Environmental Impact Profiles for Glazing Systems: Strategies for Early Design Process

Abstract

The most crucial architectural design stage is the early design phase, when most of the critical decisions are made. To address the significance of this stage, the design team is obliged to rapidly evaluate many design variations. The current research presents a framework to expedite this process, to assist architects early in the decision-making process. To create an effective methodology, the main criteria in the design of building envelopes (i.e., sustainability and energy consumption) were investigated while preserving the extendable nature of the proposed method. A full life cycle assessment (LCA), along with annual energy-consumption calculations for over a hundred exterior glazing system typologies, was performed. In the next step, a multiobjective optimization using Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA2) was utilized to make the LCA and energy-consumption data obtained from the previous step comparable for designers by providing a set of optimized data and comparing the distance of the design variations from Pareto’s curve. The results will assist architects in mitigating the ecological footprint of their design more quickly and efficiently, specifically regarding material selection.