight the following perspectives:

• Circular Architecture: presenting research on design methodology, and elaborating best practises in terms of adaptive reuse of building, design for reuse of building material and design with reused building material.
• Design for Disassembly and Reversibility: addressing design indicators and the impact of design decisions on potential material and CO₂ savings.
• Reverisble Building Design: papers elaborating one or all three dimensions of building reversibility ,spatial, technical, and material reversibility, and their implementation in design and construction.
• Conversion of Offices Into Affordable Circular Housing: addressing, among other things, design strategies for affordable circular housing and financial models and strategies.
• Lifecycle Sustainability of Healthcare Buildings: including the impact of such approaches on procurement and policies strategies.
• Circular Economy in Built Environment: particularly focusing on financial models and social and policy implications of circular economy on design, construction, operation, and end of life of a building, as well as the integration of rest value of materials into risk management systems.
• Multicriteria Decision Support Models: focusing on trade-offs between circularity, energy efficiency, wellbeing, and/or other green and sustainable indicators.
• The Role of Digital tools in Designing Buildings as Material Banks: presenting digital tools for decision support regarding deconstruction and reuse strategies and rest value calculation.
• The Role of Digital Platforms and Digital Twins: particularly regarding circular building projects

Circle Economy. (2022). The Circularity Gap Report 2022. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Circle Economy.

Dr. Elma Durmisevic
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Architecture is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• reversible building
• circular building design
• design for disassembly
• design for reuse
• adaptive reuse
• whole-lifecycle sustainability