Circular Construction
Buildings as material banks: keep what exists, design the next change, and waste nothing that still has value.
keepThe commitment
Treat every building as a store of materials with a future. Keep what already stands. Design new work so it can be changed, repaired and one day taken apart. Choose materials by their whole-life cost to the living world.
What the usual way assumes
A straight line: extract, build, use, throw away. An old house on a valuable lot is called a teardown, and its century of old-growth framing leaves in a dumpster.
What we think instead
The largest circular act is also the plainest one: keep the building. A house that stays where it is needs no trucking, storage, refitting or special approval for its parts.
When a building truly has to come down, taking it apart by hand saves far more than wrecking it, and costs more too. We think the fix is to change the terms of the choice, not to wait for salvage to get cheap.
The Japanese word mottainai names the feeling behind all of this: regret at wasting something that still has worth.
What we don’t know yet
How to make reuse the easy choice. Reclaimed parts are slow to fit and are often held up by building codes written for new materials. We have not solved that, and we are not sure a small firm can.