Starting point: 

How can historic AEC data be leveraged to achieve more sustainable and efficient future projects?

This topic may include consideration of: how ‘wicked’ design goals might be established in building projects around resource consumption, waste production, carbon emissions, time, budget, and benefit objectives; how past project performance might be evaluated within these goals; identifying who should be setting new, sustainability-focused future goals and how to enable them, and ensuring quality assurance in shared architectural models.

Project Summary: 

The construction industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation, largely due to the demolition of existing buildings and the disposal of valuable materials that could otherwise be reused. Demolition not only erases the embodied energy of construction but also generates significant amounts of waste, much of which ends up in landfills. This process accelerates the depletion of natural resources while producing avoidable carbon emissions. At the same time, current industry practices often treat existing buildings as obstacles because of labour-intensive investigations, rather than as reservoirs of reusable material stock. Unlocking this hidden potential requires new digital methods that can systematically register, track, and evaluate the materials embedded in buildings across their entire life cycle. 

Although circular economy strategies and material reuse are gaining attention, a critical gap persists in how existing buildings information is captured, standardized, and maintained across the life cycle. Traditional Building Information Models (BIM) rarely include the multi-level material data needed for reuse, while current Material Passport platforms lack links to cadastral registrations or relevant industry standards such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). This limits their ability to support long-term tracking, as materials change in quality and value over time. As cadastral records trace land ownership over time, material information too must be continuously updated—tracking how components are assembled, how they age, when they require maintenance or replacement, and whether they remain valuable, reusable, or hazardous. Without such integrated, life cycle–based systems, the ambition of large-scale urban mining and resource recovery remains unattainable. 

This research addresses the gap by proposing a digital framework that extends Material Passports using the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard alongside complementary datasets. The framework will be based on multi-Level of Detail (LOD) representation to simplify building geometry while preserving essential material attributes. This ensures that even when individual components are aggregated (e.g., into wall systems), their material and lifecycle information remain accessible for reuse and circularity assessments. Progress to date includes the design of an Action Design Research methodology, the formulation of an extended Material Passport schema in IFC, and initial tests of AI-assisted drawing extraction.  

Future work will prototype a database-driven system linking Material Passports with cadastral lifecycle management, enabling long-term registration of materials within buildings. For policymakers, this approach offers a way to assess the material potential of building stocks at city or regional scale. For architects and facility managers, it provides a practical tool to evaluate which materials can be reused, recycled, or replaced from different locations. Importantly, the framework also considers how materials change in value across decades. Ultimately, the work contributes to reducing waste, lowering embodied carbon emissions, and transforming buildings from disposable objects into long-term repositories of reusable resources. 

Objectives 

1. To review and analyse existing BIM-based frameworks and identify gaps in representing reuse-relevant material information. 

2. To engage with practitioners and stakeholders through workshops to define real-world requirements for material passports and reuse evaluation.  

3. To design a multi-level material passport schema aligned with IFC standards, capable of capturing key attributes at product, component, and building levels. 

4. To define and implement custom IFC PropertySets for reuse-specific parameters such as disassembly potential, condition, and recyclability. 

5. To use existing AI-assisted tools, where appropriate, to support material registration from historical building documentation. 

6. To propose long-term strategies for maintaining and updating material and component information throughout the building lifecycle. 

Expected Outcomes: 

1. An extended multi-level material passport framework, linking materials to components, buildings, and urban-scale datasets. 

2. A structured IFC-based schema with customised property sets to encode reuse-relevant attributes (e.g., strength, recyclability, disassembly potential) at the product and component levels. 

3. A prototype for material registration and lifecycle tracking, demonstrating how material passports can be integrated with IFC and cadastral data to support reuse planning, ownership clarification, and urban mining. =