Demolition is the default end for a building. In the United States, construction and demolition debris reached 600 million tons in 2018, twice the volume of household waste, and most of it was concrete crushed for road base or landfilled. The material had been designed to go together but never to come apart. The counter-argument dates to 1976: extend a product's life, and keep its maker responsible for its materials, so that the cost of taking a thing apart lands on whoever decided how it went together (Stahel, 1976). Take-back laws for cars and electronics in the 1990s forced manufacturers to design for disassembly. Architecture came to it later. The decision to demolish a building is usually made by someone who had no part in designing it.

Most of the method concerns the connections between components. Whether a component can be recovered depends on how it is fixed, what it is fixed to, and whether anyone wrote it down.

Brummen Town Hall (RAU Architects, 2013) was contracted as a temporary building: the timber extension is leased for 20 years, and the contractor keeps ownership of the materials and takes them back at the end of the term. Circl (de Architekten Cie., 2017) in Amsterdam combines a bolted timber frame with salvaged window frames and insulation made from 16,000 pairs of staff jeans, all recorded in a passport. The Kamikatsu Zero Waste Center (Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, 2020) sits in a town of 1,500 people that sorts its waste into 45 categories, and its facade is assembled from roughly 700 windows donated by residents. It shows urban mining and disassembly as one process: components recovered from one generation of buildings enter a structure designed to release them again. At product scale, the Fairphone 2 (2015) lets users replace screen, camera, and battery with one screwdriver and scores 10 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability index. IKEA's wedge dowel (2016) lets a table be assembled and taken apart repeatedly without tools; it is the most widely distributed reversible connection in the world.

DfD costs more at the start and pays out decades later, usually to someone else. The first owner pays for the hardware, design time, and documentation; the last owner collects the value of the recovered material. This split incentive, more than any technical difficulty, is why most buildings are still designed to be demolished. The fixes are contractual and regulatory. Leasing, as at Brummen, keeps materials on the manufacturer's balance sheet. The Netherlands has set a target of a fully circular construction sector by 2050, Denmark introduced embodied-carbon limits for new buildings in 2023, and right-to-repair laws in the European Union and in New York apply the same logic to products. Several practical barriers remain. Codes and warranties are written for new materials, so recovered structural elements must be tested again, and insurers have no loss data on reused components. A circular economy in construction needs regional fabricators, a form of distributed manufacturing, to absorb what buildings release. Design for disassembly makes reuse possible, but reuse also depends on the market, the regulations, and the records that surround a building.