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Digital Design for Disassembly

The construction and building sector is now widely known to be one of the biggest energy consumers, carbon emitters, and creators of waste. Some architectural agendas for sustainability focus on energy efficiency of buildings that minimize their energy intake during their lifetime - through the use of more efficient mechanical systems or more insulative wall systems. One issue with these sustainability models is that they often ignore the hierarchy of energy within architectural design. The focus on the efficiency is but one aspect or system of the building assembly, when compared to the effectiveness of the whole, which often leads to ad-hoc ecology and results in the all too familiar “law of unintended consequences” (Merton, 1936). As soon as adhesive is used to connect two materials, a piece of trash is created. If designers treat material as energy, and want to use energy responsibly, they can prolong the lifetime of building material by designing for disassembly. By changing the nature of the physical relationship between materials, buildings can be reconfigured and repurposed all the while keeping materials out of a landfill. The use of smart joinery to create building assemblies which can be disassembled, has a milieu of new possibilities created through the use of digital manufacturing equipment. These tools afford designers and manufacturers the ability to create individual joints of a variety of types, which perform as well or better than conventional systems. The concept of design for disassembly is a recognizable goal of industrial design and manufacturing, but for Architecture it remains a novel approach. A classic example is Kieran Timberlake's Loblolly House, which employed material assemblies “that are detailed for on-site assembly as well as future disassembly and redeployment” (Flat, Inc, 2008). The use of nearly ubiquitous digital manufacturing tools helps designers create highly functional, precise and effective methods of connection which afford a building to be taken apart and reused or reassembled into alternative configurations or for alternative uses. This paper will survey alternative energy strategies made available through joinery using digital manufacturing and design methods, and will evaluate these strategies in their ability to create diassemblable materials which therefore use less energy - or minimize the entropy of energy over the life-cycle of the material.