Informing Life Cycle Assessments Through Design for Disassembly

What determines the lifespan of building materials? This question can be approached in numerous ways. In this article, we work from the assumption that the least erroneous answer is: the future.Design for disassembly (DfD) is a way to mitigate the uncertainties of dealing with the future of construction and as a way to relinquish material lifespan from construction lifespan. (Crowther, 1999) DfD is an instrumental part of developing circular economy in architecture where lifespan of materials cannot be defined by the typology or construction type as it facilitates disassembly on various levels of a building. DfD is a strategy often referred to in literature as prompting longer lifespans of materials through reuse and recycling thereby potentially both reducing the need for virgin material resources in construction and prolonging the use of a resource. Simultaneously DfD prompts an architectural understanding of buildings as changeable artifacts, as open-ended entities. By juxtaposing the principles of DfD and LCA, this article forms a critique of the understanding of lifespan represented in conventional LCA. To contextualize this inquiry, two examples of DfD in contemporary construction are analysed, where the specific conditions for disassembly in the façade systems are laid out. The examples are two hybrid building systems in the current Danish building industry which show fundamentally different approaches to disassembly. The two examples and all data from chapter 5 in this article is based on case studies carried out by one of the authors of this article, as a part of an ongoing Ph.D. project anticipating completion in the spring of 2024. The resulting discussion is concerned with the possibility of informing the conventional LCA paradigm by imposing on it, notions of the unpredictable nature of the future, of lifespans, of end-of-life and reuse scenarios, with which DfD is occupied.