Resilience through reuse

We know buildings need to be more resilient, to endure the changing climate and evolving demand from occupants. Adapting a building without using lots of new materials is hard, but the limits to what you can do are greatly reduced once you start sharing materials between buildings. Unlocking this resilience requires a mindset shift, and a new generation of reuse hubs to test, store, and remake. The industry is starting to turn in some areas, and the first reuse hubs are emerging – is this the beginning of a new way of building?

Resilience can be hard to spot – it only reveals itself as time passes, as conditions change and the resilient survives. But resilience is also essential. It is often said that the greenest building is one we already have; the demolition and construction cycle is carbon intensive and wasteful so using buildings for longer is a powerful way to emit less carbon. Retention and reuse are primary strategies in the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, so when we must spend carbon, we should invest it well and strive to create something which lasts. On top of emissions limitation, we need to regenerate the planet, and that’s very difficult whilst continuing our extractive and wasteful construction processes. Since the demand for buildings continues to grow, we’ve got to do more with less and ensure everything lasts as long as possible.

For buildings this has often meant climate resilience; designing to account for the future, things like an anticipated temperature increase (hard to ignore as we experience another record-breaking summer), rise in extreme weather events, and rise in sea level.

This kind of built-in durability is just one kind of resilience though, and a flawed one at that, because it is based on predictions which may not come about, and assumes the building will still be useful when that day comes. It can be hard to justify the added cost and carbon to build a building in readiness for a future which may not happen, especially if the building no longer makes sense in that location anyway. Durability certainly has its place, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it is just one kind of resilience, and if we are to make the most of our buildings, we should widen our view.

Adaptability is another kind of resilience, and when applied on an urban scale, I think it is far more interesting. A building that can adapt well is more likely to have a long life – adapting to external conditions as mentioned already is part of it, but what about adapting to the changing needs of occupants? Much is made of the future of the workplace, and how we can reimagine yesterday’s offices into tomorrow’s, but what about adapting an office into a hotel, a school, a data centre?

At this point the demands may seem too drastic, after all there’s a limit to how much you can reconfigure a fixed kit of parts before you start reaching for new materials. This all changes when you consider a whole city sharing via a circular economy – the kit of parts is now huge, so buildings can adapt to a far broader range of conditions, lasting longer, and all without us having to know the future. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a circular economy approach to construction materials could reduce UK construction emissions by up to 38% by 2035.

A multi building approach doesn’t just vastly widen the scope for adaptation, it also decouples us from programme pressures. Most structural materials and many fit-out materials have the potential to last far longer than their typical working life, but there is still testing required prior to reuse. In many older buildings the paperwork has been lost, and even if we can find drawings from the original design, there is no guarantee that these were followed to the letter during construction. Testing to confirm exactly what a material is allows us to validate it for reuse, and to ensure it has not been unexpectedly degraded during its first life. All of this takes time and can throw up hurdles, which could derail a construction programme and introduce significant risk into the project. Sharing materials between buildings greatly reduces this exposure, empowering designers, investors, and insurers to reuse materials with confidence.

This is not merely an idea – we are already reusing materials across a range of applications. Reclaimed bricks are an established example of high value reuse, and at HTS we are proud to have delivered reused structural steel on seven projects (and counting). Concrete reuse is a rising sector, and specific interior products such as raised access floors, carpet tiles, and office furniture also have healthy reuse markets.

Looking forward, it is exciting to see this idea gathering momentum at an administrative level too, with councils supporting reuse hubs, storage yards, and maker spaces.

• One notable example is Tipping Point East, a collaboration between Yes Make, Resolve Collective and Material Cultures, located in the docklands in partnership with Newham Council. The site functions as a storage, fabrication and design facility for materials reuse and low carbon construction.
• Hackney council is also getting involved, with sites including The Loop in Hackney Wick, and Tower Hamlets have joined the ROMULUS (Reuse Of Materials Using Local Unitary Stakeholders) initiative founded by recycling consultancy Maconda Solutions.
• Maconda Solutions are also members of The Engineers Reuse Collective, a not-for-profit group we co-founded committed to accelerating reuse in the built environment.