Building Drift: Documenting On-Site Construction Adaptations Across Material Lifecycles

2026-06-17

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge in circular construction economies where on-site improvisations during the use of reclaimed materials often go undocumented, leading to loss of material provenance and hindering future reuse. Using the ReShelter timber pavilion as a case study, the work introduces the concept of “architectural drift” and establishes its taxonomic framework. It further develops Pentimento, a documentation tool that integrates video recording, 3D Gaussian splatting, and semantic modeling to enable spatiotemporal, semantically rich representation of discrepancies between design intent and as-built conditions. This approach uniquely facilitates visual traceability of material histories for diverse stakeholders, effectively lowering informational barriers and offering a scalable computational pathway to support collaborative construction, knowledge transfer, and sustainable reuse of reclaimed materials.

Abstract

In a circular economy for construction, reclaimed materials carry prior lives of use and go on to have post-lives in future buildings. Yet working with such materials introduces unpredictability that requires on-site improvisation, making their reuse challenging to document and scale across building lifetimes. Without documentation, the on-site adaptations that make construction with reclaimed materials possible leave collaborators, evaluators, and inheritors without the information they need to continue, assess, and reuse materials. We call the collective deviation of the physical state from the digital model through these adaptations "building drift." Through a case study, ReShelter, a reclaimed timber pavilion constructed in the forest, we develop a taxonomy for building drift that characterizes the collective deviation across building lifetimes: Tending the Site, Foraging for Fit, Interpreting the Material, Marking Measurements, and Coordinating Across Communities. To put our taxonomy for building drift into practice, we present Pentimento, a documentation tool that leverages video documentation and 3D Gaussian Splatting to spatially, temporally, and semantically represent on-site adaptations in relation to the designed model. Pentimento enables each stakeholder to navigate material histories in ways that reduce barriers to material reuse. Together, these contributions open pathways towards computational tools that support the on-site improvisation essential to construction with reclaimed materials, enabling more sustainable cycles of recovery, repair, and reuse.

Problem

• building drift
• reclaimed materials
• on-site adaptation
• construction documentation
• circular economy

Innovation

• building drift
• reclaimed materials
• 3D Gaussian Splatting
• on-site improvisation
• material reuse