Architecturally versatile

When she was a child, 38-year-old Daniela Schneider’s Barbie doll lay unloved in the corner. She preferred playing with Lego. The fire station was one of her favorite building projects with the small plastic bricks. And now, nearly three decades later, she is building another fire station – this time a real one – for the volunteer fire service in the small Swabian town of Straubenhardt.

Although bigger and a real building, the construction project has basic features in common with her 1980s Lego model. For example, it comprises a sort of kit, and the individual parts are not permanently connected anywhere, so that theoretically the fire station could be completely dismantled into its constituent parts. Why? Because it is sustainable. All materials used in the building can be separated and sorted by type, and then reused at the end of the period of use.

Cradle to Cradle® (C2C) is the name of the concept behind this approach, which imitates nature by having closed material cycles. This approach is used, for example, in the textile, cosmetics and packaging industries – as well as in the construction industry. Daniela Schneider is the C2C specialist at EPEA GmbH – Part of Drees & Sommer. “In the construction industry, C2C means that all buildings are designed to prevent any degradation of the quality of constituent materials, allowing them to be reused at the end of their service life. This turns buildings into raw material repositories,” she says. In addition, hazardous building materials are avoided wherever possible.

Schneider has been interested in sustainable construction since it first emerged around 2009. The focus in construction had initially only been on cost and functionality, and then on energy efficiency. “When raw materials are scarce, we need to design buildings so that the materials can be reused and given a new lease of life,” explains Schneider. Since 2016, she has been supporting construction projects at Dreso all the way from the first draft design to acceptance. It’s this all-round involvement that appeals to her most about her job. And she also enjoys the freedom at Dreso. “I can think outside the box and take a maverick approach,” she says. Even as a kid building with Lego, that’s what she loved to do. “I only ever built each model once according to the instructions.” After that, she experimented with her miniature towns.

In addition to project support, Daniela Schneider publishes articles and papers on C2C, gives specialist lectures, sits on various committees of the German Society for Sustainable Building (DGNB), and lectures at HFT Stuttgart (University of Applied Sciences). “Students are a little taken aback in the beginning when I ask what reversible concepts they have included in their designs.” That’s because education, too, tends to focus on the design aspect. “But architecture and sustainable construction are not mutually exclusive,” says Schneider confidently. And the best proof of that is taking shape in Straubenhardt.