ABSTRACT
At the core of all design concepts and interventions in the built environment lays the question: How can interventions in the built environment eliminate negative impacts on ecological system and biocapacity of the planet and transform them into a positive once? Circularity Gap Report argues that to bring human activities back within the safe limits of the planet, global material extraction and consumption would have to be reduced by one-third (Circularity Gap Report, 2022). At the same time, the report from 2021 indicated that almost 60% of the built environment required to accommodate urban population by 2050 remains to be built (Circularity Gap Report, 2021). This gap can be bridged by multiple and effective re-use of resources and industrial concepts where waste does not exist and where materials from one process are resources for another. This chapter presents a new design concept (applied during students workshops in the past six years) which can unlock multilayered re-use capacity of buildings and their components/materials and enable their multiple re-use options. Such approach envisions the built environment without demolition and value degradation and labels construction and demolition waste as design error. In order to eliminate this design mistake from the design process International Green Design Biennale organizes regular multidisciplinary design studios involving students from all over the world in exploring new dimensions of the future generation of buildings – reversible buildings.
