The Role of Circular Design Principles in the Language of Residential Architecture. A Reflection on the Implications that Technical Aspects Bring to the Contemporary Way of Building

The building sector’s environmental impacts, resource depletion and waste production are crucial for combating climate change and promoting ecolog-ical development. For this reason, moving towards a production model based on reuse, repair, refurbishment, recycling, and recovery appears to be the most feasible and appropriate solution. However, the transition to a circular economy brings new challenges for designers and other actors involved in the construction sector. Indeed, achieving a zero-waste building process in which existing materials are reused implies a significant change in the conventional design approach and requires specific knowledge, strategies and methods. The present paper proposes a reflec-tion to comprehend how the main principles of the circular economy applied to the construction sector are changing the contemporary residential architectural language and way of building. Furthermore, for this purpose, an implementation of the frame-work proposed in the REBUS design manual is applied to a case study in Bologna, Italy, consisting of a multi-family residential building, in order to analyse the circu-larity of its enclosure elements. This implemented tool consists of 3 categories of quality parameters that bring together: (i) circularity evaluation of the end-of-life potential, durability and healthiness of materials; (ii) technical aspects related to the type of connections and ease of disassembly; (iii) Embodied Energy and Embodied Carbon assessments. This type of analysis constitutes a decision support tool for the preliminary design phase where evaluated parameters work as drivers to ensure low resource use in production and better lifetime efficiency, implementing circular economy in architecture.