Circular Economy In the Build Environment

Class Exercise Rotterdam

In this exercise we were instructed to systematically map environmental related phenomenon and suggest, according to the said map, a series of interventions, their planned and unplanned effects, as well as short medium and long term strategies. This is a summary of our semester’s work.

The constriction industry is in dire need to withhold the market demands. Being on of the most polluting of industries, The expansion in construction means that Rotterdam will exhaust it’s carbon budget significantly earlier than it should.

The effort of mapping and distinguishing systematically the build environment from construction, through habitability, to end-of-life brought the the surface three dominant sub-systems:

The three nodes we decided to focus are the demolition, Heat stress and habitation energy consumption

In the state of the art we examined several projects that experimented in different formats of  greenery  integration to the urban enviorment as well as centralized energetic systems

Our proposal for 3 strategies intervention  consists of:

covering 10% of the build enviorment in green walls.

Repurposing un inhabitable structures in as vertical gardens.

Centralizing the heating system and redistributing the heat across the city

Circular Economy In the Build Environment-Class Exercise Rotterdam  is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at Master in City & Technology and Master in Robotics In Construction in 2021/22 by student: Adriana Aguirre, Kshama Patil, Shahar Abelson and Lliang Mayuki  and faculty: Nico Shouten and Tamara Streefland