Three essential steps for achieving architectural sustainability
The climate crisis creates new challenges for the architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) sectors, which must ensure emerging technologies are being adopted to help build a more sustainable future.
The UK Green Building Council estimates that 25% of UK emissions are attributed to the built environment. And while we can build efficient new buildings, the greater challenge is posed by making current buildings more efficient - particularly given 80% of the buildings which will be occupied in 2050 already exist.
The AEC sectors are now being tasked with addressing this immediate need to decarbonise existing stock and reduce energy demand in our buildings. And following an interesting discussion as part of Architecture Today’s webinar on Digital Transformation in Practice last month, we identified three key ways that the sectors are pursuing sustainability:
Adapting working practices
The UK has committed to reducing emissions by 78% by 2035 (compared with 1990 levels) and achieving net zero by 2050. This is influencing organisations’ working practices and how they approach building design. WSP is one leading firm that has recognised this need to adapt and, in turn, has introduced a host of new structural and building services with the aim of delivering net zero strategies and solutions.
Changing materials
Building materials play a significant role in overall energy efficiency and carbon footprint. And while the construction industry has had relative success in reducing the operational carbon of a building (the carbon emitted during the operational phase), Luka Stefanovic from Vectorworks advised that the AEC sectors still need to tackle embodied carbon, which is associated with the CO2 emitted when producing the building materials. Unlike operational carbon, this can only be assessed before the building is constructed and must be an active consideration during the design process.
Embracing technology (but being informed!)
It’s important that the AEC sectors don’t look at their sustainability efforts solely in the context of their clients. Architects are now looking at their own operations and considering how digital transformation could help them reduce their own environmental impact. Particularly given the dependency on software with high-compute and graphical requirements, like CAD and 3D modelling, as high-performance software is approximately 8 times more energy-intensive than general-purpose computing.
This software has traditionally been run from physical workstations and in many cases will represent a significant proportion of an architect studio’s overall energy consumption. Hosted solutions now present a more sustainable alternative when using these energy-intensive tools. For example, when run using the Inevidesk hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), architectural software is powered on virtual machines with much lower power usage and with 100% renewable energy at our data centre.
The industry is also certainly going to be looking towards AI to help process the increasing amounts of data required to properly assess the vast array of information relating to the construction and use of our buildings and wider environment. We should expect to see rapid development in this area over the coming months and years. Though in doing so, we should bear in mind the – current – colossal resources required by large AI models which would need to be factored into any equation.
Building a more sustainable future
The future of our built environment must have environmentally sustainable foundations. Speaking on Architecture Today’s webinar on Digital Transformation in Practice, it was encouraging to hear how others in the AEC sectors are similarly looking forward and thinking about what role they can play in addressing the environmental crisis. And I believe that if we can look at this issue holistically – from the way we power high-compute design software to the materials and practices we use – then we can make some important steps forward in reducing our shared carbon footprint.