In "Towards Half," a thesis-prep research studio taught by Kelly Doran, students were asked to consider what it would take to halve the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area's housing stock. Juliette chose to approach the problem by examining one of the humblest and most ubiquitous building materials available: the brick.

She began by studying a row of townhouses with brick facades, located in Toronto's Alexandra Park neighbourhood. When she delved into the history of the site she realized that before the townhouses were built there had been another brick structure on the site: a community housing building that was demolished to make way for the new construction. All the brick that had made up the cladding of that previous building had been smashed to pieces and likely buried in a landfill.

Analysis of the embodied energy in a townhouse. (Click here to view a larger version.)

An entirely new, functionally identical set of bricks had to be manufactured in order to create the new townhouses. Untold quantities of energy and natural resources had been expended to replace old bricks with new ones. All of the energy used in that process is now permanently embodied in the new structure. "Once you choose materials to build with, those carbon emissions are locked in place," Juliette says.

Juliette travelled the city in search of brick. (Click here to view a larger version.)

She became interested in the idea of preserving and reusing bricks as a means of reducing the amount of embodied energy in new buildings. "I started collecting a lot of reclaimed brick across the city," she says. "There is this latent system of material exchange where people, maybe just out of the goodness of their hearts, decide not to throw things in a demolition bin."

As a way of quantifying the way brick flows in and out of the Toronto area, Juliette researched brick manufacturers and calculated the shipping distance between their factories and Toronto's building sites. Using individual construction projects as examples, and taking into consideration the distance their bricks had to travel, she estimated the brick-related carbon emissions of each building. According to those estimates, producing a ton of new bricks creates 258 kilograms of carbon emissions, whereas building with the same amount of reclaimed brick produces only 2.7 kilograms.

A map showing the locations of clay deposits in Toronto. (Click here to view a larger version.)

Another important consideration was the age of each building. Juliette learned that the limestone-based mortar used in construction prior to 1950 is easy to remove, meaning older brick should, in theory, be reusable with a relatively small amount of effort. She analyzed the ages of buildings and found that large swaths of the city were built before 1960, suggesting widespread reuse potential.

Juliette's proposed brick cycle. (Click here to view a larger version.)

For her thesis project, Juliette is investigating ways of mobilizing community members and the homebuilding industry around systematic preservation and reuse of bricks. "A big hurdle to something like material reuse is the lack of instruction," she says. "The materials don't come with an instruction booklet like you'd get if you went to Home Depot and bought tiles."