Current practices and literature affirm the construction industry’s wastefulness and suggest that adaptability policies, while adopted marginally, can reduce waste during an edifice’s lifespan. Walls and partitions are still fashioned with plasterboard to be surfaced with joint compound and then painted. Conventional methods impede any changes over time without messy demolition. Streamlined construction has resisted the potentials of simple dry reversible connections and components. Designed-in malleability could make an important contribution to buildings’ interior systems evolution.
Buildings functional evolution over time, constantly requires some wall relocation or reorganization. These reworkings fill dumps as internal rearranging of service spaces can occur every 10-15 years, sometimes even more frequently. Programming or including dry construction / reversible assemblies in wall erection reduces required demolition, new resource harvesting and material refuse.
This is not a new idea. In the early 1970s Nijhuis Bouw BV a Dutch builder proposed a manufactured partition system: the 4 dee Inbouw. The wall kits included all framing, floor sills, top plates, and variable infill opaque or transparent patterns. All system elements adhered to a modular grid of 30cm with two height options, 2,4 or 2,6 m. A basic 1,2m wide panel, composed of 4 grid modules, slid into removable floor, and ceiling channels, making the system fully relocatable. Suggesting a more circular approach to construction, impermanent partition systems can reduce a building’s environmental footprint as materials can be recovered and employed over multiple life cycles reforming the extract, use, dispose methodology that characterizes modern construction.
DIRTT is a Canadian company commercializing the same type of panelized wall kit to facilitate long term flexibility. The multi-trade interior construction system is related to Nijhuis' system, components for framing are dry assembled and can be as easily disassembled as they are assembled. DIRTT takes the idea one step further in panel customization: A vast cloud catalogue of materials and finishes make the system fully mass customizable using the company's planning software to streamline the planning, fabrication, delivery, and assembly process.
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| Left: 4 Dee Inbouw system; Right: DIRTT's multi-trade interior construction system |
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