Conference Agenda

This case study applies life-cycle assessment methods to the preliminary design of an office building in order to quantify the benefits achieved when reusing its load-bearing components. Results show that the production of the load-bearing system would account for 40% of the global warming potential indicator. The slabs are responsible for 65% of the environmental impacts among all structural elements and should be considered for reuse first. Compared to traditional constructions built from first-use material, a fictitious reuse of undamaged load-bearing components over three consecutive use cycles would reduce the global warming potential indicator by 25%. The global warming potential of reuse is eventually computed according to three repartition methods, highlighting the need to separate the life-cycle footprints related to production, use, and end-of-life more systematically.

The built environment is facing environmental regulations more ambitious than ever before. In Europe, a law will lead all new buildings to the Nearly Zero-Energy performance level. However, even if a building does not have any energy consumption for its operation phase, it still has embodied impacts. To that end, Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods have been developed and improved since the 1960s. However, LCAs are still not used as a standard practice among the architecture, engineering and construction industry. This study aims to discover the reasons for the low use of life-cycle performance approaches thanks to a web survey targeting practitioners, and to formulate key recommendations to improve their usability. This research reveals the low penetration rate of LCA software among building designers due to their limited efficiency within the design context. The main reasons for this situation are the cost of use, too heavy for the early design stage constraints, and the functionality, which is limited to the environmental assessment. Indeed, practitioners expect much more design support functionalities (multi-criteria approach, exploration mode, etc.). The survey findings aim to support the usability improvement of new LCA-based methods and the research and development of new tools at early design stages.

There is a growing consensus on the influences of heat waves and increased temperature as among the most threatening climate change phenomena to human mortality. In addition, the effect of heat waves is exacerbated significantly in cities as a result of urban heat islands effect. Such intensification of heat waves combined by potentially prolonged periods of extreme temperature will pose huge risks on human mortality in the built environment. Over the past decade, a number of metrics in literature have been developed to assess human thermal risks and their response to extreme climate conditions. However, most of these metrics take into account socioeconomic factors, housing characteristics and climatic risks without looking at the spatial characteristics across the city. Yet, the combination of these factors on an urban resolution haven’t been largely explored yet, specifically for vulnerable population with low access to adaptation resources and minimum potentials for ventilation. The paper presents the framework of an urban vulnerability index based on identifying parameters that correlate with thermal discomfort on urban block level and building level. The study analyzes a historical residential neighborhood in Cairo, Egypt to examine the applicability of the proposed index in understanding levels of vulnerability under extreme temperatures.

Buildings consume 33% of total energy (24% domestic and 9% commercial) in India and this is growing at 8% per annum hence, there is a need for energy efficiency in the building sector. The revised version of Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) was published in June 2017 after ten years. The new version of ECBC goes beyond minimum compliance and has two additional levels of ECBC ‘plus’ and ‘super’ which include prescriptive requirements and alternative performance goals based on energy use intensity. This paper assesses the energy savings and payback period for the prescriptive of ECBC-2017, minimum compliance, plus and super levels for an office building in Vishakhapatnam. It also demonstrates alternative cost optimized solutions for these three levels of ECBC. The office building is a real building in design stage according to the current construction trends that do not comply with previous ECBC version 2007 for all building systems. The availability & cost of equipment and material to reach the ECBC 2017 levels is are assessed with a market survey. Since ECBC 2017 is a new code that has yet to be adopted by local building departments, this study shows the energy benefits for ECBC minimum compliance, ECBC plus and ECBC super levels. Further, this paper also demonstrates how simulations can be used to find more cost-effective approaches to reach ECBC 2017 performance levels using the whole building compliance approach.