As a major driver of climate change, the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector must urgently embrace circular practices using natural and reclaimed materials. However, these materials often exhibit significant variability in quality and availability, making them unsuitable for the current AEC industry, which is based on a steady supply of highly uniform materials. 

The RAW project proposes a breakthrough resource model for AEC fostering a steep change in the way we design and fabricate our built environment, overcoming the fundamental limits that the natural variability sets within bio-based material streams for the green transformation of the industry.  With a central focus on the alternative materials of waste-sourced and fast-growing materials, RAW assembles world-leading researchers and entrepreneurs in material sourcing (University Innsbruck, Lulea Technological University, OMTRE A/S, University of Leiden), non-destructive material characterisation (Lulea Technological University, Danish Technological University), non-prescriptive computational design, and adaptive fabrication (CITA, University Of Stuttgart) in a unique consortium to establish the foundation of a novel new resource model for AEC linking design, analysis and fabrication through a novel computational infrastructure and embracing the variability of resources, with the ambition to minimise waste, enable circularity, increase carbon storage in building and allow uptake of currently disregarded classes of bio-based materials and pave the way for novel aesthetic expressions and tectonics in architecture.