Decision Support for Circularity in Office Building Design

The presentation “Decision Support for Circularity in Office Building Design” introduces an integrated framework to guide architects, engineers, and policymakers in designing circular office buildings that minimize embodied carbon and material waste while maximizing adaptability and reuse potential. Grounded in the emerging European standard prEN 18177 on building circularity and aligned with EN 15978, EN 15804+A2, and the EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities, the lecture unpacks the latest regulatory and methodological landscape shaping circular construction.
It outlines six interrelated design dimensions—resource efficiency, life extension, disassembly and reversibility, material recoverability, traceability, and business model innovation—and presents a multi-objective decision-support framework using key performance indicators (KPIs) for circularity assessment.
Through six European demonstration projects—including ’t Centrum (BE), Circl Pavilion (NL), and Green Offices (NL)—the presentation illustrates how circularity can be operationalized through life cycle assessment (LCA), material passports, and design-for-disassembly (DfD) tools such as the DeCon Tool developed at the SBD Lab (ULiège). The talk concludes by discussing persistent challenges related to retained value, service life, and measurement consistency, proposing pathways for integrating circular design within early-stage architectural decision-making.