ArchDaily Explores the City as a Quarry for Housing Transformation

On October 26, 2026, ArchDaily published The City as a Quarry: Housing Transformation. The piece presents the existing city as a resource for new housing. The idea is to treat what is already built as material and space to work with, rather than starting from a cleared site.

aec+tech is covering the theme because it connects directly to how design and construction teams document, assess and reuse existing buildings. The details of specific projects or methods were not available to us, so this post focuses on the broader idea and what it asks of practice.

What the framing means

Calling the city a quarry reverses a familiar supply chain. Materials usually come from extraction sites, travel to a project and later leave as demolition waste. In this view, existing buildings become the first place a team looks for both material and floor area.

Applied to housing, the concept points toward transforming the existing stock: converting, extending and adapting buildings, and recovering components when parts of a structure have to come down. Each of those paths starts with knowing what is already there.

Where software fits

Work on existing buildings depends on accurate information about them. Many AEC teams already use tools that support this kind of work, including:

• Reality capture, such as laser scanning and photogrammetry, to record existing conditions.
• Scan-to-BIM workflows that turn point clouds into models a design team can work in.
• Model data and schedules that can track components, quantities and condition for possible reuse.
• Embodied carbon assessment to compare keeping, adapting or replacing building elements.

None of these tools is new. A reuse-first approach to housing changes how central they are, moving survey and inventory work from a preliminary task to a core input for design decisions.

What to watch

Transformation projects tend to expose gaps in data. Teams often lack reliable records of older buildings, and there is limited shared practice for describing salvaged components so another project can specify them.

Watch for growing interest in material inventories tied to models, better links between survey data and design tools, and procurement processes that can accept reclaimed elements. Whether the idea scales will depend partly on how well those pieces connect.

What it means for AEC teams

For architects and engineers, the city-as-quarry idea is a reminder that housing work increasingly starts with the existing building. Firms that can capture conditions quickly and turn them into usable models will be better placed for conversion and adaptation projects.

For BIM managers and software buyers, it is a prompt to review how existing-conditions data moves through the firm. Reality capture, modeling and carbon tools deliver more value when the information flows between them instead of sitting in separate files.