Construction and Design: Prototyping – „REUSE INTELLIGENCE: Investigating AI-Assisted Tools for Circular Architecture“

This course addresses one of the central challenges of circular architecture: how existing buildings, components, and materials can be documented, understood, and prepared for reuse. While reuse is often discussed as a design ambition, it becomes difficult in practice because buildings contain complex, incomplete, and heterogeneous information. A limited understanding of available material resources restricts the architect’s capacity to design beyond standardized forms of modular reuse. Turning this information into usable design knowledge requires both architectural imagination and new digital tools.

The course begins with the question of how architects can work with existing buildings as material resources. Students investigate concrete buildings and reinforcement information from project files, asking what can be known, modeled, inventoried, and reused. On this basis, the course introduces AI-assisted tool building as a method for dealing with complexity: extracting information, structuring data, prototyping workflows, generating simplified BIM models, and creating digital inventories for future reuse scenarios.

Rather than presenting AI as a tool for producing spectacular images, the course positions it as a practical collaborator in architectural production. Students explore how AI can be used to build small, reusable tools that support analysis, documentation, and circular design decisions.