Publications by Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

Plane Reciprocal Diagrams

James Clerk Maxwell is one of the giants of scientific thought, and whilst his groundbreaking contributions to electromagnetism and statistical physics are well known, his profound insights into the theory of structures are appreciated less widely. Maxwell ...

Cambridge University Press2025

A standardized method to assess the reuse potential of building components

Maléna Bastien Masse, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

This paper presents a standardized assessment method to evaluate the reuse potential of building components, addressing the construction industry's need for sustainable resource management. The procedure relies on basic data about the assessed building, wi ...

CRC Press2025

An extensive database of Swiss building structures to predict the availability of materials and components

Maléna Bastien Masse, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

Predicting the availability and quantities of reusable components and recyclable materials is one of the challenges of a wider implementation of circular economy practices in construction. A detailed knowledge of the composition of past and current buildin ...

CRC Press2025

Pedagogy of an interdisciplinary, hands-on workshop to design and build floor systems with reused materials

Peter Zurbrügg, Maléna Bastien Masse, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

This paper reflects on the pedagogy used for a series of student workshops on building with reused materials at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and presents the results of its 7 th edition, which focused on floor systems. During these w ...

CRC Press2025

The persistent practice of reuse in the modern era: A survey of francophone advertising in Switzerland from 1851 to 1968

Maléna Bastien Masse, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

This study examines the persistent, though often overlooked, practice of material reuse in francophone Switzerland, exploring advertisements from 1851 to 1968 that illustrate a continuous and practical approach to reclaiming construction materials. These a ...

CRC Press2025

Analysis and Synthesis of Existing Procedures Used to Determine the Reuse Potential of Building Elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

Amid escalating concerns over CO2 emissions, resource depletion, and waste generation in construction, reusing building elements from obsolete structures presents a sustainable solution. This paper critically reviews 21 procedures used in Europe and the Un ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2025

New tectonics of concrete through rubble reuse

Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Stefana Parascho

Driven by the sustainability of the construction industry, concrete rubble is increasingly considered as a construction material rather than a waste. Analysing structures from such material through the conceptual tool of tectonics highlights a fertile grou ...

CRC Press2025

Large Concrete Rubble as a New Structural Construction Material: Opportunities and Digital Processes for Load-Bearing Walls

Christophe Moser, Maléna Bastien Masse, Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

Concrete is amongst the most wasted materials on earth, mainly due to building demolitions. Currently, after a building’s end of life, concrete is crushed to be used as replacement gravel in new concrete mixes or for backfilling. Aiming to increase the cir ...

MDPI AG2025

Unraveling the architectural design process: A comprehensive study of challenges in designing with reused components

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

With increasing environmental problems such as resource scarcity, high CO₂ emissions, growing construction waste and biodiversity loss, the design strategy with reused components offers a much-needed sustainable solution. However, a radical shift in the co ...

CRC Press2025

Maximisation of the environmental performance of beams through the optimisation and comparison of different typologies

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Edisson Xavier Estrella Arcos, Noémie Isabelle Denise Riez

This study aims to enhance the Environmental Performance (EP) of structural elements focusing on isostatic beams to mitigate the construction sector’s impact. The objective of the study is to determine the optimum typology and geometry to maximize EP for a ...

Elsevier BV2025

Digital Inventory of Swiss Construction Systems (DISCS)

Maléna Bastien Masse, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

The Digital Inventory for Swiss Construction Systems is a database structure that provides detailed information on component attributes in as-built load-bearing and insulating layers of existing buildings. The first version of the dataset provides granular ...

Zenodo2025

Integrating constructability constraints into an equilibrium-aware grammar for generative structural design

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Ioannis Mirtsopoulos

Generating efficient structural forms, such as strut-tie models or reticulated steel structures, significantly relies on optimization methods that yield unique solutions, but with limited control over topology and force distribution. This paper presents a ...

CRC Press2025

Disused Concrete, Digital Acupuncture and Reuse

Maléna Bastien Masse, Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Stefana Parascho

Crushing concrete liberated from demolished buildings to provide recycled aggregate is argued to be a sustainable way of reducing material extraction. Yet, in these high‐energy processes, large amounts of new cement is often used, negating this as a low‐ca ...

Wiley2024

Concrete rubble as a new construction material: Panorama of applications to known structural typologies

Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Stefana Parascho

Concrete rubble is among the most wasted materials worldwide. In this paper, we present a panorama of the upcycling potential of disused concrete rubble as construction material for new low-carbon structures. We identify 15 existing structural applications ...

IASS2024

Designing Waste-Negative Floor Systems Made of Reused Saw-Cut Reinforced-Concrete Slab Elements

Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

Building demolitions are often triggered by reasons independent of their structural conditions, causing the disposal of large quantities of reinforced concrete in good condition. Today, this concrete is, at best, crushed into aggregates, causing the loss o ...

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH2024

Upcycling concrete rubble into masonry walls: Design and assessment of two prototypes built with digitally augmented tools

Maléna Bastien Masse, Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Stefana Parascho

Concrete rubble is currently a downcycled material whose upcycling remains under-explored and complex. This paper presents an accessible upcycling strategy to design and build slender structural masonry walls made from off-the-pile large demolition concret ...

Springer Nature Switzerland2024

Learning from North Americans: barriers and levers to reuse from practitioners' experiences

Maléna Bastien Masse, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Barbara Ludivine Justine Lambec

This study delves into the intricacies of building element reuse practices in North America, spanning the genesis, current practices, and future projections of the initiatives. Using a semi-structured interview method, 35 stakeholders representing diverse ...

Institute of Physics2024

Geometry-Driven Stock-Constrained Truss Design via Equilibrium-Based Structural Models

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Tao Sun

This paper presents a geometry-driven approach to form-finding with reused stock elements. Our proposed workflow uses a K-mean algorithm to cluster stock elements and incorporate their geometrical values early in the form-finding process. A feedback loop i ...

Springer2024

Reusability assessment of reinforced concrete components prior to deconstruction from obsolete buildings

Maléna Bastien Masse, Julie Rachel Devènes, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

A large part of building demolitions is motivated by purely socio-economic reasons. Hence, about-to-be-demolished structures, commonly made of reinforced concrete, very often present no or little degradation. When adaptive reuse of the entire building is n ...

2024

FLO:RE – A new floor system made of reused reinforced concrete and steel elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

Carefully extracting reinforced concrete (RC) elements from soon-to-be demolished structures and reusing them as load-bearing components is an emerging circular low-carbon alternative to building new structures. As floor construction typically accounts for ...

IABSE2024