What if construction waste were considered the result of a design error? Elma Durmisevic suggests that innovating adaptable, dynamic and innovative building systems would help create a circular value chain to prevent waste from ever being produced. Durmisevic founded 4D Architects, a firm that focuses on transformable structures, design for disassembly and system development. She also founded the GTB Lab, the European Laboratory for Green Transformable Buildings in the Netherlands, and the Green Design Center in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Deepika Raghu a CEA postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, conducted the interview. Raghu works across the Circular Future Cities Lab Design++, and DiCE Lab, developing AI-driven tools and digital workflows for circular construction in diverse global contexts.

Rotor is a non-profit research and design practice based in Brussels. It was founded to better understand material flows in the economy, and foster reuse strategies. Its spin-off company Rotor DC specialises in the salvage and supply of reusable building components and furniture. Michaël Ghyoot, project manager at Rotor, discusses what is involved in reusing building materials: from carrying out reclamation audits to cleaning, preparing, storing, and actually reusing the components themselves. He also describes how reuse requires a different way of thinking about construction projects – how conservation must be prioritised over demolition, and how skilled labour is needed throughout the whole process, from the demolition phase to the reuse of materials in a new project.

The current construction sector is not sustainable. The sector produces 30% of global waste and 40% of human-generated CO2 emissions. It consumes 40% of the resources and energy we use. There is a lot of potential for improvement. Dr. Guillaume Habert is professor of the ETH Zurich Chair of Sustainable Construction. In this podcast, he talks with students Natalie Feakins and Noah Pasqualini about sustainability in the built environment and how life cycle analysis, green labels, and concepts such as a material diet can help transform the construction industry. They highlight how projects like the Kunsthalle exhibition, organized by the Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture at ETH Zurich, can have an impact on circular construction.

 Many of the current efforts to mitigate climate change and its effects rely on digital solutions. But what would our designs for landscapes and buildings of the future look like if we slowed down and paid more attention to the traditional knowledge that humans have acquired over millennia? Julia Watson is an urban designer and best-selling author on nature-based technologies for climate resilience. She teaches urban design at Colombia University in New York. In this interview, she discusses climate change awareness and indigenous technologies in sustainable building and education.

Human consumption far oversteps planetary boundaries. Limiting consumption and economic growth seems like an obvious strategy for cutting emissions and protecting the environment. But Alessio Terzi, economist for the European Commission, explains why degrowth is not sustainable. He also discusses his 2022 book.

Digitalization is crucial for making construction more sustainable and circular. But the sector is slow to digitalize its processes and often relies on fragmented data. Martin Fisher, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, explains how digitalization improves project management, automation, and building information modeling to better navigate tradeoff decisions for more sustainable construction.

Human habitats and their infrastructure require a lot of space and resources. Could virtual and mixed reality help architects and engineers build spaces that put less pressure on our urban environments? Iro Armeni, professor at Stanford University, leads the Gradient Spaces Lab, where she combines computer science with architecture and engineering to create more circular, multifunctional, and reusable spaces.

Lifecycle assessments (LCAs) are necessary for understanding the environmental impacts of buildings. They’re needed to calculate the service life of all of the components and materials in a building, and how much embodied carbon is involved in producing them. André Stephan, professor of Architecture, Architectural Engineering and Urban Planning at the Université catholique de Louvain, researches how to scale up life cycle assessments so that they can be used to better understand the carbon footprint of the construction sector. In this podcast he talks with Catherine De Wolf, Professor of Circular Engineering for Architecture at ETH Zurich, about data, computational tools, the challenges of creating life cycle assessments for buildings made of reused materials in particular, and in what ways academia is responsible for reducing the environmental impact of construction.