Despite the enormous emissions and raw materials needed to produce concrete, healthy structures made of concrete are demolished daily under the jaws of hydraulic excavators and energy-intensive crushers. We propose to upcycle large irregular concrete rubbles from demolition sites into walls with the help of digital tools and through minimal material processing.
Our first real-scale demonstrator is a wall of approx. 2.5m tall, 2.9m long, 25cm thick, built out of 7 large “off the pile” concrete rubbles. Digital tools are used to harness the geometrical complexity inherent to found irregular concrete rubbles and to precisely assemble them into a slender yet stable wall. Due to its commodity and environmental potential, using unaltered concrete rubbles as a new construction material hints at new possibilities for circular construction.