Circular economy in structural design

With focus on timber structures, the workshop will incorporate carbon footprint evaluation and circular economy into a structural design workflow. Through the combined use of parametric tools for structural design, such as Karamba 3D, and for optimization, such as Octopus,  comparative strategies will be used in order to mediate between purely structural and environmental criteria, thus suggesting a more holistic design process.

In the context of the climate emergency, architects and engineers try to reduce the environmental impact of structures through a shift in their design process. The use of recycled material plays a major role in this approach. One of the major questions is, how can we design sustainable and smart structures by intelligently using recycled elements. Many factors such as the history of the elements, their condition or their location are influencing the design, the carbon footprint but also the price. Parametric structural design tools coupled with multidimensional optimization methods can help to explore the design space and evaluate designs with regard to those criteria.

The workshop will focus on principles about recycled materials in the building industry, coupled to an introduction to parametric structural design and optimization tools. The participants will work during the whole week on the design of a pavilion by applying the learned principles and making use of an available database of existing recycled timber elements. The workshop is supplemented with lectures of professionals and researchers working in the field of circular economy in  architecture and construction.

Workshops organizers and tutors, in a joint effort with the Reflow parisian consortium (including Fab City Grand Paris, the City Council of Paris and the association Arslonga), aim to build the pavilion designed during the workshop in the spring of 2021 with the participation of the workshop participants.

• Context, precedents and applications of circular economy
• Recycled elements in the building industry
• Structural evaluation
• Parametric engineering tools
• Multi-dimensional optimization
• Pavilion design
• Working with an existing database

• Rhinoceros 6 (free versions available)
• Grasshopper Plugins installed: Karamba3D  (licence will be offered during the workshop), Octopus 
• A second monitor is highly recommended

A more detailed list of the required plug-ins will be sent to participants prior to the workshop beginning.

Basic understanding of Grasshopper is recommended.

Each participant needs to work from their personal computer.

The principal software is Rhinoceros 6.0. The 90-day trial version can be downloaded from the website www.rhino3d.com/eval.html . Grasshopper 3D will be the main computational tool.

Windows 10 Operating System is highly recommended since many Grasshopper plugins still do not run on Apple IOS operating systems. If you have a Mac computer you could do a Windows 10 partition.