Real-life deconstruction pilots of the ReCreate project

The ReCreate project researches deconstruction and reuse of precast concrete elements, not originally designed for disassembly. ReCreate’s real-life pilots are a significant tool for achieving this goal. This report describes and illustrates ReCreate’s deconstruction pilots.

Six real-life deconstructions of precast concrete buildings – one in Finland, two in Sweden, one in the Netherlands, and two in Germany – are used in the ReCreate project to generate theoretical and practical knowledge about a wide range of topics directly related to the process of salvaging and reusing precast concrete elements. While the learnings regarding the planning and implementation of deconstruction are described in a centralised manner in another report (Vullings et al. 2024), the current report documents the donor buildings of the secondary elements as well as their practical deconstruction processes through textual descriptions and generous photographic illustrations and drawings. The donor buildings were blocks of flats (three buildings), public and private office buildings (two buildings) and industrial/warehouse buildings (one building). They had been deemed obsolete and were therefore slated for demolition. When engaged in ReCreate, they instead became vessels of knowledge generation for reuse-minded deconstruction. The various elements reclaimed from the donor buildings, such as sandwich panels, massive concrete slabs, massive interior wall elements, hollow core slabs, beams, and columns, will be reused in future in ReCreate’s reuse pilots. In addition to ReCreate’s six donor buildings, insights from following and observing two additional deconstructions, external to ReCreate, are also reported on herein.