One of the highlights of the Circular Economy in Architecture and Design exhibition is the project ‘Metabolism and Rebuilding Strategies’. The project is the work of 24 students and teachers from the postgraduate Settlement, Ecology & Tectonic programme. They took an in-depth look at the city and its buildings as a living organism that consumes and releases resources over time.
The postgraduate Settlement, Ecology & Tectonic programmes projects are based on a course from the autumn semester of 2014, which addressed the theme of ‘metabolism and rebuilding strategies’.
In this context, ‘the city’ and ‘the building’ are defined on the basis of circular thinking: as living organisms that continuously absorb and release materials and resources over time.
The course focused on restoring balance in our use of nature’s resources by developing strategies for recycling building elements and components, and upcycling building materials, through case studies of the demolition industry and metabolic analysis in four selected areas of the city.
The study was based on CINARK’s research into recycling and reuse, supplemented by the students’ own empirical studies of how the contemporary construction and demolition industry relates to the themes of: the metabolism of the city, demolition, building codes and recycling.