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Ultimately, removing containers from the circular economy by retrofitting them into usable spaces could put a strain on the industry and result in the need to use more iron ore, causing even more harm to the environment.
Even as the tiny house movement continues to gain popularity and shipping containers are beloved both for their aesthetic appeal and supposed sustainability, it’s worth asking if they’re the right material for this purpose.
— Fast Company
While shipping containers do generally keep project costs down owing to labor hours saved, the fit-out of their interiors can add between $20,000 and $150,000 to each construction. Materials such as spray-on foam insulation used in making a container design habitable are rarely among the... View full entry
Henning Larsen has released details of its newest K-12 project in the Danish village of Rønde. The project worked to add an ultragreen extension to the village’s existing Feldballe School that offers carbon sequestering while incorporating plans for its future disassembly and reuse as... View full entry
The material is essentially free, or at least locally available for a fraction of the cost of concrete...Mud construction contributes little to global warming. And concrete tends to be a gateway, once people can afford it, to another fossil-fuel-guzzling invention: air-conditioning. — National Geographic
Peter Schwartzstein explores the work of folks such as Clara Sawadogo, Francis Kéré and Salima Naji who are trying to rekindle an interest in materials and methods that have a long tradition in Africa and the Middle East. View full entry
A Swiss research team from Empa's Building Energy Materials and Components Lab explores the potential for using raw, plant-based materials as insulation for buildings. Led by scientist Dr. Jannis Wernery and researchers from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, the project is... View full entry
Barcelona’s IAAC has collaborated with Italian 3D printing company WASP on the creation of a 3D printed earthen wall. The element was printed from a mixture of clay and rice fibers, with interlocking timber beams providing support for stair and floor structures. The 15.7-inch-thick wall was... View full entry
Researchers from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have published details of a new material that can auto-regulate its environment by changing its infrared colors and liquid-solid state. In the future, the ultra-thin material film could be added to a... View full entry
The University of Toronto’s School of Engineering has announced a new research center that will, together with its industry partners, work to find a viable solution to the growing need for public infrastructure that is in tune with the push for sustainability and concerns over climate change... View full entry
2022 was another productive year in laboratories across the United States and beyond, as colleges, manufacturers, and startups strove to challenge the orthodoxy of construction materials. While teams of students and researchers at institutions from Virginia Tech to ETH Zurich sought to push the... View full entry
For many years, industrial hemp was illegal in the US due to hemp’s association with drug use, despite the fact that it does not contain more than 0.3 percent THC [...] Building residential homes with hempcrete was therefore effectively outlawed until 2018, when the Farm Bill distinguished between hemp and cannabis plants. Then, in September 2022, hemp building materials were added to the model US residential building code, paving the way for legal use in 2024. — Reasons to be Cheerful
The International Residential Code (IRC) accepted a modified appendix in September that some are hopeful could be a catalyst for further adaptation throughout the building industry. Builders for Climate Action spokesman Chris Magwood says its greatest potential lies in commercial... View full entry
Waste from the city of Ghent, Belgium, is being turned into the building blocks of a major cultural institution. For a renovation and expansion of the Design Museum Gent, an innovative new recycling process is turning old bits of broken concrete and glass into the bricks that will cover the museum’s exterior. — Fast Company
The Gent Waste Brick was designed by London-based practice Carmody Groarke in partnership with materials designers BC Materials and Local Works Studio. Together, they developed an energy-saving method that takes ground construction waste materials, mainly crushed concrete, masonry... View full entry
Megadeveloper Lendlease is one of the entities behind a new study into the use of mushrooms as a means of decarbonizing construction waste through their application on discarded asphalt roofing shingles. The company teamed with Rubicon Technologies, Mycocycle, and Rockwood Sustainable Solutions to... View full entry
A group of faculty and students from ETH Zurich has completed a prototype architectural pavilion whose production merges 3D printing with computational design. Unveiled at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the Eggshell Pavilion’s development seeks to demonstrate how "digital design techniques... View full entry
Construction is underway in Houston on the first multistory 3D printed building in the United States. Designed by two assistant professors of architecture at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP), the two-story, single-family home merges 3D printed... View full entry
Barcelona's Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and Italian 3D printer manufacturer WASP have created a building they say is the first made entirely of local materials and 3D printing technology in Spain. Called "TOVA," the project was developed by a team of... View full entry
A professor of architecture from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has been awarded a $1 million grant for the development of windows that incorporate screens of microalgae. Professor Kyoung Hee Kim, who has spent decades researching the topic, believes her “biochromic windows”... View full entry
