Disassembly: In Search of Models

A Messy Context

The explosions that demolished Pruitt-Igoe were loud and messy. The planned demolitions that began in St. Louis, Missouri on March 16, 1972 had been initiated by state and federal governments following concerns about deteriorating conditions in the public housing complex. Meticulously planned and controlled, each explosion of the steel-and-concrete buildings produced a spectacle visible even at a distance, with dust from the rubble rising high into the sky. With a demolition cost of $3.5 million, it was the first major public housing project in the US to be destroyed.1 Televised and widely debated at the time, the demolition became symbolic of Modernism’s end.2

Viewed through an environmental lens, the televised 1972 Pruitt-Igoe demolition is a poignant reminder of the ubiquity of dismantling buildings by brute force. Buildings of brick, mortar, concrete, and glass are not designed to be easily taken apart. Whether using dynamite, wrecking ball, or sledgehammer, most demolition processes to this day rely on crude methods that don’t leave much material available for re-use. And demolition itself continues to fascinate: YouTube alone contains over four million clips capturing building demolitions all around the world, while television documentary series like Blowdown (2008) appear to almost glorify their ingenuity. Demolition today contributes to pressing concerns about the wasteful and damaging environmental impact of buildings. In the context of a growing planetary climate crisis, finding new, more sustainable models that rethink building material lifespans has never been more urgent.

Today’s construction industry is a staggering consumer of the world’s depleting material resources. Globally, each year, nearly half of the materials extracted and manufactured are used for the construction of buildings and infrastructure, much of which ends up as waste mere decades later.3 While such patterns continue, consumption is only set to rise, with projections that global usage of materials for building projects will double by 2060.4 Such turnover of materials mirrors statistics around carbon emissions from the construction industry. As highlighted by architectural historian Barnabas Calder, the construction, operation, and demolition of buildings today are responsible for 39% of all greenhouse gas emissions.5

The management of carbon in architecture thus begins with the initial design process, where materials and their methods of assembly are chosen, and continues to the wider systems that look after a building when it is occupied and when it is not. Such processes often fail, however, to plan for the reuse or safe disassembling of a building’s components. Across Europe, for example, building waste accounts for approximately 35% of total waste generated each year, and consists of materials including concrete, bricks, gypsum, tiles, ceramic, wood, glass, metals, plastic, solvents, asbestos, and excavated soil, most of which ends up in landfills, where ongoing deterioration can carry further polluting effects.6 Reuseable elements are rarely recovered, and that which is not discarded tends to be downcycled into lower quality product, such as filler for roadbeds or the foundations of new buildings. Rules and regulations—which vary from country to country—around who owns and manages the materials removed from building sites add further complexity to this picture. Architects campaigning for action in the face of the climate crisis are calling for greater transparency in monitoring the embodied carbon footprint of buildings and greater regulation in the management of building waste.7

Designers and manufacturers are also investigating the realities of spiraling quantities of building waste through material innovations. For instance, K-Briq, which is developed by Scottish brick manufacturer Kenoteq Ltd., is made of 90% recycled construction waste and uses a low-energy curing process to bond the aggregate material in a formwork, without the need for traditional firing processes. The K-Briq initiative began in 2019 as a research project at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and became a reality only through a successful collaboration with Scotland’s biggest waste management company, Hamilton Waste & Recycling, which provided the necessary gypsum. Following initial testing and accreditation phases, it was released as a commercial product in the UK in Spring 2023 with the hope of having a wider industry impact.

While such innovations represent some positive steps forward, they are rare and limited as the architecture industry remains stagnant in its system of waste production. Bound up in capitalist economic models of growth, most current construction industry models justify demolishing and building new buildings instead of renovating old ones, while opting for cheaper materials over longevity and recycling potential. With such powerful economic forces at play, models of architectural design and fabrication, alongside the building codes that regulate them, need to be rethought in order to normalize sustainable material flows.

How we take things apart

How things are produced and what materials they are made from play a defining role in the longevity of a design and how quickly it ends up discarded as waste. From single-use coffee cups to electronics, clothes, furniture, and buildings, waste is a complex force encompassing varied lifespans shaped by a network of actors and interests. It is also a deeply problematic concept that has the potential to be designed away. To do so requires models that rethink the systems that govern how our world is made. In this context, disassembling offers an important framework for critically rethinking waste.

Defined as “the action or process of taking something to pieces,” the modern English usage of the term “disassembling” has its origins in military contexts.8 Around 1872, the term “disassembling” was used to describe the systematic dismantling of mechanical objects such as small arms. Definitions at the time allude to the speed that such disassembling can happen, time being a critical factor for reloading and repairing weapons. These origins connect to the wider historical moment of the Industrial Revolution, when new developments in mass manufacturing were changing the ways machine-produced products were designed. Military products, such as the American Colt Army Model 1860 revolver, were game-changing inventions that perfected the mass production of identical, interchangeable parts. The Colt’s design answered calls from a wartime military industry that was struggling with the costs of made-to-order arms full of bespoke, hand-crafted parts that were time-consuming and expensive to fix. Interchangeable parts made repair a norm, as new technologies and precision machinery enabled the reliable production of identical parts. Such principles of parts-based manufacturing then expanded into other factory-made designs for the civilian sphere, such as sewing machines, bicycles, and eventually, cars.

Disassembling thus signals a planned process in which component pieces are capable of being joined together and taken apart and, when required, easily replaced. Crucial in the concept of disassembling are “parts.” Pre-designed from the outset, they operate as distinguishable, replaceable, and re-useable elements. Beyond the context of precision manufacturing, thinking through parts is an important principle of planning for dismantling and the possibility of recovery and re-use of materials. As such, disassembling invites long-term thinking into the process of design. Unlike the pulverized fragments that remain after a messy demolition, distinguishable parts and reversible material assemblies help to reduce what becomes “waste” in the first place.

Thinking about design as a practice of assembling and disassembling recoverable parts highlights important connections to systems of material flow in the natural world. Here, there is no such thing as waste, as nature operates according to a system of nutrients and metabolisms that create a constant flow of resources. Described as a “cradle to cradle” system by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in the eponymous book, the natural world runs as a circular system where “waste equals food” and the network of living species continuously sustains itself.9 This, they argue, sits in direct opposition to dominant cycles of human production, which operate on linear “cradle to grave” models in which materials are “thrown away.” Drawing on this analysis of natural resource flows, McDonough and Braungart issue a rallying cry for remaking the way we make things. Their approach is rooted in biomimicry; design should operate on the premise that everything is a resource for something else. They argue that, through the right material choices, everything has the potential to be disassembled: either safely returned to the soil as “biological nutrients” through decomposition, or re-utilized as high-quality materials for new products as “technical nutrients.”10

The looming crisis of microplastic pollution serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when this doesn’t happen, when the disassembly and disintegration of materials is unplanned.11 Since the first lab experiments in the nineteenth century, plastics have shown signs of instability and unpredictability as a material.12 Today, there is growing evidence of the far-reaching environmental and health damages caused by plastic breakdown, with safe methods for their disassembly yet to be found.13 Designing for disassembling requires taking responsibility for material selection and having foresight of the human and non-human forces that will ultimately act on them. From designing new materials to choosing from existing ones, cross-disciplinary knowledge across design and science is needed to responsibly model the full lifecycle of materials and ensure that, once released into the world, they won’t take on unplanned, damaging forms of coming apart.

Harvesting

Disassembling can operate as an intervention into structures slated for demolition. Here, design practices intervene to find and create parts for re-use, even if they have not been pre-planned. The result captures materials before they are disposed of as “waste,” prolonging their life as a useful resource. The work of Dutch architecture practice Superuse Studios demonstrates how disassembling and materials salvage can be drivers of design itself. Since its founding in 1997 by Jan Jongert and Césare Peeren, the studio has been committed to exploring the flows of materials in urban environments and finding ways to maximize their reuse. Today, it operates as a collective based in various cities, with each member helping to promote strategies for reuse interventions. “Recognizing opportunities are basic capabilities for what may become a new profession: the superuse scout,” says Jongert.14 The “superuse” method sees all buildings through the component parts they are made of, and views disassembling as a tool for extracting these parts for re-use. For the studio, this has translated into both building buildings and building online toolkits for materials sourcing.

In 2012, Superuse Studios launched a dedicated online platform, “Oogstkaart” (or “Harvest Map”), to serve as a marketplace for re-circulating reclaimed building materials in the Netherlands.15 Beyond supplying Superuse Studio’s own architectural commissions, Oogstkaart opens their process to external design professionals and project developers. This interactive map captures listings of components recovered from demolished buildings, unsold inventory and stock (known as “deadstock”), and leftovers from industrial manufacturing. The map offers filters including the location of a product, its material type, quantity, and size. Crucially, it also maps the distance between available materials and the building site they are being “scouted” for. Minimizing the carbon footprint of transportation distances and cutting out needless relocation of materials is all part of how “superuse” works as an intervention into resource flows.

Such “harvest mapping” is at the root of each Superuse Studio design project, and often involves starting with the very site of a building commission, carefully examining any existing material or structures already on it. For Buitenplaats Brienenoord, a cultural center in Rotterdam opened in 2020, Superuse devised a design based nearly exclusively on harvested materials, with 90% of the new project’s materials being sourced from pre-existing buildings.16 The remainder were sourced new, with their distance from the site carefully mapped to minimize the environmental costs of their transport. Such design tactics rely on a strategic collaboration with clients who are open to the processes and aesthetics of building with salvaged parts, as well as construction workers who are confident in dismantling and working with reclaimed components. They also require deft navigation of building codes that require safety and performance certifications for construction materials—regulations that currently make deploying reused materials slow and difficult.

The work of Brazilian practice Arquivo tackles the national specificity of rules for reuse head-on. Founded by Natália Lessa and Pedro Alban, the Salvador-based studio operates as a think tank and consultancy with a mission to simplify reuse processes in architecture. Arquivo’s services include conducting site surveys to determine possibilities for reuse, carrying out the physical removal of reusable components, and selling salvaged building components on their practice website.17 Recent projects include an online map of reclamation yards in Salvador, which maps local agents in a centralized way for the first time. Arquivo acknowledges itself as a facilitator that helps link up diverse actors who are already operating in this sphere, with the ultimate aim of building momentum for what Lessa and Alban call a “functional reuse industry on a national scale.” To this end, they see architectural education around reuse strategies as critical. Their practice is currently a provider of online courses for practitioners seeking training in this field, welcoming attendees local to Salvador and from across the globe.

(Left) Buitenplaats Brienenoord building, photograph by Frank Hanswijk. Courtesy of Superuse Studios. (Right) Buitenplaats Brienenoord “harvest map,” courtesy of Superuse Studios.

The right to repair

Alternative strategies of disassembling move further up the chain to consider the design of re-usable parts from the outset. Speaking to McDonough and Braungart’s concept of “technical nutrients,” these tactics create for future disassembly and circular re-use. Such “technical nutrients” are materials or products that are designed to go back into the cycle of production from which they came. Planned with re-usable, easy-to-break down component parts that can be reused or easily repaired, “technical nutrients” circulate in closed loops as resources, not “waste.” Known as “design for disassembling,” such practices are emerging across diverse fields and scales of design, from electronics to furniture and buildings.

For instance, Fairphone, first launched in 2013, challenges industry norms of unrepairable “black box” electronic devices and planned obsolescence. Created by Bas Van Abel and Tessa Wernik with a team of international collaborators, Fairphone is committed to ethically-mined component minerals, fair factory worker conditions, and a right to repair built in from the start.18 Now in its fifth design iteration, Fairphone continues to be based on a unique kit of parts complete with do-it-yourself repair instructions, enabling any user to disassemble their device, add upgrades, and prolong its life. Together with wider campaigns for the “right to repair” led by online communities such as iFixit.com and growing networks of specialist repair trades, the power of such designs is beginning to show in legal frameworks and industry commitments. For instance, in California, a new “Right to Repair Act” (SB 244), which guarantees consumers access to parts and instructions to fix devices, was passed in October 2023, aided by a surprise U-turn from tech giants like Apple itself.19

Image courtesy of Fairphone.

Design for disassembling can also be found as an emerging strategy in furniture product design. British company Benchmark Furniture offers an example of a business model built around the idea of product longevity and circular re-use of parts. Rooted in a commitment to sourcing all its wood from forestry-certified sources, their furniture is designed to be easily taken apart for repair and reuse. Designs use robust solid woods and natural oils, and avoid chemical glues that would make disassembly difficult. The firm offers a “Lifetime Repair” service, encouraging refurbishment or redesign rather than replacement, alongside a “Take Back Scheme” for customers.20 As with Fairphone, building care into the logic of a design is predicated on a longer-term relationship between company and customer. Wider applications of such principles in more mass reach contexts, such as at IKEA, are also being developed.21

Translating such strategies into architectural design remains a challenge, not least because of the complexity and scale of a building’s component parts and the skills and labor needed to safely dismantle them. However, the fundamental principle of transparency around component parts holds the key to how materials can become “technical nutrients” for material flows. A growing number of architecture practices is working to create so-called “material passports” to address this very issue. Essentially digital documents that collate data on all component parts that go into a building, “passports” aim to make future parts analysis, repair, and disassembling easier, and to help tackle the often complex legal and financial side of assessing reusable parts. The concept was pioneered by Dutch architect Thomas Rau, co-founder of Turntoo and RAU, who abides by the philosophy that “waste is a material without an identity.” He has called for a commitment to mapping all materials that go into buildings and devised the digital platform Madaster (a “cadaster for materials and products”) as a toolkit for the industry.22 Variants of digital platforms generating “material passports” for building projects continue to emerge.23

Decomposition

Design for disassembly can extend beyond industrially made, technical parts to strategic thinking about natural processes of decomposition. Materials of natural origin, when used without toxic chemical treatments, offer the potential for biodegradable products and buildings. Here, naturally derived component parts can breakdown through natural processes, avoiding the risk of becoming polluting waste from the outset. Such models of sustainable making speak to McDonough and Braungart’s concept of “biological nutrients,” where material assemblies have a planned afterlife beyond human uses, in wider ecosystems of material flow. Rooted in ecological knowledge and a commitment to long term thinking, such practices willingly subject human-made products and structures to the agency of diverse non-human actors, embracing the power of natural metabolisms to take things apart slowly and re-circulate their nutrients where needed.

Models of such practice abound in the rich vernacular traditions of many Indigenous communities around the world.24 Such construction systems foreground the use of natural materials that form a cohesive part of local ecosystems. As a material for building, local earthen matter typically involves low carbon emissions. It does not require industrial processing and needs little to no transportation. A centuries-old building construction technique, rammed earth architecture can be found across India, Mali, Burkina Faso, and beyond.25 Processed by hand or pressed into “bricks” through formwork molds, the key components of rammed earth structures—including walls and floors—are unfired and require only solar heat to harden. In the hands of skilled craftspeople, they can be assembled without cement or other non-compostable stabilizers, and as such have the potential to exist as fully recyclable structures.

Samples created by the Making with Earth class at Columbia University, instructed by Lola Ben-Alon. Photo courtesy of Lola Ben-Alon and the Natural Materials Lab.

Design education is increasingly turning to non-modern building practices for design inspiration.26 Education efforts are underway to rebuild the traditional ecological knowledges that were once passed down through intergenerational communities but are now at risk of being lost. In the Himalayan region of Ladakh, for example, a new university, the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives (HIAL), has been created with the vision of reviving Indigenous construction and engineering techniques, as well as farming practices.27 Founded by social entrepreneurs and educators Sonam Wangchuk and Gitanjali J. Angmo, the HIAL educational model connects design to its local ecosystem. Students learn by doing as contributors to the ongoing construction of HIAL’s low-carbon campus. Building on the traditions of Ladakh’s historic rammed earth architecture, the program also introduces new techniques for raw earth building and teaches students the principles of sourcing hyperlocal materials for construction.28

Translating such experimental research practices into the wider architecture sector remains rare. Mainstream construction economies make building with natural, fully biodegradable materials challenging: material certifications are lengthy, while construction-sector knowledge of how to safely build with natural components is rare. But step changes can happen. Projects like Atelier Luma, designed by London-based Assemble Studio and the Belgian BC architects for the Arles-based Luma Foundation in France, point to new models of building with natural, biodegradable materials. Rooted in lab-based materials research and in collaboration with diverse local industries, the project pioneered building applications for materials as diverse as rice straw, sunflower stems, salt, soil, and limestone waste. Testing the viability of such materials with construction partners early in the process enabled their application on a pioneering scale, translating them into acoustic and thermal insulation and rammed earth walls.29 The result is a bio-regional architecture with sustainable material flows and connections to diverse custodians of materials at its core.

Across a diversity of formats and design contexts, disassembling can be a powerful strategy for sustainable making. From reclaimed parts to an expanded field of safe decomposition, it offers the opportunity to rethink the troubling principles of “waste” that still govern our world. As a creative and subversive act, it invites design practice to have greater agency in economic systems. In its push for more sustainable alternatives, the human-made world can become a respectful part of a wider ecology—a wider web of planetary life.