We should be recycling our building parts into newer ones for the future and avoid overbuilding, says UniSA professor

The infrastructure of the future could be as reusable and interchangeable as Lego, says a professor and former architect who also warns we might be overbuilding as it is.

BHP is shifting into the $235 million office tower complex at the historic GPO site.

Building new, supposedly “green” office towers when there’s so much vacant CBD office space bothered one former Adelaide architect and asset manager so much he wrote a book.

The Impact of Overbuilding on People and the Planet will be launched at the Adelaide Town Hall on Wednesday.

He’s also working on one solution to the problem with global design and engineering firm Arup that would create a market for reusable building components.

The idea is something like smart Lego, where every single system and component of a building is tagged and tracked, from one useful life to the next.

The author and project leader, Adjunct Professor David Ness, of UniSA, is deeply concerned about the extravagant consumption of energy and material resources.

“Massive structures, not just commercial buildings, are said to be carbon neutral and ‘green’ based on operational energy saving features such as more efficient cooling and heating,” he says.

“But if we truly want to be low carbon, green and sustainable, we need to restrain extravagant new construction, especially as our population growth is slow.

“If we want new sports stadiums, art galleries, offices and the like, we need to be aware that this impacts on emissions.”

“If we truly want to be low carbon, green and sustainable, we need to restrain extravagant new construction, especially as our population growth is slow.” - Adjunct Professor David Ness

Dr Ness says he was spurred on to write the book about overbuilding when, in 2015, the Adelaide City Council and State Government together claimed that emissions had declined even though city office stock had grown substantially.

“From 2007 to 2013, city office floor area grew by 243,000 square metres or 16 per cent, yet through best-practice green building design, energy efficiency and renewable electricity, emissions declined by 23 per cent,” they said.

This was described as a highly noteworthy example of the decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions, demonstrating that deep cuts can be made without forgoing economic growth.

Across Australia, climate-change action has tended to focus on renewable energy and energy efficiency.

In the construction sector, Dr Ness says all the talk is about increasing efficiency of operational energy (heating, cooling, lighting) and reducing associated greenhouse gas emissions.

There is a failure to account for resource consumption and “embodied carbon” in our buildings and we need to take this problem seriously. We need to find better ways to “reduce, reuse and recycle” in the construction industry.

“If we can make use of and adapt existing building and infrastructure stock, we save new carbon and resources,” Dr Ness says.

“We also need to design any new structures for ease of disassembly, adaptation and reuse, as part of a ‘circular’ built environment.”

“If we can make use of and adapt existing building and infrastructure stock, we save new carbon and resources,” Dr Ness says.

In 2017, the UniSA research team was awarded the Arup Global Research Challenge to further pursue the idea. Part of the New Royal Adelaide Hospital was selected as a test case, with radio frequency identification tags attached to potentially reusable building components such as partitions, ceilings, doors and facade panels, and information such as location, size, type, and age of those components uploaded to a database.

Arup Associate and Adelaide building engineering lead Nick Roach says the successful “proof of concept” research project is now coming to an end, so it’s time to find a couple of commercially viable approaches and test them out in the marketplace.

“What we’ve done is shown there's an opportunity here to re-use systems that were previously sent to landfill or at best recycled for their raw materials,” he says.

“This project has allowed us to take advantage of relatively new technologies like BIM (Building Information Management) systems and cloud-based database storage systems to help track, categorise and organise building elements in a way that was never before possible.”

Just as home handymen (or women) and tradespeople can now shop online, rather than having to go the hardware store and search the shelves, the architects who currently turn to a supplier's website or catalogue for the specification of building systems could one day go to a “monster database of new and used components” when preparing their designs.

“Instead of selecting a new component that the supplier then builds to specification, the cloud database enables selection of objects from what's available, enabling new designs to be built from existing components rather than just new,” Mr Roach says.

“It’s a change in approach, taking advantage of new digital technology.”

This futuristic database would allow people to grab items that previously weren't known or available to architects because the information on those items just wasn't there, compared to the current approach of scrapping those items to landfill often even if they are in perfectly good condition.

“To be able to digitally access a massive array of available potential components already in existence on buildings and when they might be available for use at a later date, and then gain access to components, would be revolutionary,” he says.

“So it's very complicated, but it’s using technology that is now available, to organise data and match users with materials, components and systems that already exists in the built environment.”

Taking it further still, the next level would be to help architects transition to a new approach to designing buildings, by embedding advanced algorithms into architectural design software to enable designs to be digitally moulded by the components available in the cloud database.

“To help facilitate this, we are looking at new business models for procurement of building components, like transitioning away from the ‘buy and depreciate’ model of purchasing building systems, to more of a ‘leasing’ model.”

Mr Roach argues that leasing building components as a system, in much the same way as photocopiers in an office are procured, incentivises the system supplier to design and fabricate more durable systems that will last longer.

“I can't remember the last time I saw a service technician visit our office to fix our leased photocopier,” says Mr Roach.

But before everyone gets too carried away dreaming of the future, the researchers want to get a simple test case up and running.

“We spent quite a bit of time looking at building elements as part of the research and identified some ‘low hanging fruit’, items that at the end of their use are still in good condition, the higher churn, high value items,” Mr Roach says.

“One example was internal glazed partitions, because they are quite standardised and relatively high churn. “When used on an office fit-out, they might exist for ten or so years, but then, instead of putting them in the bin, the supplier could take them back and repurpose them on another site.”

In Adelaide, the company Construction Glazing is receptive to the idea and, in the near future, researchers hope to demonstrate the value of that kind of business model, opening a window on a whole new world of resource-conscious construction.

Flight to quality

Adjunct Professor David Ness cites the new GPO Exchange development as an example of his concerns.

“When there's new office space available, what happens is that firms and the government move out of their older office space into the new space,” he says.

“This is known as a ‘flight to quality’. For example, BHP are going to move out of their Grenfell St office into the new GPO Exchange.

“It's a very fine building but what that means is the building in Grenfell St may struggle to get tenants, or may draw these from other C or D grade buildings.

“Then they may fall behind, over time become vacant, degraded and eventually be demolished, so it all leads to waste.”

His book also refers to the procurement of two new buildings by the ATO in the mid-1990s, which added 32,000sq m of office space to an oversupplied market.