Breaking Ground: How Automation Paves the Way for Sustainable Building

I have always been keenly interested in sustainability and the readaptation of buildings. As a young architect, getting into sustainability and working on LEED projects gave me early exposure to a wide variety of projects and perspectives that are still useful today.

By working with owners directly on the design side as an architect and consulting on green building certification work, I’ve seen up close how people actually approach sustainability, in both the documentation and achievement process.

The challenges that affect the industry in terms of different project types and different goals are extremely complex. And yet there are universal comparisons that exist between projects of just how you approach sustainability within a project.

Blue Ocean’s mission is to make the whole sustainability journey easier and more accessible so that people can get real time information earlier in the process to help leverage better outcomes for the whole industry as opposed to just the premier projects that can afford a deluxe consultant.

The company is intently focused on solving the challenges that individuals in the design and construction industry face and providing solutions that help them actually implement sustainability.

While there’s plenty more work to be done on sustainability on both the construction and design sides, we can look at how automation is removing barriers to sustainable building. 

Sustainability in Design

From a sustainability perspective, design automation results in a better quality of outcome, and a better value provided to clients, because designers can actually spend their time where it's meaningful. For example, maybe you can spend less time doing bathroom elevations if they're all the same, or if you are specifying the same standard materials over and over again.

When architects can rapidly conduct simulations and evaluate different design scenarios, they can focus on the experiential and premier spaces.

If they can create options easily by moving Lego pieces around to get them to fit together in the footprint, architects can do those studies early to come up with their initial layout. This new approach allows them to more easily model and analyze multiple options. They leapfrog farther and faster into the design process to have deliverables done sooner.

We’ve discussed in an earlier blog the business impacts of automation.

The implications on sustainable design are equally transformative. Design automation can improve outcomes. With an earlier engineering simulation, architects can make some key decisions earlier so that they don't get locked into a bad decision they have to live with. They can predict and actively modify the designs based on different parameters, rather than merely verifying results after the fact. When designers have more room to embrace an owner’s mission and goals, it opens up more opportunities for incorporating sustainable design. It’s no longer too much work to redo it.

Sustainability in Construction

Construction is inherently carbon intensive. According to BuildingGreen.com, construction emissions account for up to 30% of upfront embodied carbon of a building.

Measuring the Inherently Wasteful Construction Process

Measuring the sustainability of buildings is certainly a hot topic. As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

For some buildings, construction can take years, using massive amounts of energy and water and generating millions of tons of construction waste. By and large, no one is tracking the carbon impact of the construction process itself in a meaningful way.

Tools for measuring a building’s operation and maintenance – such as LEED – are commonly used. And the embodied carbon of building materials is becoming more widely tracked as they factor into Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions reporting. But the carbon footprint of the construction process itself deserves continued attention.

Tracking Construction Site Energy and Water Use, Waste Generation and Disposal

Because embodied carbon measurement of the construction process (scope A4 – A5) is so inconsistent, some contractors think they’re doing it even if they are not.

A true measure would focus on the specific job site. But most carbon measures from manufacturers are generalized averages based on shipping destinations. For example, a site in Boston gets the same embodied carbon number from a window manufacturer based in New York as a site in Los Angeles. The sites are getting either a larger carbon cost, or a smaller one.

We need to stop guessing. Tools that track construction site energy use, water use, and waste generation and disposal practices can give accurate metrics and improve sustainability.

The current inertia in adopting such an approach stems, in part, from the fact that contractors aren't incentivized to focus on embodied carbon.

When contractors get recognized and rewarded for having sustainable electrical equipment on site or for buying from local suppliers, they will make decisions more in line with sustainable principles.

We’re nearing a time where ‘bolt-on’ sustainability is a thing of the past. New measurement tools and automations – like Skema and TrueCarbon – are giving us new opportunities for truly integrated design across disciplines. I remain focused on driving the industry to make more progress in these areas.

Is your firm adopting new tools in order to shift toward holistic design practices? Email us at info@blueoceanaec.com