Background
With the world's building stock expected to double by 2060, Buchan is dedicated to designing and delivering sustainable buildings that benefit the planet and people.
Embodied Carbon is the carbon emissions associated with the production, transportation, and construction processes of building materials. Unlike operational carbon, which can be improved throughout a building’s lifecycle, embodied carbon is ‘locked in’ once a building is constructed. Early-stage decisions about a building’s form, structure, and primary materials have a particularly outsized impact on its embodied carbon.
With Autodesk Forma’s embodied carbon tool, Buchan can now visualize, measure, and report on the embodied carbon of our building designs.
The tool
This analysis shows the embodied carbon impact of your buildings in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or tCO2e. It can run on any number of buildings, regardless of the site limit, in 1-10 seconds and uses the C.Scale data model, developed by EHDD. Review the technical documentation here.
Workflow steps
Step 1: Design your building geometries.
Step 2: Define the Building program, envelope cladding type, and primary structural system.
Step 3 - Run the analysis and take note of the result. This is now your baseline.
Step 4 - Design multiple alternatives that outperform the baseline, each with varying levels of ambition. In my experience, subdividing a large building into smaller adjacent buildings using different materials and technical approaches can be highly effective. keep in mind that Forma will consider adjoining buildings as a single entity when calculating facade and MEP requirements.
Step 5- Collaborate with the project team to explore various alternatives and establish a clear goal. Ensure that each alternative is accompanied by references to the specific construction solutions assigned. Additionally, provide examples of facades that illustrate how the window-to-wall ratio you’ve determined appears in practice. Keep in mind that facades with limited daylight access or those exposed to excessive or insufficient sunlight may require distinct solutions.
Step 6 - Present trade-offs and recommendations to the project owner. Securing shareholder buy-in on sustainable targets is more likely when the team introduces data and solutions early in the project agenda.
Conclusion
Buchan can now understand, test, and document the embodied carbon within our building designs. By applying material-specific environmental data directly to design geometry in Forma we can now make informed data-driven decisions earlier in the design phase, enabling us to have more informed conversations with our clients around the design of their buildings.
These conversations are now supported by real-world data and metrics that visualize the outcomes and the impact of decisions around material selection, primary and secondary structure choices and design, proposed lifespan, and more. Autodesk Forma visualizes embodied carbon results through simple color coding in-scene, along with allowing you to see a systematic breakdown of embodied carbon values across the envelope, structure, MEP, and interiors.
The embodied carbon tool has empowered our designers with more information than ever before to start designing with sustainable outcomes in mind. Having access to this tool and the embodied carbon data early on helps Buchan make better and more informed choices early in the project with our clients, where decisions can have the highest impact and lowest cost
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