Circularity Potential of Timber Buildings in Theory and Practice - Component Design, Data Models and Technical Principles

Abstract Small scale Residential buildings based on pre-fabrication (aka system construction methods) can be found in Austria (and Central Europe) since more than a century. Advantages of these buildings include cost-efficiency due to the industrial fabrication process, rendering them to be the most affordable option for individual single-family houses. Moreover, adaptations to the buildings in an “order to assemble” process are in many cases possible and allow certain individual design decisions by their future inhabitants. In Austria, the industry is characterized by small and medium-sized companies, which in part has been showing a high degree of innovation in planning and production of such buildings. The life-expectancy of such buildings as stipulated by construction standards by far outnumbers today’s real usage time of such building. However, little effort has been spent in reusing components from such buildings in the past. In a shared effort, we explore different aspects of their reuse-potential. In this contribution, a data model is presented that should allow for easy reuse of prefabricated components of existing prefab timber buildings. This database has been developed based on the most relevant aspects of building construction, building physics and structural design, and can be used as a starting point in designing buildings that in part could utilize such reused components. Thereby, the database was extensively tested in the academic context: Filled with component data of six different prefabricated timber houses, students were asked to use the data for designing new buildings that should majorly use existing components with minor modifications.