Parametric Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings

With the built sector’s responsibility for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, there is pressure and urgency to drastically reduce both the embodied and operational carbon in the buildings that we design as architects and engineers. The study of Life Cycle Assessment has allowed us to understand the whole-life environmental impacts of the materials that we select. However, with myriad design considerations (from climate zone, to building typology, to client requirements) and intricacies (which concrete mix to choose, how to space your structural bays, which glazing system to choose, which refrigerant to choose) comparative benchmarking studies have continually fallen short in explaining the decisions that lead to lower overall whole-life carbon scores.

During this course, we will approach Life Cycle Assessment from an object-oriented, computational perspective by utilizing BHoM Life Cycle Assessment Toolkit. BHoM (Buildings and Habitats open Model) is an open-source platform that is rooted in an object-oriented approach, serving as a common language between software platforms allowing seamless interoperability between building modelling and analysis. We will access this functionality by assessing Revit and Rhino models via both Grasshopper (visual programming) and Excel.

This object-oriented approach allows the physical assessment of building elements (mass, area, volume), a similar break down of the environmental attributes of the element’s material via an Environmental Product Declaration object, as well as the evaluation of Life Cycle Assessment metrics like Global Warming Potential (embodied carbon.)

When our building elements are evaluated through this lens, we are then able to produce pointed delta evaluations by element or scope (structures, foundations, enclosures, interiors or MEP) over a period of time via the BHoM Diffing Engine. This approach when applied to benchmarking allows meaningful comparison of projects by scope (if a project does not include MEP, exclude that scope from comparison in overall kgCO2e/m2 values.)

The approach of Life Cycle Assessment, when paired with structured objects and data can lead to many valuable insights for the building industry. Particularly when applied to problems like identifying forced labor in our building material supply chains or identifying the most harmful materials in our buildings when it comes to the health of the building occupants.