Enabling Sustainable Development Through Low-Carbon Structural Design

Society is building at an unprecedented rate: to house over 200,000 people moving to cities each day, building stock will need to double by 2060. This will add over 230 billion square meters of floor area in new construction, the equivalent of a new Paris every week, and most of this construction will occur in Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDCs). This scale and growth of urban construction also comes with critical ecological consequences: buildings and construction already account for 36% of global energy use, and nearly 40% of carbon dioxide emissions.

These numbers continue to rise as building-related CO2 emissions grow by one percent each year. Increasingly, policies and technologies are introduced to reduce the lifetime carbon emissions of buildings. However, few of these solutions are appropriate to the scale and nature of construction in LEDCs where construction accounts for 20-30% of their carbon emissions, more than twice the global average.

With no end to construction in sight, it is vital to develop better building practices. Unfortunately, most building construction is structurally and materially inefficient, developed to reduce labor over material costs through modular and oversized elements. This presents a strong opportunity for interdisciplinary design research on the thoughtful design of high-performance concrete structures that apply to today’s construction industry.

This project creates a new cross-disciplinary research group called the "Open Structures Group" at UVA dedicated to the advancement of accessible methods for the design and fabrication of low-cost, low-carbon building structures.The Open Structures Group is now working with the Precast Concrete Institute’s Foundation and local precast concrete manufacturers Tindall and Metromont to research how the embodied carbon of precast concrete might be reduced through holistic material and geometric design.

Open Structures also recently received support from the UVA Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation (CGII) to explore how low carbon concrete structures might enable low-cost housing construction in Nairobi, Kenya. This work will involve local developers, fabricators, and housing non-profits that are already invested in advancing sustainable development through low-carbon construction.