Material Versatility, Locality and Change in Circular Design

The discipline and practice of architecture is facing a profound dilemma. The pressure on planetary boundaries requires the rethinking of architecture’s reliance on CO2-rich materials and energy-intensive processing. At present, calls envisioning a sustainable building culture focus on renewable and bio-based materials as solutions for carbon neutrality. However, many of these practices carry over industrial paradigms of mass production and standardisation, creating a fundamental reliance on virgin materials and an inability to achieve true cascading. Instead, they intensify the pressure on the ecologies from which materials are cultivated and harvested.

This paper asks how the ideation and prototyping of waste-sourced bio-based materials can drive new models of circularity and reuse in architecture. With a special focus on 3D-printed biopolymer composites, the paper describes the creation of a versatile material system that can respond to local resource availability. Here, the additive logic of 3D printing is extended to support models of functional material grading that can combine variations of the material recipe to create complex composite architectural panels – first, through strategies of material pleating, and second, through in-process grading. The paper asks how circularity can challenge models of resource deployment in architecture, and how they might
expand the axioms of digital design and fabrication from being driven by models of performance optimisation to incorporating new sensitivities to resource locality.