RAW

Computation For A New Age Of Resource Aware Architecture: Waste-Sourced And Fast-Growing Bio-Based Materials

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector must urgently adopt circular practices using natural materials to reduce its significant contribution to climate change. However, the variability in quality and availability of these materials makes them unsuitable for the industry’s current need for highly uniform supplies. To make them fit AEC uses wasteful processes of selection and homogenization, which jeopardize the carbon reduction goals.

The RAW project proposes a breakthrough resource model for AEC fostering a steep change in the way we design and fabricate our built environment, overcoming the fundamental limits that the natural variability sets within bio-based material streams for the green transformation of the industry.  

With a central focus on the alternative materials of waste-sourced and fast-growing materials, RAW assembles world-leading researchers and entrepreneurs in material sourcing (University Innsbruck, Lulea Technological University, OMTRE A/S, University of Leiden), non-destructive material characterisation (Lulea Technological University, Danish Technological University), non-prescriptive computational design, and adaptive fabrication (CITA, University Of Stuttgart) in a unique consortium to establish the foundation of a novel new resource model for AEC linking design, analysis and fabrication through a novel computational infrastructure and embracing the variability of resources, with the ambition to minimise waste, enable circularity, increase carbon storage in building and allow uptake of currently disregarded classes of bio-based materials and pave the way for novel aesthetic expressions and tectonics in architecture.

The research takes place in an interdisciplinary and international consortium consisting of: 

• Royal Danish Academy - Centre for Information Technology and Architecture
• University Of Stuttgart (Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) and Institute of Computational Design and Construction (ICD)
• Danish Technological University (Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering)
• Luleå University of Technology (Wood Science and Engineering)
• University of Innsbruck (Department of Structural Engineering and Material Sciences)
• OMTRE A/S
• Leiden University (Institute of Environmental Sciences)