Designing with Uncertainty: ReShelter Building for Reclamation

Designing with reclaimed materials introduces uncertainty as a persistent condition rather than a temporary lack of information. While circular construction increasingly relies on digital infrastructures for traceability and documentation, existing approaches often assume stable and comparable material information. This paper presents ReShelter, a full-scale reclaimed timber demonstrator, as a framework for designing with differentiated uncertainty in circular construction. The project combines heterogeneous timber resources, staged inspection strategies, adaptive design methods, robotic fabrication, and on-site documentation workflows. Four reclaimed timber streams from industrial, demolition, and waste sources, each with distinct levels of geometric complexity and available information, were integrated through source-specific representation and assessment methods. Rather than pursuing complete material characterisation, the workflow establishes fit-for-purpose confidence across design, fabrication, and assembly. Results show how uncertainty can be transformed into actionable constraints through adaptive joint systems, scan-based fabrication, and differentiated data models while retaining architectural flexibility and design intent. During assembly, LiDAR scanning, Gaussian splatting, and semantic annotation were used to document both geometric change and the reasoning behind on-site adaptations. By formalising workflows that valorise reclaimed materials rather than virgin resources, the paper proposes architectural methods that accommodate partial and evolving knowledge, supporting resilient, expressive, and resource-conscious circular building practices.