Universal Frames: Building an Industry for Reclaimed Structural Steel Part 2 Project 2019 Samuel Little Architectural Association London | UK Steel manufacture accounts for up to 9% of global carbon emissions. Production levels are rising year on year with around half going to the construction industry. Universal Frames is a viable UK strategy to build an industry for the ‘reuse’ of structural steel. For the last 150 years, structural steel has become an increasingly standardised, globalised product, which typically does not degrade with use. However in the UK its reuse rates are dropping in favour of recycling, a process of re-melting that comes at a much higher environmental cost.A new actor Universal Frames is proposed to counteract this trend. They are a stockholder, designer and fabricator specialising in reclaimed structural steel. The company’s rural new headquarters shows how design can deal strategically with disparate supply chains. The accompanying detailed business model demonstrates its feasibility. Expanding on ‘niche’ construction practices already present in agriculture, the project turns reclaimed structural steel into a social, economic and architectural opportunity, raising fundamental questions as to the point in which ideas of ‘material supply’ and ‘architectural culture’ should meet.Universal Frames demonstrates that by proactively engaging in notions of constraint and contingency, architecture can address urgent social and ecological questions on its own terms. Tutor(s) Lionel Devlieger Aude-Line Duliere Maarten Gielen