CircularBuild 2026, which focuses on the practicalities of reusing buildings and materials, will also include contributions from Bennetts Associates, Gothenburg and London-based White Architekter, Buckley Gray Yeoman, the City of London Corporation, and advocacy group Don’t Waste Buildings. It will be held at Convene in the City of London on Wednesday 16 September.
The event, now in its fifth year, is an evolution of the annual AJ Retrofit Live event, which was inspired by the AJ’s RetroFirst campaign for the reuse of existing buildings.
Landsec will be represented by its development director, Sophie Morgan, who will discuss its ambitious new campus in London’s Bankside, Timber Square with architect and Bennetts director Peter Fisher. The project, which delivers 365,000 sq ft of workspace, involves both the adaptation of a 1950s printworks into a 10-storey building and a 15-storey new-build believed to be the the largest hybrid building using steel and CLT in Europe.
Another speaker at CircularBuild will be Joel De Mobray of Yes Make and Tipping Point East in Newham, billed as the UK’s first dedicated circular construction hub. De Mobray will be discussing London’s progress in ‘closing the CircularBuild loop’ with Tessa Devreese of ReLondon. Later in the day, he will join the event’s co-host, Duncan Baker-Brown, in an audience-led session on the practical reality of specifying circular materials at every stage of a project. Topics will include: ‘where the decision needs to happen, how planning helps or hinders it, and what it takes to design with what is available, rather than what is ordered’.
Mace will be discussing its involvement in 30 Duke Street, St James’s, as a major contractor.
The project, designed by Make Architects, includes the largest re-use steel frame for a commercial office in the UK, alongside reused Portland stone, granite and marble. Mace operations director Salvatore Capotosto will give a warts-and-all account of the lessons learnt on the project and what the design process needs to look like from the outset for material reuse at this scale to be deliverable.
The event’s keynote speakers are OMA partner Reinier de Graaf and Pritzker prizewinner and Grafton Architects’ director Shelley McNamara.
In response to feedback from Retrofit Live attendees, this year’s event also features more interactive sessions, with four workshops taking place over the course of the day.
CircularBuild takes place on 16 September at 155 Bishopsgate, London. To view the full list of speakers and to book,
click here