Patricia Schneider-Marin

Norwegian University of Science and Technology | NTNU · Architecture and Technology

While the reduction of operational greenhouse gas emissions is prioritized for the existing building stock, embodied emissions dominate the environmental impact of newly constructed buildings that fulfil zero emission standards. One option to reduce embodied emissions is the use of biogenic materials in construction. However, this usually requires...

The decarbonisation of the construction sector is critical to meet national and international climate goals. Literature gives many examples of measures for the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from buildings. However, few studies investigate the trade-offs between potentially conflicting GHG emission reduction measures or the affordabili...

*Aim and Approach*Geographical locations can significantly impact the economic viability of building upgrading strategies. Previous research into environmental and economic assessments has yielded conflicting results regarding whether decarbonization measures result in additional expenditures or cost savings. To address this issue, the cost-benefit...

Embracing the design for disassembly (DfD) mindset when constructing new and renovating existing buildings is a promising means of achieving our climate targets and putting the circular economy principles in practice, as promoted in the European Green Deal. Current greenhouse gas emissions’ accounting frameworks only deal with DfD to a certain exte...

To make use of the great opportunities for emission reduction in early building design, future emissions need to be calculated when only geometric, but no detailed material information about a building is available. Currently, early design phase life cycle assessments (LCAs) are heavily reliant on assumptions of specific material choices, leading t...

Resource scarcity and global warming call for ambitious strategies in the construction sector to meet the ever-growing demand for indoor spaces with minimal resource consumption and positive environmental impacts. In line with the need to introduce circular economy in the construction sector, the German Public Sustainability Certification System (B...

The results of a life cycle assessment of five recently finished housing projects in Northern Germany - all of them part of two certified climate protection neighbourhoods - point out the necessity of combining a variety of different carbon reduction approaches in order to reach carbon neutrality. The analysis presented here focuses on both, embodi...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become the standard method to evaluate environmental impact throughout the life cycle of buildings. However, detailed data about the future building as well as knowledge about the mutual influence of decisions concerning the various disciplines involved are often missing in early design phases, otherwise known to bea...

The construction and building sector, responsible for 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is undergoing a fundamental digital transformation enabled by Building Information Modelling (BIM). Integrating life cycle assessment (LCA) in digital building design processes enables early evaluation of embodied impacts. This connection offers opportunit...

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector has great potential and responsibility for reducing its considerable resource consumption and high share of global emissions.However, economic factors are often cited as barriers to more environmentally friendly solutions inbuilding design. Hence, environmental and economic life cycle asse...

With increasing environmental damage and decreasing resource availability, sustainability assessment in the building sector is gaining momentum. A literature review shows that the related methods for environmental and economic performance, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC), show great potential for answering a multitude of qu...

manavmahan.singh@kuleuven.be 2,3,4 {patricia.schneider|hannes.harter|w. lang}@tum.de 5 geyer@tu-berlin.de The reduction of energy consumption of buildings requires consideration in early design phases. However, modelling and computation time required for dynamic energy simulations makes them inappropriate in the early phases. This paper presents a...

Purpose Building life cycle assessment (LCA) draws on a number of indicators, including primary energy (PE) demand and global warming potential (GWP). A method of constructing a composite index of weighted individual indicators facilitates their use in comparisons and optimization of buildings, but a standard for weighting has not been established....

The early stages of building design involve the consideration of different design variants and their assessment regarding various performance criteria including energy consumption and costs. During the design process, the involved experts from different disciplines frequently exchange building information to develop a design that satisfies the proj...

With current efforts to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of buildings in the operational phase, the share of embedded energy (EE) and embedded GHG emissions is increasing. In early design stages, chances to influence these factors in a positive way are greatest, but very little and vague information about the fut...

Ziel des Bauprojekts ist die Entwicklung eines integrativen Gesamtkonzepts zur Schaffung eines Bürogebäudes im KfW-Effizienzhaus 55-Standard, unter Verwendung unterschiedlicher Massivbauweisen und Lowtech-Lösungen. Die verschiedenen Massivbauweisen werden im Rahmen des Monitorings (Laufzeit Januar 2017 bis voraussichtlich Dezember 2018) auf Basis d...

During building design and especially in early stages, important decisions influencing the lifecycle-based energy demand of buildings are made. Life Cycle Energy Assessment (LCEA) is used to evaluate this energy demand already in early stages of design. However, at that point, the building design and the related information can quickly change and a...

A formalized building design process assumes that the design process is essentially linear with increased detailing of the design without essential changes or loops back to earlier design variants. BIM models follow this logic, i.e. they are used as if the model is increasingly detailed but not changed. However, the building design process is becom...

Waste from building and construction sector makes up for about half of the total waste. In order to reduce waste, future buildings shall be constructed in a way that they leave little to no waste behind at the end of their life time. In this work a new method to characterize buildings with respect to their deconstruction and recycling potential at...

To achieve a sustainable and energy efficient building sector and to comply with the EU climate targets (European Commission 2017), decision criteria in early planning phases have to be evaluated regarding ecological and economic impacts during the whole life cycle of a building. The research project ‘Design2Eco’ evaluates data from recent office b...

To increase the sustainability of buildings already in early design phases, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) should be integrated into Building Information Modelling (BIM). However, LCA and thus the calculation of embedded energy and greenhouse gases in early design phases can only be performed with a certain level of inaccuracy/uncertainty. This is cau...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) finds its application in many areas of today’s building sector. Calculations of building LCAs are based on extensive databases that deliver datasets for building materials and processes. As there is a need for high quality and validity of these datasets they have to be reviewed thoroughly. In this paper six databases are...

As the energy and resource consumption during building operation is declining, the influence of the construction and end of life phases on the overall consumption is increasing. This study examines primary energy (PE) demand and global warming potential (GWP) of six construction types in a life cycle analysis depending on the building class. The re...

Verbundprojekt: Im Rahmen eines interdisziplinären Projekts an der Technischen Universität München wurde die Kombination hochgedämmter nichttragender Fassadenelemente in Holzrahmenbauweise mit Stahlbetonbauweisen untersucht. Im Ergebnis bescheinigen die Ingenieurinnen und Ingenieure des Lehrstuhls für Holzbau und Baukonstruktion, des Lehrstuhls für...

The research project ’timber-frame façade elements for hybrid construction’ aims to close certain information gaps during the planning process of hybrid constructions. The goal of the project is the development of a construction catalogue, summarizing combination possibilities of highly insulated and prefabricated timber-frame elements with a reinf...

This investigation about the design process of an alpine hut shows the mutual impact of design decisions and environmental considerations using the Hochwildehaus in the Austrian Alps as an exemplary project. Different design strategies were compared in the light of the environmental impact of construction, maintenance, and disassembly of the buildi...