[Greenbuilding] Deconstruction , Design for Disassembly and Adaptability

[Brad Guy]

Chris, et al,
If you mean the Building Materials Reuse Association
(BMRA), that is www.buildingreuse.org and I am the
President.

Coincidentally, it was started in Canada under the
name Used Building Materials Association. It was not
able to bs sustained and we (a core group) moved it to
US in 2001 and changed the name in 2004.

Related note is the www.lifecyclebuilding.org design
challenge that the BMRA, AIA and EPA were all involved
in hosting (with EPA funding). Alex Wilson of
BuildingGreen was one of the judges and the very cool
winners (including students) are up on the website. If
you click on "Resources" you will see a primer on
"Design for Disassembly in the Built Environment" that
I put together and a host of case studies on
deconstruction and various reports.

Frank - I also put together a "Guide to
Deconstruction" which is downloadable at
www.deconstructioninstitute.com - click on "Learning
Center", and co-authored a book called "Unbuilding:
Salvaging the Architectural Treasures of Unwanted
Houses". 

There are a host of model deconstruction
spscifications from some US sources, and an excellent
one is from Greater Vancouver Regional District, and I
have more reports from applied deconstruction research
with the various contracts, best practice lessons
learned than you probably want to know about.

I would be interested in talking about testing your
standard and just had some conversations with some US
governmental officials about this topic. I would
proselytize that the idea of buildings with infinite
lives through design for adaptation and disassembly
should be a much greater part of the discussion of
green building. Some studies have indicated that with
ever higher-energy-performance designs the percentage
of total life-cycle energy use that is embodied energy
will go from 15% in a baseline non-high-performance
design to as much as 45% in a very low-operating
energy-use design, over a 50 year life-cycle (Cole
1996, Thormark, 2002). 

Perhaps some way to making the Canadian DfA/D guide a
"North American" standard would help with engendering
support in the US - and we could discuss off-line from
this listserv?

Brad
Cole, R., and Kernan, P.C., Life-cycle energy use in
office buildings, Building and Environment, Vol. 31,
No. 4, (1996) pp. 307-317.

Thormark, C., A low energy building in a lifecycle –
its embodied energy, energy need for operation and
recycling potential, Building and Environment, No. 37
(2002) pp. 429-435.

--- Chris Green <pojeros at telus.net> wrote:

> Lohmann, Frank wrote:
> >  
> > Hello Brad and other listserv readers
> >
> > 1)I caught the email thread on deconstruction
> contractors as I was
> > sitting in a meeting at the Canadian Standard
> Association in Toronto on
> > Wednesday, where we talked about the feasability
> of developing a
> > standard or guideline on deconstruction.  The
> question, on which we
> > would like feedback from the "deconstruction
> industry" is whether there
> > are any best practice documents for this industry
> in North America
> > (managemnet/contracting, etc)?
> >   
> Hi, Frank. There's a national association of
> building materials 
> recyclers in the US. I'll try to find their website
> again and if I do, 
> I'll send it along.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris Green
> 
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Brad Guy
Ph.D. Program
School of Architecture
Carnegie Mellon University
Cell: 814-571-8659

President
Building Materials Reuse Association
www.buildingreuse.org

Please note: the email address "gbg2 at psu.edu" is no longer valid.


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