Material Classification and Reuse Framework Based on the Reverse Dismantling of Architectural Design: A Case Study in TCCLab

After natural resources are mined, they are stored in cities in the form of urban minerals through the construction of buildings. However, buildings have many negative impacts on nature from the time they are constructed and used to the end of their life cycles when they are demolished and discarded. At present, many researchers have conducted research on the recycling of buildings, including the whole life cycle of buildings, the value assessment of the construction waste, the recycling boundary of the construction waste, and the way building waste could be reused. These studies all need to discuss the types of construction waste and their total volume. Urban mining uses GIS data (top-down) and the same type of building material per unit area (bottom-up) to provide a broad calculation method for the construction waste, but it fails to accurately obtain the exact amount of each material of the building. From the perspective of architectural design, the same type of buildings tend to have different spaces and structures due to factors such as the site, orientation, and function. These all affect the way construction waste is reused. This paper aims to create a framework for the reuse of construction waste to improve the accuracy and diversity of the reuse of construction waste in the future. The main purpose of this article is to provide a more accurate assessment of the material which is contained in a building. Using a 48-year-old office building in the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Laboratory (TCCLab) as the research case study, the paper compares the data calculated by different methods and verifies the difference between the bottom-up and the disassembly classification method proposed in this study. According to the architectural design principles, the authors first carried out a 3D digital modeling of the office building (including the building structure) using a forward construction sequence and then they proposed the framework of the material classification and the reuse of the reinforced concrete (RC) of the office building using the method of reverse disassembly, hoping to provide a reference for the reuse of construction waste.

Automated summary

This paper explores the reuse of construction waste and proposes a framework based on material classification and reverse disassembly. The effectiveness of this method is verified through a study on an office building in Taiwan.