Planning is a cornerstone of good building practices and accurate information is critical to successful planning. This is the premise behind the development of a new framework to increase sustainability in building design.

The framework, developed by a team from Cornell University’s Environmental Systems Lab, injects a massive amount of information into the pre-design and early design phases of a project in order to save architects and design teams time and money later on.

"(Our framework) allows designers to understand the full environmental impact of their building," said team lead Allison Bernett, a recent graduate and corresponding author of the report, "Sustainability Evaluation for Early Design (SEED) Framework for Energy Use, Embodied Carbon, Cost, and Daylighting Assessment.”

The researchers looked at the cost of change in the design process and the opportunity of impact.

"In the very beginning, changing something doesn't cost anything, but if you're a month into the project, changing something is really expensive, because now you have to rehire consultants and redesign things. And then the other thing is the potential of impact,” said Timur Dogan, assistant professor of architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning and one of the principal investigators. "In the very beginning, just with a simple nudge in the right direction, you can change a project from being an energy hog to something that's very sustainable, and integrates well into the environment."

The International Energy Agency reported in 2018 that the construction sector contributed 39% of energy and process-related greenhouse gas emissions, 11% of which originated from manufacturing building materials and products.

"In that sense, the construction industry is super inefficient," Dogan said. "There's too many players who don't know the full picture and then make decisions that are not always rational. This framework that Allison worked on is geared to help bring the information to the table. Every stakeholder in the design process can then form their own opinion about design goal priorities."

SEED makes the process easy and cost-effective by gathering all that data in one place and pre-packaging it. The framework simulates building energy performance, embodied carbon (carbon emissions generated by construction and materials), construction cost and daylighting (the use of natural light to illuminate indoor spaces). This allows design teams to quickly evaluate and rank tens of thousands of design iterations using as few as four points.

The team tested SEED on a hypothetical office building project in Boston, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. They used publicly available data and a number of available design simulation programs including Rhino/Grasshopper (a CAD program) and engineering software Karamba3D. They also used ClimateStudio, developed by Dogan, for daylight simulation and building energy modeling; and AutoFrame, a new procedure developed by another principal investigator, Katharina Kral, a licensed architect and lecturer in the Department of Architecture, for automatically computing structural systems. AutoFrame helps improve the precision of embodied carbon assessments and daylight simulations.

The SEED Framework generated thousands of design options based on variables specific to each of the three cities, providing flexibility early in the process, when changes are still cost-effective to incorporate. This allows designers to immediately eliminate the options that do not make sense and focus on the ones that do.

The paper was published in the Journal of Building Performance Simulation.