London, United Kingdom

“For the last couple of decades, architects have often focused on the performance of buildings and minimizing operational carbon within them,” states Xavier De Kestelier, head of Hassell in London.

“But with the need to tackle climate change more urgently we also need to look at embodied carbon. Re-Emerge was a great way for the students to start embedding this approach in their design.”

Hassell’s lead architect in London, Xavier De Kestelier, together with The Architectural Association (AA) designed the “Re-Emerge” pavilion to explore new design and construction technologies that repurpose materials that have completed their first life cycle into innovative structural formations.

The pavilion was designed during the postgraduate program Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech).

The project addresses themes of generative design, material computation, large-scale fabrication, and assembly technologies, minimizing the pavilion’s ecological impact from the earliest phases of the design process onwards. 

The pavilion is open to the public on the corner of Bedford Square in London opposite the AA premises until 25 November 2021.

Hassell challenged EmTech students to keep the carbon footprint of the project as low as possible and therefore only use reclaimed timber.

“The students really took on the challenge with both hands and decided early on to build the pavilion out of timber from reclaimed wooden pallets,” said De Kestelier.

Wood is inherently the best bio-fabricated and biodegradable material; it is renewable, resilient, and lasts for a long time. 

When a timber building is demolished after several decades, it does not produce useless waste but instead generates reclaimed wood that can be reused and repurposed in other applications after disassembly, becoming part of the circular economy.

Re-Emerge was created with Grade A reclaimed wood pallets, one of the most abundant reused timber elements in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry yet one which generally ends up in landfills or burnt as fuel. 

Instead, in Re-Emerge, their structural and morphological capacities are explored and exploited. 

The reclaimed pallets used in the pavilion have been collected from various timber recycling facilities in and outside London. 

The structural system for Re-Emerge comprises diamond-shaped volumetric timber modules that are created by scoring and kerfing wood pallets. 

These diamond modules are organized into structural ribs which are then assembled with lap joints, thereby diminishing the need for secondary materials in the joinery system. 

The system can sustain loads in vertical and horizontal arrangements. 

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the reclaimed timber planks employed within Re-Emerge provided useful information which informed the pavilion’s preliminary design phase. 

Analysis of most plywood types used for external construction versus solid timber planks demonstrated that CO2 emissions from plywood are significantly higher than solid planks during the preparation stage.

At the end of its second life-cycle, Re-Emerge will be disassembled. 

Part of the pavilion will be erected in the Hassell offices in London and part of it will be sent back to the timber recycling facilities where its materials were sourced. 

The ambition of Re-Emerge is to create a strong dialogue between the local timber industry and its by-products and to demonstrate to the world that innovative timber architecture can be created with construction waste while maintaining a mindful approach towards our environment.

Project: The Re-Emerge pavilion
Architects: Hassell and The Architectural Association (AA)
Client: Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech)
Photographers: Naaro