Sustainability through reuse: a reconfigurable structural system for residential and office buildings

Current load-bearing systems for buildings rarely have a beneficial end of life. Modular design is a proven solution for revalorizing obsolete structures, but it hardly competes with conventional solutions: the range of future spatial configurations that the modules will accommodate is usually too limited to balance additional upfront costs due to necessary oversized elements and extra connections. Through a review of building demolition cases, this paper first presents motives, challenges and requirements for overcoming adverse end-of-life environmental impacts of building structures. Then a new structural system addressing the specified design constraints is introduced. The system is a highly versatile kit of slab and column elements. Contrary to existing modular solutions, its element dimensions do neither constrain the positioning of columns nor the shape of floor plans. Slab elements are stacked vertically to tune bending and shear stiffnesses locally and ensure serviceability requirements for a wide range of column and load cases layouts. All connections between elements are reversible and ready for reuse. Accordingly, the proposed structural system is well-suited for multiple service cycles and architectural needs, mitigating the detrimental effects that buildings have on the environment.