Sustainability Triad | LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction

For many of us, 2020 was a year postponed. While we were focused on coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, we lost ground on other critical issues, including plastic pollution and climate change. It may have gone unnoticed, but the waste management and recycling value chain in South and Southeast Asia has ground to a halt while the use of single-use and virgin plastics has soared. The situation is untenable for the long run and the environmental impact is sobering. As we inch closer to the promise of mass vaccination and kick off 2021 in the Year of the Ox, it is time to adjust our perspective: these crises present incredible prospects for economic recovery and growth, and are not just environmental issues for the dinner table.

The workshop will incorporate carbon footprint evaluation and circular economy into a structural design workflow with a focus on timber structures. Through the combined use of parametric tools for structural design such as Karamba3D, and optimization tools such as Octopus, comparative strategies will be used to mediate between purely structural and environmental criteria, suggesting a more holistic design process. In the context of the climate emergency, architects and engineers try to reduce the environmental impact of structures through a shift in their design process. The use of recycled material plays a major role in this approach. One of the central questions is how can we design sustainable and smart structures by intelligently using recycled elements. Many factors such as the history of the elements, their condition, or their location influence the design, the carbon footprint, and the price. Parametric structural design tools, coupled with multi-dimensional optimization methods, can help to explore the design space and evaluate designs concerning those criteria.