Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making buildings the leading cause of climate change. To incentivize more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and maximum energy use. However, they currently only reward energy efficiency measures such as equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and Singapore. Automatically generated floorplans for a case study in Zurich further increase access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in terms of environmental performance and access to daylight.
Cellulose, chitin, and pectin are three of the most abundant natural materials on Earth. Despite this, large-scale additive manufacturing with these biopolymers is used only in limited applications and frequently relies on extensive refinement processes or plastic additives. We present novel developments in a digital fabrication and design approach for multimaterial three-dimensional printing of biopolymers. Specifically, our computational and digital fabrication workflow-sequential multimaterial additive manufacturing-enables the construction of biopolymer composites with continuously graded transitional zones using only a single extruder. We apply this method to fabricate structures on length scales ranging from millimeters to meters. Transitional regions between materials created using these methods demonstrated comparable mechanical properties with homogenous mixtures of the same composition. We present a computational workflow and physical system support a novel and flexible form of multimaterial additive manufacturing with a diverse array of potential applications.
Almost 40% of global carbon emissions can be attributed to the building sector (Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction 2019). This makes the built environment both a challenge and an opportunity in terms of mitigating climate change. To further understand the implications of global carbon budgets on buildings, housing policy and development, we present an interactive model for carbon emissions from buildings between 2020 and 2050. In our simulation, the user initially chooses one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Shared Socioeconomical Pathways (SSP) to define a global carbon budget until 2050. Based on this choice, our model presents three alternative scenarios. The "Business as usual" scenario assumes a constant 1% renovation rate for existing buildings and usage of current building standards for new construction. The "Net Zero Operational Carbon" scenario assumes that all new buildings will become net zero in their operation after a user-defined transition period. Finally, the "Net Zero Operational Carbon and Embodied Carbon" scenario assumes that new buildings will become Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) in terms of both, operational and embodied carbon from construction also following a user-defined transition period. For all three scenarios, the model assumes a linear decarbonization of the electric grid until 2050 and current annual emissions of 14.8 GtCO2 for buildings. Global floor areas and operational emissions are based on projections by the International Energy Agency (IEA) (Wörsdörfer et al. 2019). In our research, we find that the retrofit rate must be increased substantially from today's 1% to around 4-5% and new buildings must be built in a net zero standard by 2040 to meet the climate goals for any SSP. Next to operational carbon emissions, we show how the embodied carbon of buildings has a significant impact on the carbon budget, contributing between 14-46% to building-related carbon emissions by 2050, and is therefore key in achieving net zero building stock.
This paper will discuss and explore the impact of creating a new architecture-specific, distributed robotic system for the in situ assembly of timber structures. The system developed is composed of multiple collaborative, single-axis robotic nodes designed to utilize standardized timber struts as a building material and for its locomotion system. The material is therefore not only used in the final built structure but forms an integral part of the robotic system, minimizing its size, weight, and complexity. By codesigning custom robotic builders together with their material assembly system, the tectonic logics and spatial expression of the possible structures are a direct expression of the robotic configuration and building behaviors of the system. The spatial expressions of the proposed robotic system expose new possibilities for timber-based architecture in both design and construction.
Abstract Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making buildings the leading cause of climate change. To incentivize more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and maximum energy use. However, they currently only reward energy efficiency measures such as equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and Singapore. Automatically generated floorplans for a case study in Zurich further increase access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in terms of environmental performance and access to daylight.
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