Taisugar Circular Village is a Model Case Study for Circular Economies

What truly sets TCV apart from other examples of eco-housing collectives is BaF’s thoughtful use of circular design principles. The housing blocks are made of prefabricated modular parts, which heavily reduces material waste during construction. Further, balcony facade systems, designed and installed like a curtain wall, comprise precast modularized panels that are interconnected with simple nuts and bolts; modular, prefabricated hollowed core slabs make up the floor system. Also of note, every building component in TCV comes with a unique ID number, aka material passport. This feature accomplishes two things: part repairs can be performed without disrupting other equipment, and more crucially, life-cycle assessments provide a clearer picture of how individual components can be reused or repurposed following disassembly or demolition.

“Circular architecture is not a complicated subject. The techniques applied are pre-existing ones,” Kuo says. “We are simply applying these techniques through fresh perspectives. In the past, when we’d design a building, we’d only consider its immediate result, only fulfilled its immediate needs. With circular architecture, we have to begin with the end in mind.”

Supporting this outlook is the fact that, via “experimental” bank contracts and user agreements, manufacturers retain ownership of their products, thus making end-of-life sequencing (be it reuse, upcycling, or recycling) that much more streamlined. In effect, TCV is renting its parts.

To this day, many in the design community still use “sustainable” as a catchall for anything remotely green, renewable, or regenerative. Circular design, however, truly encapsulates what the sustainability label aspires to be: restorative, intelligent, and self-sustaining. As a proverbial kit of parts, TCV is designed to outlive itself.

BaF’s project page notes how TCV “transforms residents into integral parts of a shared local ecosystem, fostering a reconnection between people and nature and consumption with production.” Those ends are achieved through the village’s green roofs, composting, repair shop and co-sharing workspace, and a robust urban agriculture program and local farmers market, largely aided by aquaponics, in which waste produced by farmed fish and other aquatic life supplies critical nutrients for hydroponic farming, which in turn purifies water supplies.

The buildings that make up TCV are designed in carefully assembled layers, all fastened with nuts and bolts for easy disassembly, and with minimal use of composite materials, which can be difficult to recycle. Structural steel, cross-laminated timber, and a host of salvaged materials from pre-existing buildings and infrastructure that once occupied the TCV site are integral. “From structure to building envelope, all the way to the interior, each element has a coordinated module, similar to the Fibonacci Sequence we see in nature,” Kuo says, referring to the numerical sequence in which an element is the sum of its two preceding elements. “When you construct a building this way, the values of each element are retained through time.”

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• Residential

• Circularity
• Justin R. Wolf
• Studio Millspace
• Taiwan