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

Ritik BatraCornell Tech, Martin TamkeCITA, Royal Danish Academy, Tom Svilans2, Jan Hüls2, Amritansh KwatraIndependent, Steven J. JacksonCornell University, Thijs Roumen1, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen2

In the Proceedings of the Annual Conference for the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA'26)

Best Paper Award

preprint

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.

@article{batra2026building,  title={Building Drift: Documenting On-Site Construction Adaptations Across Material Lifecycles},  author={Batra, Ritik and Tamke, Martin and Svilans, Tom and Hüls, Jan and Kwatra, Amritansh and Jackson, Steven J and Roumen, Thijs and Thomsen, Mette Ramsgaard},  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.19609},  year={2026}}

Acknowledgements

We thank Carolyn-Nelle Preston Ichniowski, Lena Fritsch, Nadja Gaudillière-Jami, Katerina Toumpektsi, and Amin Adelzadeh for their insights during this project and Torben for sharing his wisdom, forest space, coffee, and offcuts with us. The ReShelter project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101019693).

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Contact

If you have questions about this work, contact Ritik Batra: ritik at infosci dot cornell dot edu