‘Materials as a Design Tool’ Design Philosophy Applied in Three Innovative Research Pavilions Out of Sustainable Building Materials with Controlled End-Of-Life Scenarios

Choosing building materials is usually the stage that follows design in the architectural design process, and is rarely used as a main input and driver for the design of the whole building’s geometries or structures. As an approach to have control over the environmental impact of the applied building materials and their after-use scenarios, an approach has been initiated by the author through a series of research studies, architectural built prototypes, and green material developments. This paper illustrates how sustainable building materials can be a main input in the design process, and how digital fabrication technologies can enable variable controlling strategies over the green materials’ properties, enabling adjustable innovative building spaces with new architectural typologies, aesthetic values, and controlled martial life cycles. Through this, a new type of design philosophy by means of applying sustainable building materials with closed life cycles is created. In this paper, three case studies of research pavilions are illustrated. The pavilions were prefabricated and constructed from newly developed sustainable building materials. The applied materials varied between structural and non-structural building materials, where each had a controlled end-of-life scenario. The application of the bio-based building materials was set as an initial design phase, and the architects here participated within two disciplines: once as designers, and additionally as green building material developers. In all three case studies, Design for Deconstruction (DfD) strategies were applied in different manners, encouraging architects to further follow such suggested approaches.