Recycling Architecture: the Redefinition of Recycling Principles in the Context of Sustainable Architectural Design

Abstract

The sustainable management of city resources (land, infrastructure, suprastructure) is one of the crucial urban processes to which the ‘smart cities’ concept should be addressed. In other words, resource conservation is highly important question nowadays. Namely, only a small percentage of the total building stock is made up of new works. This inevitably means that the general refurbishment and adaptive reuse will significantly benefit the sustainability agenda in the next twenty years, which will, further, make our cities smarter. Since most buildings are physically suitable to various uses, flexibility and ‘long life – loose fit’ should be a guiding principle behind most design briefs. The recycling of existing buildings has several benefits, such as: decreasing the pressure on new land, preserving the embodied energy of building materials, saving new materials form being used, cutting the associated environmental impacts of producing and transporting new materials, and, finally, involvment the lesser generation of residues in relation to a totally new construction. Thus, the subject of this research relates to the definition of recycling principles for sustainable architectural design. According to this, contemporary literature on recycling in architecture has been evaluated, compared and analysed. It is hypothesised that in order to produce least environmental damage the recycling intervention should use as much of the original building’s material as possible. Thus, physical characteristics of the original building define which design principle is most adequate for its recycling. Such an literature overview enabled the creation of so-called recycling model, which establishes a link between the physical characteristics of underused buildings, on the one hand, and the design principle most environmentally sustainable for its recycling, on the other. This model provides a fresh understanding of how an extensive range of physical characteristics of building can be considered in a systematic way in order to choose the most suitable design principle in the recycling process. Its elaboration is the focus of the research.