Material Versatility, Locality And Change In Circular Design

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 the 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; firstly, through strategies of material pleating and secondly through in-process grading.

The paper asks how circularity can challenge models of resource deployment in architecture and how they fundamentally can expand the axioms of digital design and fabrication from being driven by models of performance optimisation to incorporate new sensitivities to resource locality.