RE:Thinking Timber Architecture. Enhancing Design and Construction Circularity Through Material Digital Twin

Wood is a fundamental resource for building the future environment and meeting CO2 reduction goals. However, wood is truly sustainable only if it can be preserved for a long time and reused throughout several construction cycles. Previous research by the authors shows that algorithmic design and automation technologies are introducing novel possibilities for reconfigurable architecture, which is conceived to allow easy assembly and reassembly of wood components into different structures. In this context, dynamic and accessible material data is vital to enhance circular construction effectively. This paper introduces the concept of Material Digital Twin, an online material database directly connected to computational models and is used for real-time exchange of design, simulation, assembly and construction information. The outlined approach is applied to the realization of a laboratory-scale prototype structure, which is used as a testbed platform to verify and document the relevance of the accessible database in supporting the automation of reusable timber construction.