Digital Upcycling: Wood

In order to sustainably meet the increasing demand for construction timber, forestry products need to be complemented with materials from the urban mine as well as through secondary material flows. Digital design and fabrication processes can respond to heterogeneous secondary material streams with customised processes through their adaptability and enable upcycling.

The design studio builds on the findings of the "Reprogramming Wood Waste" studio and develops new types of construction systems from wood waste using digital construction technologies. The aim is to develop an understanding of processes based on machine learning, robotic aggregation and computational structural design methods. Building on this, we will explore new architectural expressions informed by digital fabrication processes that emerge from the structural and construction logic of the building system.

The aim is to develop a digital circular building system that is pioneering in terms of design, fabrication, assembly, reconfiguration and disassembly as well as suitable for wide architectural application. Using 1:1 prototypes in conjunction with digital processes, insights into this will be gained.

A section of the building system will be built as a demonstrator during the seminar week next spring and presented at the Karlsruhe festival 'dasFest' next summer. The foundations for this will be laid at the end of the studio and all processes will be tested as examples.