RAW x Puuster symposium

RAWxPuuster symposium: Designing Beyond Standardisation: The Costs of Circularity

Circularity and regenerative use of waste-stream materials are increasingly positioned as key drivers in architecture, engineering, and construction. Yet their implementation unfolds through diverse material practices and technological approaches—from reclaimed timber and damaged wood streams to biogenic residues and computationally enabled design systems.

Across these domains, fundamental questions emerge around how variable, non-standard materials can be sourced, qualified, and brought into use—and how they can be reliably assessed and transformed into viable building systems. At the same time, the challenge extends beyond material techniques to questions of scale, implementation, and context: how such approaches can be embedded within existing regulatory, certification, and market frameworks, brought from prototype into practice, and how they can align with specific cultural, societal, and economic conditions?

The RAWxPuuster symposium brings together leading researchers from across Europe with the Estonian Puuster initiative to exchange approaches to these questions. Combining expertise in timber, biogenic materials, computational design, and material systems, it creates a platform for comparing methods, infrastructures, and paths to implementation.

Structured in three modules—Sourcing & material qualification, Transformation & performance, and Embedding into society & economy—the symposium follows the trajectory of materials through the value chain. It addresses questions of quality, performance, standards, and cost, situating circularity as a shared but differentiated field of practice across contexts.