Dear Architects,
While your building designs shape the skyline, I’m the encompassing system – shaping the ground beneath us and the networks that connect us. It’s me – infrastructure.
You and I may not always share the same design studio, but our connection is inseparable. You shape the places where people live, work, and connect, while I provide the lifelines that bring us together. Since we’re both invested in creating a better future, can we collaborate more closely?
Buildings and infrastructure systems face the same challenges – finite resources and growing waste streams. The built environment is a major contributor to embodied carbon and material overconsumption, and while prefabrication techniques offer valuable solutions, we must accelerate the adoption of closed-loop resource systems.
In other words, we can give materials a new life through salvaging and reuse, extending their useful life. If we rethink how we design and repurpose materials, especially across our shared high-emitting material palette of concrete and steel, we can bolster a circular economy that strengthens our industry while creating new jobs and markets.
Our industry has consistently adapted – from hand-drawn sketches to BIM, from isolated projects to interconnected systems, and from repairs to adaptive reuse. Now, it’s time to evolve how we manage finite resources, ensuring that what we build today sustains our communities tomorrow.
I know this isn’t simple. Deconstruction, logistics, regulations, connecting supply with demand, and perception challenges all create barriers – but they also open doors. They drive innovation, create opportunities for local economies, and demand creative problem-solving.
Standardized protocols, advanced materials testing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration can turn these hurdles into the foundation for real change.
Whether we’re designing a facility or a bridge, the principles of circularity are universal. We can accelerate their adoption through collective action:
- Prioritize adaptive reuse to preserve existing structures and reduce the need for new construction.
- Analyze opportunities to integrate multi-use infrastructure within buildings to reduce reliance on standalone systems through combined functionalities like energy, water, and transit access.
- Evaluate embodied and operational carbon through life cycle assessments early in our designs to minimize environmental impacts.
- Support a digital marketplace for materials using tracking and verification systems, ensuring decommissioned materials find new life in future projects.
- Specify low-carbon materials and advocate for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to drive industry transparency.
- Share data and insights to collectively advance best practices in circular design.
- Inform policy and invest in research to guide the next generation of circular solutions.
Circularity across the built environment offers a practical path to achieving both environmental and societal benefits. Through the ASCE Infrastructure 2050 initiative, we’re building a collaborative network of diverse stakeholders – governments, researchers, developers, designers, builders, manufacturers, technology innovators, and educators – to accelerate circular solutions.
As Architects, your influence is transformative. Engage clients early, specify circular materials, and champion resource-efficient designs. This is how we’ll create lasting change – by building collaborative networks, fostering circular economies, and sharing best practices and lessons learned. It’s about leveraging the collective power of our connections to achieve our shared goals.
As we work to progress our respective fields, whether with building or infrastructure designs, let’s collaborate to find effective solutions.
There’s more power in our combined approach.
Talk soon,
Infrastructure Engineering
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
This article was also reviewed and edited by Sean Pulsifer, AIA, LEED AP, National Architectural Discipline Leader and Vice President at STV, and Meghan Timmons, ENV SP, Sustainable Design Specialist in STV’s national Sustainable Design practice.
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