Abstract:
As concerns of climate change increase, there is a growing focus on the
environmental impact of the construction industry. A research collaboration with
BRANZ and Massey University found that the average new-built house is five times
the assigned carbon budget per development. ( Chandrakumar, et al. 2020) If New
Zealand is going to fulfil its obligations to the Paris Agreement, new-built homes
must achieve this carbon budget, which the architectural industry can largely
support.
In New Zealand, the romantic perceptions of a new-built architectural home on a
picturesque site and the large use of timber in construction have probably
distracted the industry from considering embodied energy in constructions, which
is neither realistic nor sustainable. With the current climate change contingency,
we need to rethink how we design and measure a project's environmental impact.
Can we, as designers, employ assessment tools to influence design decisions to
encourage low impact houses?
Currently, the operational energy during a building's life is the most significant
contributor to a building's impact. (C. Chandrakumar 2019) However, New Zealand
aims to become 95% renewable energy by 2025 and 100% by 2035. (Ardern 2021)
As a result, this thesis critically reviews the architectural practice of using
assessment tools to measure a building's embodied energy, the second-largest
contributor.
This thesis seeks to investigate some aspects of the current residential sector in
New Zealand, environmental assessment methods, and setting a benchmark that
aligns with the Paris Agreement. This thesis aims to define an architectural process
of assessing the embodied carbon of a project by using LCAQuick as the primary
assessment tool and the CAD software Revit, which is very popular with
architectural firms. This exploration is being carried out on a rural new-built
detached architecturally designed home, investigating a pragmatic approach to
making design decisions and demonstrating that a system can be successfully used
as an effective architectural design tool.
