Happy Monday to you!
I've argued here before that buildings should be designed to come apart, that the future may belong to structures built to be moved rather than demolished. My previous post, The Dandelion Economy, looked at the reversible joint at the end of a building's life. If you want to read up on disassembly fundamentals, material passports, dry joinery, and the residual value of a building's parts, I recommend checking it out. Today, we’re looking at it from the beginning. We’re bringing you up to speed on where the research and innovation are and on strategic thinking for early design.
The Bottom Line
The same connection that lets a prefabricated component come apart cleanly at the end also lets it go together quickly at the start. Bolt it, clip it, or dry-fix, and you get the best of both worlds: quick factory assembly now and clean recovery later. But weld, glue, or pour, and you forfeit both. The recovery part of DfD is where its main purpose lies; however, the assembly part is where the immediate money sits, since the productivity that justifies building off-site depends on the same joint. One detail, settled at the concept stage, answers both.
The Mechanism
A well-designed joinery is the bracket that holds a facade unit to the frame and determines how a wall panel meets a floor cassette; whether it’s constructed to be pulled back out later or gets cast in for good.
The assembly pressure has an expensive history. Over the past decade, a wave of well-funded companies tried to industrialise construction by owning the whole chain: their own factories, supply lines, and crews. The largest, Katerra, raised more than two billion dollars before collapsing in 2021. Prefabrication's savings, the post-mortems agreed, come from designing components so the same parts connect the same way every time, which is what lets a kit go up fast and cheap. These firms sank their money into factories, then watched the economics break the moment a client demanded one-off changes, because each change destroyed the repetition the savings relied on. The value that survived was the connection grammar itself, the decision about how parts meet, made before anything reaches a factory floor.
The recovery pressure demands the same properties from the other end. A part can have a second life only if it can come apart without being destroyed, which depends on the connection's reversibility and simplicity. Welded steel and poured concrete fix the parts they hold in place; bolted frames release them. As we’ve seen previously, regulation now turns that into a compliance line; a building’s material passport is worth only as much as the joint allows.
Market Signals
Researchers stop treating the two as separate
Building academics are formalising what some practices already sensed: modular construction and circular economy rest on the same principles, standardisation, simplification, repeatable connections. A group at City University of Hong Kong proposes folding them into a single design approach rather than two checklists, since the potential is wasted when each is pursued in isolation.
The gap between the idea and the buildings
The numbers are in; enthusiasm runs well ahead of implementation. Fewer than one in twenty new commercial buildings have meaningful design-for-disassembly properties. One of the largest obstacles concerns the investment horizon and conservativeness: developers selling at completion see no payback in a future teardown, engineers still weigh bolted against welded with caution, and salvaged-component markets remain a patchwork. The market is moving forward at a lower-than-desired pace, but anyone calling this solved is overselling it.
The money drifts to the kit of parts
A US Department of Energy review of more than 50 multifamily projects found that panelized buildings are gaining ground because hauling finished volumetric modules down a highway is costly and risky. Flat panels keep transport cheap, geometry flexible, and assembly reversible, all of which are good for circularity. The shift from whole rooms to flat kits is a market correction following the previous factory failures.
The connector becomes the research object
Australian research on reversible connectors for modular timber found that some tight-fit joints ceased to function as the wood swelled in humidity, undermining the disassembly they were meant to enable, prompting the development of a purpose-built connector to address the issue. The performance of reversibility must be thoroughly tested before it can gain market traction.
The passport arrives before the practice
The European Union's Digital Product Passport for construction products begins phasing in this year, attaching origin, composition, and reuse data to materials. It assumes the parts can actually be recovered, which, as we talked about before, raises the question of how they were joined. Regulators are beginning to mandate paperwork for a level of reversibility most buildings are currently not designed to deliver.
Intelligence Brief
Getting fluent in the Design for Disassembly process has little to do with memorising approved fasteners. Those are a Google search away, and your structural engineer knows them better than any newsletter could teach. The fluency that pays is judgment: knowing when the joint is worth the fight, and how to defend it.
Three variables determine whether designing for reversibility earns its keep or is green theatre: how much the building repeats, how far its parts must travel, and whether the owner will hold the asset long enough to care about its second life. High repetition and a long horizon make the economic case write itself. However, if a developer sells at completion, the end-of-life argument disappears. The strategic move could be to argue the pros of the same joint for adaptability instead; enabling a building to be reconfigured rather than demolished when its use changes is easier to sell, and even a short-horizon owner would want to pay for it. The distance a system has to travel is a double-edged sword. On the delivery side, reversibility and distance are allies. Flat, demountable parts (a panelised kit) ship densely and cheaply, while finished volumetric modules ship mostly air and trigger oversize-load permits, escort vehicles, and big cranes. So the farther the factory is from the site, the more a long haul pushes you towards bolted, flat-shippable components, which is the same reversible-detailing circularity wants. Distance-friendliness compounds: a part that ships flat once can be demounted and shipped again to a new site later. On the recovery side, however, distance can be the enemy. A salvaged component only earns its second life if a reuse market or remanufacturer sits within a sane haul. Truck a recovered beam several hundred kilometres and the cost and carbon of moving it can erase the benefit of reusing it at all. Heavy materials are worst hit: a demountable precast concrete frame is gorgeous in theory but punishing to transport, so its economic reuse radius is small. Light systems (steel framing, timber, panels) travel much farther before the payoff dies.
Another challenge is to spot the decisions that quietly prevent recovery, since they are cheap to make and ruinous to undo. Pouring concrete in place to tie precast elements together locks in their value for good. Bonding services into the structure means the fast-changing layer (wiring and pipework) cannot be accessed without breaking the surrounding fixed structure. The habit that does the most work is to separate the layers, both logistically and chronologically, so that a building comes apart in the reverse order in which it went up.
One way to set new quality standards would be to treat reversibility as a factor to be proven, as with a fire rating or a U-value. Ask a manufacturer whether the same connection has already been taken apart and reassembled; maybe the answers you get might influence your design strategy.
But most important of all, start small rather than waiting for the perfect circular commission: take one repeated element, a facade unit, a partition, a service module, and design its interface to come apart, before committing a whole building to a discipline the office has never tested. Designing everything radically different from the status quo might meet resistance from the client, but small changes to demonstrate proof of concept are realistic, even in the smallest project.
There is a reward for getting there early. This skill sets a practice apart today but will be the baseline tomorrow, once regulation makes it mandatory. By that time, it will be clear enough in the commissions, and the firms/architects who haven’t proactively invested in these strategies will have to fight to keep up. The architect who can draw a joint that assembles fast and releases clean holds value that the fabricator downstream and the engineer alone cannot supply, and holds it at the one moment when it costs almost nothing to decide: the first sketch.
Did you find these thoughts and insights helpful? Consider talking them through with a colleague by the water cooler and see if new ideas spark to life! If they do, I’d love to hear about them!
See you next week!
-Johan