Design for disassembly and reuse for renovation of housing in Flanders – Case Study for Existing (High Rise) Housing Buildings.

Conventional existing building structures are not designed for change. Transformations in
buildings, required to answer variable factors of the everyday life, often cause demolition of
buildings. The enormous amount of waste produced during renovation and demolition processes
causes serious environmental issues. The combination of disposal problems, pollutant impacts
and the loss of materials and energy resources, requires building strategies taking life cycle
design of building products into account. To increase the building's transformation capacity
building systems have to focus on building systematisation and development of building methods
providing adaptable structures allowing reconfiguration, reuse, or recycling. The aim of this paper
is to specify decomposition characteristics of buildings, which determine the reuse potentials of
the building in the framework of the existing building stock.