Reversible Building Design: Guidelines and Protocols for Design for Disassembly
About this book
Elma Durmisevic's 2006 dissertation, completed at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and published under the title "Reversible Building Design: Guidelines and Protocols for Design for Disassembly," is a foundational text in the emerging field of circular construction. The work addresses a structural problem in the way buildings are designed, built, and ultimately demolished: the construction sector generates enormous quantities of waste at the end of a building's service life, and much of that waste is the direct consequence of design decisions that make buildings difficult or impossible to take apart in a controlled and value-preserving manner. Durmisevic's central argument is that this problem is not inevitable — it is a consequence of design choices, and it can be systematically addressed through a different design approach that she calls reversible building design.
The concept of reversibility, as developed in this work, refers to the capacity of a building to be transformed, reconfigured, or disassembled without causing damage to its constituent systems, components, or materials. Reversibility is not simply a property of individual joints or connections but a systemic characteristic that must be designed into the building at multiple interdependent levels simultaneously. Durmisevic organizes this systemic analysis through three principal dimensions: spatial reversibility, structural reversibility, and material reversibility.
Spatial reversibility concerns the capacity of the building's layout and functional organization to be adapted to new uses over time — the ability to subdivide, enlarge, or reorganize internal spaces without wholesale structural intervention. Structural reversibility concerns the capacity of the load-bearing and envelope systems to be modified, extended, or disassembled. Material reversibility concerns the capacity of individual materials, elements, and components to be recovered, reused, remanufactured, or recycled at the end of their functional life in a given configuration.
A central technical contribution of the dissertation is the development of a framework for assessing and improving the disassembly potential of building structures. Durmisevic introduces a hierarchy of building levels — from the scale of the entire building down through systems, subsystems, components, and individual elements — and argues that the independence of these levels from one another is the critical enabling condition for reversibility. When a building is designed so that its systems are highly interdependent — when, for instance, the mechanical services are embedded in the structural slab, or when cladding panels cannot be removed without damaging the underlying structure — disassembly without destruction becomes impossible.
Conversely, when systems at each level are designed to be functionally, technically, and physically independent of one another, transformation and disassembly become feasible and economically rational. The role of connections and joints receives particularly detailed attention in the dissertation. Durmisevic identifies a typology of connection types ranging from fully fixed and permanent through various intermediate categories to fully reversible and demountable.
The choice of connection type is one of the most consequential design decisions from a disassembly perspective, and yet it is rarely treated explicitly in conventional design processes. The dissertation provides systematic guidelines for specifying connections that maximize the potential for future disassembly — favoring dry connections over wet ones, mechanical fixings over adhesive or cast-in embedments, and accessible joints over concealed ones. The work also develops the concept of the base element — the component within a product configuration that serves as the structural intermediary integrating all surrounding elements, and whose design determines the independence and exchangeability of those elements.
By carefully defining base elements and the interfaces between different product configurations, designers can ensure that components can be removed and replaced without cascade effects that render adjacent systems irreparable. This concept has direct implications for the design of facades, floor systems, partition systems, and technical fit-out. Durmisevic frames the entire framework within a broader argument about the environmental imperative of circular construction.
Buildings represent the largest reservoir of embedded materials in the human-made environment, and the durability of most building materials far exceeds the functional lifespan of the configurations in which they are used. The mismatch between material durability and functional lifespan creates an enormous opportunity: if buildings are designed so that their materials can be recovered and redeployed at the end of each functional cycle, the construction sector can dramatically reduce its consumption of virgin resources and its generation of demolition waste. Reversible building design is thus not merely a technical protocol but a strategic response to the resource constraints of the twenty-first century.
The dissertation's guidelines and protocols have proven durable and have been adopted and extended in subsequent research, most notably in the BAMB2020 (Buildings as Material Banks) Horizon 2020 project, which used Durmisevic's framework as a foundation for developing material passports and reversible building design guidelines at the European scale. For practitioners working in green building, circular economy, or adaptive reuse, this work provides an essential theoretical and methodological foundation.