Back in June, we covered news of research set to be undertaken at Penn State on the subject of embodied carbon in cities. The research, one of many stories this year focusing on embodied carbon, signals a growing awareness in academic and professional circles of the need to include whole-life perspectives on buildings when calculating their environmental impact: from conception and construction to demolition and reuse.

Given the sizeable 40% impact of the AEC sector on global carbon emissions, it is no surprise that conversations on embodied carbon, life-cycle analyses, and our attitude towards waste in buildings have also garnered mainstream attention.

This week, The New York Times published an article by freelance writer Jessica Camille Aguirre titled ‘How to Recycle a 14-Story Office Tower.’ While the title may evoke ideas of an IKEA-style step-by-step manual to building deconstruction, the article is in fact a 5000+ word deep-dive into the topic of circularity in the built environment.

While written for consumption by a general audience, the piece is recommended reading for any architect or designer.

Aguirre’s exploration of the topic uses as its vehicle several architectural projects throughout Amsterdam, from a former building at the Dutch National Bank meticulously deconstructed and recycled by environmental engineer Michel Baars, to the Schoonschip community of 46 floating houses on the city’s canal, constructed along the principles of circular design.

For an architectural audience, Aguirre’s most valuable contribution is a whirlwind tour of several important resources on the topic of circulatory in the built environment. These include the books The Limits to Growth (1972), Silent Spring (1962), and Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002), and circularity-minded organizations such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The piece is not without potential discord, however. The article’s largely undisputed welcoming of ‘a world where everything is on loan,’ where individual ownership of services and appliances is replaced by leasing from manufacturers, is far from settled. 

While the article appears to justify this approach with examples such as the success of Spotify’s ‘leased’ music model or an admittedly persuasive example of Schiphol Airport outsourcing ownership of their lighting infrastructure to Phillips, the dangers of this model brought to a domestic setting go unmentioned. Most notably, the piece fails to draw a clear connection between conversations on leasing versus ownership and the failures of leased accommodation in the United States housing market; rife with exploitation and neglect by landlords and uncertainty and financial insecurity among tenants.

In today’s economy, home ownership is one of few avenues for lower-to-middle-income individuals or families to accrue wealth to support their children and grandchildren. Conversations over who owns the built environment cannot ignore this.