MATERIAL WORKS: Optimizing Material Circularity through Reversing Architecture

Abstract

“Material Works” posits the largest abandoned industrial landscape in the Niagara region — the former General Motors Plant site — as a key infrastructure to circulate the existing building stocks for city scale reuse in St. Catharines, Ontario. The city’s building permits issued in 2023-2024 were analyzed to examine buildings registered for demolition and to build a database of materials to be reused if deconstructed. This initial study informed the design of the facility, in its scale, aesthetics and programmatic organization.

The half-demolished GM structure, with a former building footprint of 38,000m2, is transformed to a circularity hub to address the city’s potential reusable building material stock. The architecture provides spaces for people to train in deconstruction, salvaged materials to be processed for resale, and designers to demonstrate their potential for architectural re-application. With circulation of materials as the central motif, agencies essential in facilitating circular activities are imagined to co-exist in one physical site to develop approaches to create more sustainable, closed-loop metabolic systems of materials.

The building industry constitutes nearly a quarter of the global waste stream, and with Ontario’s landfills projected to reach capacity by 2032, the movement and uncertain destination of materials remain critical environmental concerns. In the quest for a sustainable architectural future, where construction’s inherent destructiveness contrasts with the demand for densification, focus shifts toward assessing the residual value of existing urban building stocks within the Anthropogenic landscape. This paradigm shift from the current linear to a circular construction model protects the architectural heritage of our urban fabric from rapid erasure while optimizing resource efficiency.

This thesis explores design interventions and industry practices that replace the 21st century’s planned-obsolescence-thinking with reuse, contributing to the discourse of material circularity to address the environmental and cultural resiliency in architecture.