In this reflection, you’ll hear from a Fellow on lessons learned from the Urban Design Study Trip to Copenhagen.
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Natural materials grow, die, decay and are reborn, a circular process. The vast majority of our building materials are extracted, fabricated, installed, and demolished, not reborn.
The extraction of building materials to create our human-made structures comes with responsibility; our resources are finite. The current processes for installing materials in buildings demands enormous amounts of energy. We call this energy the embodied energy of our buildings. The burden of this high-energy demand has substantially contributed to global warming.
We need to imagine new materials & processes that diminish this demand. What if our building materials mimicked the lifecycle of natural materials?
Our building stock is an incredible storehouse of existing materials. Perhaps these already-created materials cannot be reborn, but they can certainly be repurposed. Through repurposing, we perpetuate that material’s service life. Simultaneously, we must research and develop new ways to safely integrate natural materials in our future structures.
At Grønttorvet in Copenhagen, Lendager inspired us by integrating reused materials from dismantled existing industrial buildings and incorporating them into two new community facility structures on the same site. While this type of circular design process is not yet codified nor regulated, this project sets a precedent for economical construction with repurposed materials.
Back home in New York City, the New York City Economic Development Corporation is also leading by example, publishing Circular Design & Construction Guidelines and incorporating circular requirements in the RFPs for their projects. This is a courageous first step towards paradigm-shifting around material reuse. At TYLin Buildings, our company was built on this same ethos: creatively reuse what we already have.
In our current global age of interconnectivity and interdependence such study trips are vital for intercontinental learning and sharing across. UDF’s Study Trip left me inspired by the resonance of our shared questions about how natural materials and processes can inspire design that encourages human flourishing.