Category / Work / Research

In October 2020, the Circular Construction Lab brought together a group of community organizations as partners on an Engaged Cornell Grant with the “specific aim to investigate the circular potentials of the local built environment.” The team is currently in negotiations with the owners as well as the contractors of the Catherine Commons development project aiming to develop a detailed proposal to deconstruct at least one of the buildings and maximize the direct reuse of materials in a broad coalition of local stakeholders.

We are honored and excited to announce that RhinoCircular has been shortlisted for a Prize for Innovation at the 2021 Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment. From the public invitation to participate, a total of 220 projects have been registered from 42 countries, all of which stand out for their exceptional quality and originality. In a pre-selection, ten projects have now been shortlisted in each category.

Sustainable design and construction require holistic thinking across a wide variety of topics and fields: Socio-cultural, economic, ecological, functional and aesthetic, local as well as global factors must be considered and understood as equivalent and interacting with one another. This complexity makes it impossible to convey simplified recipes and answers, or suggest generally valid applications. Sustainable design and construction are rather the result of an unbiased, critical perspective and, consequently, a personal attitude towards the task – based on empirical values from one’s own experimental activities and a comparatively broad foundational knowledge base on topics of sustainability. Supported generously by the inaugural Kuan and Wu Research Fund for Innovation and Sustainability, The Circular Construction Lab sets out to compile such a knowledge base for the students (and faculty) of Cornell AAP and the Department of Architecture.