Living Lab design build, Oxford Brookes University, 2022-present
The ‘Sustainable Salvage Yard’ building is a living lab that will be constructed from ultra-locally sourced waste material. The building is designed to be modular and demountable in order to enable deconstruction and reconstruction by undergraduate Year 1 students in the School of Architecture as a continuous process of build, test and re-build. The Salvage Yard building will also function as a sheltered workshop space for students to undertake design build projects and assemble large objects.
In 2022-24 two successive cohorts of students designed, made and tested wall cassettes to clad the Sustainable Salvage Yard building. We have been granted planning permission to install the building on campus. The technical design of the superstructure is currently in progress and construction will begin in 2024-25.
The project aims are:
to provide students with a space that enables them to undertake design build projects.
to develop processes, systems and methods that are suitable for building with waste material generated by the construction industry.
to teach the next generation of architects how to design with Circular Design principles.