Re-defining the Architectural Design Process Through Building a Decision Support Framework for Design with Reused Building Materials and Components
Abstract
Waste from construction and demolition-building activities is increasing every day.
Landfills have almost reached their capacity. When thinking about the negative impact of
demolishing activities on the environment it becomes very necessary to think about
reusing and recycling building materials in new construction or perhaps better recycling
our thoughts on how to make use of waste materials. In Kevin Lynch\'s book, Wasting
Away, he wrote: "Architects must begin to think about holes in the ground and about
flows of materials." Studies show that construction and demolition activities are the
primary source of solid waste worldwide. For example construction and demolition
wastes constitute about 40% of the total solid waste stream in the United States. The
growing interest in materials and resource conservation in the United States is inherent
in the growth of green building practices. The USGBC identifies six categories in the
Materials and Resources (MR) section of LEED. One of these six categories is Resource
Reuse (RR). Interestingly enough, a recent study about the cost of green buildings
indicated that RR was the category credits least often achieved in most LEED certified
projects. Literature suggests that there are a number of constraints and barriers to
resource reuse primarily due to the complexity of buildings but perhaps the most
important barrier, according to many architects, is the lack of easily accessible
information to the design team on resource reuse. Therefore, as we promote the idea of
building material reuse to a wider audience of designers and architects, we mustn\'t
forget that in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, both Reuse
and Recycle terms are used interchangeably without yet a clear distinction between them.
The use of arbitrary descriptions to distinguish reuse from recycle has caused nothing
but more confusion to the public. This study argues that the real distinction between
reuse and recycle exists in Knowledge and Information. This suggests that design with
reuse requires a paradigm shift in the required knowledgebase and the way information
flows within the design process. Unfortunately, the structure of this paradigm shift is not
known and hasn\'t been well defined. Since knowledge forms the core of building a
Decision Support Systems (DSS) for a design team in order to consider reuse, it is
necessary to capture the required knowledge and information from the industry experts
through a Knowledge Acquisition (KA) process. This knowledge can then be used to 1)
identify the building material reuse criteria and 2) to build a prescriptive decision model
and 3) to map the process design of the current traditional architectural design workflow
and the proposed one. The overarching goal of this study is to use the building material
reuse knowledgebase for 1) building a Unified Virtual Repository database to be
connected to all available physical repositories and share a unified standard of
information. 2) When the unified virtual repository is integrated with the Building
Information Modeling (BIM) database, the DSS can work as a feedback and feed forward
support for architects and designers as they consider building material reuse in new
designs and constructions.
Landfills have almost reached their capacity. When thinking about the negative impact of
demolishing activities on the environment it becomes very necessary to think about
reusing and recycling building materials in new construction or perhaps better recycling
our thoughts on how to make use of waste materials. In Kevin Lynch\'s book, Wasting
Away, he wrote: "Architects must begin to think about holes in the ground and about
flows of materials." Studies show that construction and demolition activities are the
primary source of solid waste worldwide. For example construction and demolition
wastes constitute about 40% of the total solid waste stream in the United States. The
growing interest in materials and resource conservation in the United States is inherent
in the growth of green building practices. The USGBC identifies six categories in the
Materials and Resources (MR) section of LEED. One of these six categories is Resource
Reuse (RR). Interestingly enough, a recent study about the cost of green buildings
indicated that RR was the category credits least often achieved in most LEED certified
projects. Literature suggests that there are a number of constraints and barriers to
resource reuse primarily due to the complexity of buildings but perhaps the most
important barrier, according to many architects, is the lack of easily accessible
information to the design team on resource reuse. Therefore, as we promote the idea of
building material reuse to a wider audience of designers and architects, we mustn\'t
forget that in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, both Reuse
and Recycle terms are used interchangeably without yet a clear distinction between them.
The use of arbitrary descriptions to distinguish reuse from recycle has caused nothing
but more confusion to the public. This study argues that the real distinction between
reuse and recycle exists in Knowledge and Information. This suggests that design with
reuse requires a paradigm shift in the required knowledgebase and the way information
flows within the design process. Unfortunately, the structure of this paradigm shift is not
known and hasn\'t been well defined. Since knowledge forms the core of building a
Decision Support Systems (DSS) for a design team in order to consider reuse, it is
necessary to capture the required knowledge and information from the industry experts
through a Knowledge Acquisition (KA) process. This knowledge can then be used to 1)
identify the building material reuse criteria and 2) to build a prescriptive decision model
and 3) to map the process design of the current traditional architectural design workflow
and the proposed one. The overarching goal of this study is to use the building material
reuse knowledgebase for 1) building a Unified Virtual Repository database to be
connected to all available physical repositories and share a unified standard of
information. 2) When the unified virtual repository is integrated with the Building
Information Modeling (BIM) database, the DSS can work as a feedback and feed forward
support for architects and designers as they consider building material reuse in new
designs and constructions.
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