Abstract Summary
Cities in the twenty-first century are increasingly confronted with challenges to incorporate sustainable urban design in light of pressing environmental concerns. The presented project focuses on the clash between new development opportunities and the increasing concerns regarding the sustainability of the construction industry. This research adopts the principles of urban mining as one method to address these concerns; the project explores the possibility of Plugin Facades, a new urban configuration, informed by the circular re-use network. Based on the principles and concepts of Circular Design and Circular Economy in the urban environment, we create a complete methodology to develop a pipeline from material exploration to economics of implementation. Beginning with the use of a novel machine learning tool trained to identify different materials, we implement this to quantify the material repository for all building facades using publicly available images of Google Street View. This approach allows the city itself to be considered as a bank of materials. We then look at the spatial potential and material repository to guide the design proposal of ‘Plugin Facades’. The project uses the neighborhood of Sant Marti in Barcelona, Spain, as a case study, to create a design proposal, presented in both urban and architectural scale. The project proposes a new typology of shared space through data-driven implementation of reused materials in cities. Final outcome is based on the cross-referencing of supply and demand - supply being the accessible volume and demand, the abundance of materials sourced from deconstruction. The plugin potential for non-residential buildings can be envisioned as an extension of the outdoors onto the building facades, where varying public sector organizations and individual private developers retain the ownership and accessibility to the plugin in partnership to help achieve the cities sustainability goals. Ultimately, we find that with its potential to disrupt the conventional construction industry and foster sustainable urban development, 'Plugin Facades' exemplifies the blueprint for a brighter, more resilient future for cities worldwide.
