Victor Bunster

• PhD, MPhil, Architect
• PostDoc Position at Monash University (Australia)

Ensuring access to quality social housing is a major challenge for developing countries. The problems of standardized mass housing are well-known. However, this type of provision is ubiquitously used for its advantages when addressing pressing shortages, often resulting in significant mismatches between the attributes of the housing and the require...

Economic growth often results in an increased demand for energy and resources. This is the case of Chile, a country that although has managed to become a leading economy in the South American region, is still strongly dependent on extractive industries and imported fossil fuels. In this context, the Chilean building sector is one of the largest con...

The Circular Economy (CE) approach to the built environment gathers growing interest from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. However, there needs to be more clarity and consensus on the concept formulation, principles, strategies, and actions that define CE in building. The lack of conceptual clarity hinders progress in the field. This pape...

The building and construction industry contributes to 37% of global annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In comparison to year 2020, global building operations related carbon emissions showed an increment of 5%. In 2015, the Paris Agreement was put in action, with global leaders pledging to limit global temperature increase below 1.5C

Regenerative design (RD) is an approach to creating positive change in the built environment rather than reducing its negative impacts. RD focuses its design work on improving the relationship between humans, places, and ecosystems. It also proposes fundamental paradigm shifts that promise to address the urgent climatic and biodiversity crises. Whi...

Buildings contribute close to 40% of the global annual energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, all emissions need to halve by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive, holistic, and systemic approach to quantify the environmental impacts of a building. Built...

Purpose Climate change, environmental concerns, and economic problems pose challenges to the construction sector in Iran, which must provide affordable solutions while addressing environmental issues. Hence, natural earthen building materials are critically needed to reduce energy-intensive and costly construction practices dramatically. The purpos...

The productivity of the construction industry has lagged behind other sectors for decades, hindered by the linear and fragmented processes of traditional building activities (Aitchison et al., 2018). Among the main causes of such fragmentation is the one-off project-based approach of traditional construction that isolates the design and the constru...

The global sustainability movement has developed a variety of new design and building methodologies. Regenerative Design (RD) focuses on understanding the dynamic relationship between people, a place and ecosystems. By weaving together the natural and social systems, RD maximises humans' and nature's creativeness and abundance. Projects are not see...

Esta investigación evalúa los impactos energéticos y medioambientales asociados a distintos escenarios de rehabilitación energética de los bloques CORVI 1020, edificios emblemáticos de vivienda social construidos en gran número en Chile entre 1968 y 1978.

The construction industry has benefited from the recent methodological advancements in Computational Design (CD) and its associated technological developments. However, the multifaceted challenges faced by the construction industry have limited its capacity to achieve global sustainability goals. In this context, Industrialized Building (IB) has op...

As the construction industry shifts towards more systematised methods of designing and delivering buildings, data-informed approaches towards product development, evaluation, and selection promise to enable improved performance (structural, acoustic, fire, environmental), material efficiencies, and ease of production while maintaining the highest q...

The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) simulation tool is the only authorized software in Australia for the Passivhaus (PH) certification. Despite its key role in this certification scheme, previous studies have reported significant gaps between the simulated and actual performance. To address this limitation, this study introduces a bottom-up a...

The construction industry has benefited from the recent methodological advancements in Computational Design (CD) and its associated technological developments. However, the multifaceted challenges faced by the construction industry have limited its capacity to achieve global sustainability goals. In this context, Industrialized Building (IB) has op...

Cities are complex sociotechnical systems, of which buildings and infrastructure assets (built stocks) constitute a critical part. As the main global users of primary energy and emitters of associated greenhouse gases, there is a need for the introduction of measures capable of enhancing the environmental performance of built stocks in cities and m...

A significant share of the global housing stock lacks minimum residential quality standards. This has prompted the emergence of schemes aimed at meeting the needs of current occupants and country-specific carbon targets. Energy retrofitting, in this context, is a cornerstone for initiatives aimed at improving the indoor environmental quality of res...

Energy retrofitting yields great potential as a means to reduce the environmental loadings of buildings; however, the scope of these measures is often limited to the operational stage of buildings. This study contributes to the development of more comprehensive approaches to energy retrofitting by quantifying the life cycle energy loadings of diffe...

The construction industry is an important driver for economic growth, but it is also a major contributor to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. A plethora of sustainable design tools and rating schemes have been developed in an attempt to improve the environmental performance of buildings. Regardless of their increasing adoption by the...

Hybrid embodied energy coefficients for Chilean construction materials [MJ/Kg]

Currently, less than 2% of the residential building stock in Chile meets minimum of thermal performance conditions while the current approach to social housing development has proved incapable of ensuring appropriate living standards. Demolishing housing blocks to replace them with new buildings is economically inefficient, environmentally damaging...

Current models to quantify environmental performance in the built environment are flawed as they typically focus either on one scale of the built environment (e.g. buildings), on a limited range of environmental flows (e.g. energy), or a particular life cycle stage (typically building use). There is a need to develop a more comprehensive model to a...

Binary concordance matrix for Chilean national energy balance and input-output industry sectors 2013. Based on the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) and Chilean methodological documents.

Work in progress. Unit = MJ/kg

Energy satellite for Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis (EEIOA) of Chilean industry sectors.

Compilation of publicly available embodied environmental flows (energy, CO2 and water) for Chilean building materials extracted from environmental product declarations (EPDs) and research projects. Work in progress, more details to be published.

The Chilean social housing program is a highly structured system of incentives and rules that although successful in meeting quantitative goals has neglected the quality of its outcomes. Over time, initiatives based upon user participation and self-help action have been disregarded to favour the efficiency of a housing delivery system in which mass...

In Chile, about 20% of the energy is consumed by the residential sector. There is consensus in the country that the thermal performance standards for housing are extremely low, explaining the high amount of energy that is currently used for space heating. Nowadays, firewood accounts for close to 50% of this consumption. The high share of this fuel...

Chau, Hing-wah, Victor Bunster and Masa Noguchi. ‘Courtyard Environmental Performance Analysis of Yung Ho Chang’s Split House.’ ZEMCH 2016 International Conference Proceedings. Edited by Arman Hashemi. Brighton: University of Brighton, 2017, 209-221. (ISBN: 978-967-11236-9-0).

In this book, leading international experts explore the emerging concept of the zero energy mass custom home (ZEMCH) – designed to meet the need for social, economic, and environmental sustainability – and provide all of the knowledge required for the delivery of zero energy mass customized housing and community developments in developed and develo...

This paper responds to calls for comparative urban research (Dear, 2005; McFarlane, 2010; McFarlane & Robinson, 2012; Robinson, 2004, 2006) that bridges traditional divides between regions, political spectrums and wealth profiles (Robinson 2011). It draws comparisons from cities in South America and Australia to analyse the planning concept of soci...

It is a major challenge in developing countries to ensure access to quality social housing. Standardised mass housing is still ubiquitously used when addressing pressing shortages, regardless of well-documented problems with this form of provision. Although strategies based upon participation and self-help action may offer significant benefits, the...

Climate change accompanied by global warming issues necessitates that homes are more environmentally friendly in production and operation, while the drastic hike in energy costs and increasing socio-economic diversity demand housing that is more affordable and more customisable than ever before. Homes need to address social, economic and environmen...

Ensuring quality in affordable housing remains a major challenge for both developed and developing countries. Residential quality can be explained as the capacity of a dwelling to meet the specific needs and preferences of its occupants, a condition that is often associated with the high costs of custom buildings. This chapter introduces the notion...

Recent initiatives towards the reduction of domestic energy consumption largely depend upon the availability of thorough information to enable focalised interventions and a posteriori impact assessment. This is a significant issue in developing countries, as informality of fuel markets and lack of intelligent technologies can undermine the capacity...

The earth is experiencing the adverse effect of climate change. In response to growing global warming issues and the constant increase of energy prices, house-builders and housing manufacturers today are becoming more responsive to the delivery of net zero energy and carbon dioxide emission sustainable homes than ever. Within this context, the sust...

Recent initiatives towards improving residential conditions of Chilean social housing largely depend on self-help personalisation as means to facilitate greater coherence between the needs of different households and the characteristics of their dwellings. Although self-construction is widespread among these mass housing developments, there is stil...

Global increases in the demand for energy are imposing strong pressures over the environment while compromising the capacity of emerging economies to achieve sustainable development. In this context, implementation of effective strategies to reduce consumption in residential buildings has become a priority concern for policy makers as minor changes...

Architectural design is a complex activity. The development of a building involves management of the diverse goals of a heterogeneous group of agents using no more than the discrete resources of a given setting. These variables can often conflict and result in rigid normative frameworks that can limit the capacity of a designer to respond with accu...

Research poster

Architecture often requires integration between heterogeneous objectives. Both empirical requirements and speculative aspirations inform design in ways that resist ready formalization under computerizable logic. This thesis explores the possibilities of tropism-analogy as strategy for tackling some of these diverse objectives in a generative system...

The definition of architectonic features often requires negotiation between diverse classes of design conditions merging in particular elements. The use of encompassing concepts opens possible approaches for layering control between these assorted factors. This study presents a method for the implementation of tropism as a conceptual gathering proc...