Circular Design for Zero Emission Architecture and Building Practice: It is the Green Way or the Highway

By Marwa Dabaieh

Circular Design for Zero Emission Architecture and Building Practice: It is the Green Way or the Highway presents the main concepts of circular architecture and building design, focusing on emerging trends in zero-emission buildings, particularly zero- and minus- carbon practice. The book is structured around practical design solutions, including research-based passive solutions for extreme climates. It discusses passive and low carbon cooling and heating and natural ventilation, lifecycle assessment and life-cost analysis. The book presents examples and case studies from innovative low-tech to high-tech approaches, covering a wide spectrum of climate zones to show lessons learned and proof of concept.

Vulnerable groups of people such as climate refugees are discussed, alongside how vernacular architecture can help introduce practical methods into low-carbon building practices. This book presents theoretical and practical coverage of circular design for zero emission architecture and building in relation to the global challenges of climate change and extreme weather.

• Presents key concepts of circular architecture and building design
• Offers practical design solutions, including solutions for extreme climates
• Gives practical solutions for design resilience, construction climate mitigation, adaptive behavior, building resilience and environmental impact
• Considers vernacular, tradition and locale-based, climate response and adaptive approaches to sustainable building and design
• Discusses the application of design after disasters and extreme climate events
• Gives practical case studies of both low- and high-tech design solutions from across climate zones

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Dec 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9780323899895

Marwa Dabaieh

Marwa Dabaieh is Professor of Environmental and Sustainable Architecture, and Head of the Sustainable Architecture Research Group (SARC) at Aalborg University, in Denmark. She is also the Docent of Zero Emission Buildings at Malmo University, in Sweden. She has 18 years’ experience in sustainable building practice, focussing on passive and zero-emission construction. She has published over fifty articles, papers and chapters, as well as 5 books, and has participated in numerous research projects throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Book preview

Preface

Circular architecture and circular thinking in general are among the most important and popular topics right now in the building industry arena since we have almost approaching a dead end with our current sustainability strategies. The current rate of global consumption far exceeds the level we should be at. The rate now is that it takes 8months to consume what we should consume in a full year. Today, nature takes 18months to recover from what we consume globally in12months. Just to give an example, if everyone on the planet consumed as much as an average European citizen, we would need three Earths to match the demand. In parallel with our consumption increase, the population is also mounting. Over the coming 4decades, the world population is expected to jump from 7 billion to almost 10 billion. With the population growth we need to build more, and construction is consequently set to increase. This means an ever-increasing burden on the environment due to the overuse of natural resources and the negative impact of the building sector on our environment, such as toxic emissions and harmful construction waste. The chances of more extreme climate change events is sadly forecast to increase due to these adverse environmental burdens. Forecasts for the construction sector suggest that 60% of the building stock that is expected to exist in 2050 has not yet been built. This means that our consumption for natural resources will need to be three times the amount of resources we actually have. We cannot delay construction programs all over the world, but we can build climate-smart and future-friendly buildings. The enormous threat from climate change has pressured a new way of thinking toward a reduction of energy consumption and the carbon footprint of the built environment. From here comes the urgency for a new paradigm of building design thinking, shifting from a linear to a circular way, hence the notion for this book.

Being an Egyptian studying ancient Egyptian architecture and vernacular architecture, provided the privilege to know more about ancient and traditional building know-how, including the way of thinking and decision-making strategies. It was surprising that we were reinventing circularity. It was the default way of living in traditional communities. The level of awareness was way higher than what we have currently in terms of using natural resources and avoiding environmental impacts. What we describe now as closing the loop of production and consumption is what our ancestors perceived as the norm. In this book I have elaborated more on such facts with examples and case applications. I have shown how the modern glamourous life with the industrial use of everything has transformed our pure instinct to a linear one-way pattern of consumption, instead of the natural circular way. The ancient way of thinking was wise to look at natural resources as a loan taken from future generations that must be paid back exactly as we took them. Unfortunately, now we look at natural resources an inherited recourses we took from our ancestors as for granted fortune and misused them. The aim of this book is to develop and disseminate knowledge about circularity in architecture, taking inspiration from the past to our future. This book is not offering utopian solutions as much as it is offering inspiration for a way of thinking in a practical manner. It is not offering a track to follow or a manual to use, as much as it is offering a spectrum of wide solutions, strategies, or principles that can be of guidance to redirect our pathway toward sensible and climate-responsive design. Through your reading of this book you will find hands-on examples for projects that managed to come up with ideas to use materials that can be disassembled and reused directly one-to-one in new buildings without needing to be processed or without significant loss of material value before their reuse. You will find what are called transparent design approaches in using raw materials as they are for first use and for other subsequent uses after building demolition or end of life.

The different chapters have explored the wide notions of ecological adaptive thinking for how we can have a much lighter impact on the environment. Several topics are discussed, such as energy efficiency in buildings, renewable technologies, nature-based solutions, bio-based materials, from ecological to regenerative thinking, and many more. Some of the arguments raised in this book are around the dilemma of aesthetics and artistic expression of architecture, and sustainability or ecological thinking. Circular green buildings need to be beautiful. Being energy efficient and carbon neutral does not mean not creating aesthetically pleasing pieces of architecture. They are not contradictory. Using reclaimed materials does not necessarily mean using scrap waste that looks ugly. This specific argument reminds me of the saying if you build an ugly building, you are influencing the taste of millions of people for many years to come. It would be worse if this building was not a carbon-light structure on the environment and one that would leave many environmental burdens even after its end of life. Let alone if the building is also not providing a healthy indoor environment to its occupants. Therefore, buildings can really harm our psychology, physiology, and general health. If we look at the building sector and try to see how we can shift to a circular mindset, we need to stop the concept of a single use of our building materials. The transition to circularity in the built environment means, for example, that construction and building products must be manufactured so that their constituent materials can be separated out and easily disassembled for a second if not a third use.

I would say that the most important contribution of this book is that it explores how a heightened awareness of environmental and human-centered design, when done with nature in mind, can help us find resilient designs for the adverse climate problems we are facing. The building industry in the meanwhile is basically concerned about producing energy-saving measures that will reduce emissions. The issue is bigger than this. Circularity in architecture is how we conserve every single resource we use in construction and retain the energy content of building materials as long as possible. This book has tried to maintain a balance between philosophical emotions about carbon neutrality and ecology in the built environment with architectural conceptual ideas and technical information. The book also provides links to webtools and user-friendly programs and software that are mainly research-based open-access tools. These are to help designers, architects, and engineers to get a quick indication during their design process on their building performance. Also, they will be very helpful for students and researchers undertaking projects to give preliminary assessments for their designs. The book started with vernacular and climate change, where a background of green and environmental thinking has been embedded in vernacular architecture for many centuries. Meanwhile, it concluded that sustainable circular resilient design balances economics, equity, and environmental impacts that can be seen and felt over the short and long term. Having said all that, I wish you a pleasant reading journey.

Introduction

In the coming chapters the terms circularity and circular design will be repetitive. So, to take you in an easy ride in this circular architecture design journey, we better start by talking about circular economy or in short (CE). While there is no standard definition for the CE model, it has been defined by several organizations as the opposite of the linear economy (LE) and it can be explained as a systemic approach to economic development designed to achieve sustainable economy to benefit businesses in general, society, and the environment at large. In contrast, linear economy model that we follow now globally mainly follows take-make-dispose concept. The CE is more sensitive toward natural resources and raw materials and act in a restorative and regenerative way. The aim is to dissociate economic growth from the consumption of limited natural resources we have on our planet. CE model aims to design out the waste and pollution together with keeping the products and materials in use for as long as possible and to regenerate natural systems. CE has adopted several principles which are lacking in our linear industrial economy. One main principle is to shorten the loop for manufacturing activity and transportation; meaning the smaller the loop, the more profitable and resource efficient it is. It is even better if the loops can have no beginning and no end, and it keeps circulating. CE also seeks continued ownership for products as it is very cost-effective strategy. When reuse, repair, and remanufacture are made without any change of ownership, it saves almost double the transaction. CE is not necessarily considered a new concept but rather one that combines various previous preexisting principles for closing material loops, reducing energy and mainly reducing raw material waste and elongating the lifespan of commodities through regular maintenance and repair. As circular economy concepts can be integrated in the scale of buildings, products, and components, the connection came like circular architecture.

Circular architecture takes from CE the inspiration in working with two main aspects: circular material usage and circular design in addition to working on both technical and biological cycles. As consumption happens in biological cycles, it feeds back into the natural system through composting and alike. The technical cycles work on recovery and restorative mechanisms for materials and products through repair, reuse, recycle, and remanufacturing loops. In another words, the circular design is concerned with circular materials that are concerned with the selection of materials that are renewable (biological cycles), or that are possibly reusable after their first use (technical cycles). More specifically, circular design is defined as the design of products and components or elements that can be easily assembled and then disassembled at the end of their use to facilitate their reuse in other projects or reclaimed for other purposes. Furthermore, circular building design (CBD) is mainly concerned with buildings that are designed, planned, constructed then operated, and maintained with circularity and CE principles in mind. Circularity in architecture design are impeded in buildings' life cycle stages and the building small component and regard it from cradle to cradle. This also entails ensuring that all materials used in the building can be recycled or composted at the end of its lifecycle like the natural biological cycles. Circular building design is complex and dynamic because circular design involves many different systems and components, each with its own life cycle, functions, and characteristics. All that have to be considered from building materials resources passing through the construction process then operation then what is after building end of life.

CE and circular design on city level have another dimension of complexity. A circular city implants the principles of a circular economy across all its functions through establishing an urban system that is regenerative, accessible by all society categories and is abundant by design. These cities that are planned and designed based on circularity in mind aimed to eradicate the concept of waste on all levels. They keep resources and assists at their highest value at all times and are empowered by digital technology to achieve this. A circular city is a city that is liveable and resilient like it's all components and infrastructure like energy systems to mobility systems and all its built and non-built places and spaces. Main feature of circular cities that they directly and indirectly encourage their citizens to be mindful in their consumption patterns and dissociate the creation of value from the consumption of limited the planet resources we