Architecture, Waste, and the Circular Economy

Waste is a modern global crisis. The world is drowning in an unprecedented amount of waste due to an increasing linear economy model that drive societies to consume more every day. It was reported that the average American citizen consume nearly 32 times more that the average Indian citizen. Companies, businesses, and corporates are continuously racing to deplete the planet’s natural resources in an astonishing rate. The design and construction sector alone is responsible for 30-40% of total solid waste worldwide, yet as architects, designers, and planners the waste problem is almost absent from the current discourse, both in practice and academia. Beyond sustainability, and if ideas such as the Dutch “CircularCity” become more appealing to architects, designers, and clients, the architectural education must adopt a transformational shift in the design thinking process to prepare a more responsible future architect. A shift from goal-oriented design to means-oriented design requires a shift in the design education, and the studio pedagogy. A transformation is needed in education, practice, research, and the related professions to address the current and emerging economic challenges more so post crises and pandemics, and through the built environment lens. It is time to define the role of architecture and design in the circular economy paradigm shift.

Innovative Ceramic Floor for Resilient Cities

LIFE CERSUDS is a project carried out over the period 2016-2019 whom the main objective was to improve the ability of cities to adapt to climate change by promoting the use of green infrastructures in the renewal of urban environments. Under the project, an innovative permeable urban pavement (hereinafter, CERSUDS) was designed using ceramic tile stock of low commercial value. This pavement solution was tested in a demonstrator in the town of Benicí ssim. The main objective of the project was to improve the ability of cities to adapt to climate change by promoting the use of green infrastructures in the renewal of urban environments. Under the project, a Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) was built as a demonstrator in the town of Benicí ssim, using ceramic tile stock of low commercial value to manufacture an innovative permeable floor (hereinafter, CERSUDS flooring), a subject already dealt with in an earlier presentation at this congress . Once the demonstrator had been built, a monitoring period was run between August 2018 and July 2019, which enabled both the CERSUDS floor and the demonstrator's value as a rainwater management system to be validated. This article presents the design process of the ceramic permeable pavement including the main results of the tests carried in the laboratory and the main results of the project relate to: environmental and economic assessment of the CERSUDS system, user's validation of the system, monitoring of the system's mechanical performance and permeability, and monitoring of the demonstrator's hydraulic response in terms of the quantity and quality of run-off water.

Resistance to Opportunities of Plastic Recycling

Plastics present a vast and pressing issue in modern society. Currently recycling efforts fall dangerously short of dealing with even a small percent of the millions of tons of plastic waste produced yearly across the globe. This article investigates resistance toward plastic recycling in three areas from both a contemporary and a historical context, highlighting the magnitude of the problem and the insufficient nature of current solutions. The three primary areas covered are the plastics problem from (1) a design perspective, (2) a material science perspective, and (3) a systems perspective. Solutions are proposed that emphasize a synergistic collaboration across disciplines and research modes. Ultimately, the conclusions point to a need for stronger engagement at the level of people (both consumers and decision makers) and reintegrating reused and recycled plastics into everyday life to build a solid foundation for success.

Circular Economy of Dharavi

As developing nations continue to progress, people of these countries face problems of shortages in building materials and rising production of solid waste. The purpose of this research study is to explore the potential of establishing a circular economy by recycling/reusing solid waste as alternative building materials. Focused on the slum of Dharavi in Mumbai, a settlement well-known for its existing recycling business, this article explores the concept of a circular economy utilizing local informal labor by considering the flow of waste materials in the slum. This article presents an analysis of the case studies where waste is reused as a building product and identifies the gaps, advantages, and disadvantages related to how and where the building materials from the case studies could be adapted in the context of the Dharavi slum.

Cardboard Architecture

Explorations in the use of cardboard products in architecture exist since the 1940s. However, it was not until the early 1990s, when Shigeru Ban's work emerged when cardboard products became a potential material for architecture. Since then, cardboard use in architecture has been continuously growing worldwide, and Ban's cardboard buildings have now achieved important recognition. This article reviews cardboard architecture works in academic research and professional architectural practice in the last eight decades to lay a foundation for designers to get ahead in cardboard for architecture. Cardboard products could contribute to increase more environmentally friendly and affordable architecture because they are recyclable, low-priced, and have relatively good strength to sustain loads, among other potential advantages for construction. The study summarizes the fundamentals of cardboard architectural design and diverse strategies proposed by different authors to decrease cardboard strength degradation due to the material's weaknesses.

An Experimental Approach to Transdisciplinary Methodology in Housing

This article explores a transdisciplinary research method derived from the need to determine the tacit knowledge in the re-reading of contemporary housing patterns in Narcity in İstanbul, Donau City in Vienna, and the Eastern Docklands in Amsterdam. The need for the development of such a method derives from two main problems: first, the necessity of re-reading the new dynamics of contemporary housing within the context of changing urban narratives in a globalised world; second, the consideration of the need for a dynamic view that engages both the subject and object in housing research. The residential areas are simultaneously evaluated at three levels defined by Basarab Nicolescu through an experimental and three-dimensional surface and inquiry space. It is projected that this methodology can help transgress the boundaries between fixed forms of policies and production and help bridge fact and fiction in re-reading and mapping controversies among researchers at different levels of comprehension.

In Search of a Cultural Background

The modernist architect and critic, Alfred Lawrence Kocher, proposed and commented on many bibliographical references in The Architectural Record in the years 1924-25. Recent studies on American architecture of the 1920s and 1930s have recognized the peculiar character of modernism in the United States and have gone in search of its cultural and social roots. However, Kocher’s extensive lists have so far been completely overlooked. They were based for the most part on the correspondence he exchanged with a number of American and British architects and George Bernard Shaw: he had sent to them a circular letter, asking for recommendations on texts on background literature that a young architect should know. The unpublished correspondence that Kocher had with Louis Sullivan and the 19 texts on “Aesthetics and Theory of Architecture” are analysed in particular by the author. Although from 1927 onwards Kocher became a passionate supporter of European rationalist architecture, his bibliographies cannot be considered a conscious foundational literature on modernism and modernity. They rather give an idea of the ‘cultural trunk’ on which the discussion on modern European architecture was going to be grafted; they help to illuminate the scene on which American architects moved in the mid-1920s. In some of the texts, the pragmatic notion of utility shines through, as − sometimes connectedly − does the concept of a creative act as a free, ‘natural’ act, which derived from American transcendentalism. Independent from Kocher’s will, a line of thought is even identifiable, through which one can explain the apparently contradictory combination of ‘maximum of utility’ and ‘maximum of free creativity’, openly advocated by the skyscraper architect Raymond Hood at the end of the 1920s. Such way of thinking was based on the recognition of the beauty of utility.

László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s Connections

Departing from the fact that László Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur (1929), had been an important source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, this article examines the affinities between László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s intellectual positions. The article places emphasis on two particular ideas: how Aalto and Moholy-Nagy conceived the connection of biology with standardization and technology and its relationship to light and perception. Special attention is paid to the notions of “flexible standardisation” and rationalisation in Aalto’s thought, as well as to his belief that nature and standardization should be conceived are closely interconnected. In regard to their shared intellectual development, the article sheds light on the first encounters of the two men including: their meeting at the second Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929; the June 1931 Finish meeting of Aino Marsio-Aalto, Alvar Aalto, Moholy-Nagy and Ellen Frank; the June 1931 exchanges between Aalto and Moholy-Nagy during the inner circle CIAM meeting in Berlin; and the common stay of the Aaltos and Moholy-Nagy in London in 1933 are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on Aalto’s “The Reconstruction of Europe is the Key Problem for the Architecture of Our Time”, in which he argued that standardization in architecture should draw upon biological models.

Architectural Interventions to Mitigate Occupational Stress Among Office Workers

Stress is one issue that affects the health and well-being of every building occupant. The negative effects of stress are more pronounced in workplaces, where stress can act as a major agent of disease and an impediment to employee productivity and satisfaction. The underlying causes of occupational stress are varied and include job insecurity, extended hours, excessive workload, altercations within the organization, tight deadlines, changes in responsibilities, and lack of autonomy, among others. One of the factors that can contribute to overall occupational stress is the working environment itself—a factor that can be mitigated by design. While occupational stress may arise from a multiplicity of causes, designers have numerous interventions they can employ to decrease it. The literature on occupational health, well-being, satisfaction, and productivity is broad and multifaceted; however, this paper is limited to exploring stress factors that correlate with the built environment and focuses on employees who are experiencing a high rate of stress in office buildings as the target group. To address these issues, supporting literature was explored to identify environmental interventions that could reduce stress or enhance the stress-coping abilities of workers in offices by improving the environmental quality of the built environment. This article explores the following questions: How does space cause people to experience mental stress? In what ways can the built environment itself be a generator of stress? What are the main environmental factors in offices that can mitigate the stress levels of employees or help them to recover more easily from work-related stress? To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand the causes and mechanisms of chronic stress, including work-related stressors, and to identify the factors in the built environment that can be associated with occupational stress. The present paper is based on concurrent analyses of supporting literature in the rather different fields of architecture, public health, psychology, management, and environmental studies. The outcome is an identified set of practical strategies that provide solutions for healthier and more productive workplaces. By concentrating on measures that can reduce employee stress levels, these strategies can be used as a source for evidence-based workplace designs.

Covid-19 Home Sign-Posts

The Integral Living Research (ILR) group advocates for five foundational principles in the urban housing environment: 1) privacy, 2) security, 3) access to healthy nourishment, 4) access to green space, and 5) self-efficacy enhancement through a culture of care and creativity. These principles have emerged from almost a decade of work in communities of need and are intended to guide designers working towards solutions to reduce stress and enhance health for urban families. In this paper, we examine and analyze best practices in WELL Buildings’ pandemic response guide among others, within the framework of housing, specifically single-family urban housing. Here, within the 2020 pandemic, best practices for alleviating the challenges of the urban single-family home in an underserved community are considered. In this analysis, five areas of focus called “COVID-19 Home Signposts” have emerged and been given additional lenses of equity and access. We describe those inequities and consider how to improve pandemic housing health for those in at-risk communities. We identify further areas for empirical study that are urgent: 1) to promote better understanding of how home, health, and housing improvement all play a role in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic; and 2) to devise appropriate strategies for addressing the fault lines in our cities and our society.