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Reimagining low-carbon futures: architectural and ecological tradeoffs of mass timber for durable buildings

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Abstract

The urgency to rapidly reduce carbon emissions of the built environment make embodied carbon (EC), and thus material decisions, central to architecture’s most ambitious ecological goal. Structural systems are often the most durable and consequential to upfront EC in new construction. Although durability is critical to reducing EC in buildings in the long term, it may be at odds with the short-term goal to reduce resource consumption. This research closely and systematically examines the trade-offs between lower-carbon structural systems needed in the short-term and the durable systems needed to achieve long-term sustainability, functional adaptability and cultural significance. Specifically, this study evaluates the feasibility of using carbon-sequestering biomass to replace the more carbon-intensive structural materials that are more commonly used in buildings designed with extraordinary requirements of durability. The perceived conflict between durability and sustainability calls for more nuanced methods of analysis that consider the role of a building’s service life in EC reduction, and can augment the capacity of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to simultaneously consider the architectural impacts of material decisions. The methodology consists of fully redesigning the structure of an existing building with complex demands of sustainability and durability, and performing LCA for scenarios of equivalent architectural qualities, to retrospectively compare and analyze alternative low carbon futures in a context that only real projects can provide. The findings provide a more nuanced understanding of a near future when taller mass timber structures may leverage requirements for increased fire protection, robustness and durability to simultaneously achieve larger and longer-term carbon reductions.

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Acknowledgements

This work expands on research started as part of the project titled Future Use Architecture: Design for Persistent Change, which was done in collaboration with Professors David Fannon and Peter Wiederspahn from Northeastern University, and was funded by the 2017 Latrobe Prize, a research award granted by the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. Special thanks to Professor Matthew Eckelman, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, for his contributions to that earlier work, and for his further guidance and feedback on LCA methods used in this study. Lastly, thanks to the contributions of research assistants from Northeastern University, Benjamin Epstein and Laura Gomez, who assisted with the BIM models and architectural diagrams, and Ece Alan, who assisted with LCA models and charts.

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  1. Northeastern University School of Architecture, Boston, MA, USA

    Michelle M. Laboy

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The outreach materials and structured interview questions performed for this work were submitted for evaluation and received an exemption from the Institutional Review Board of the author’s institution on the basis of the subject matter being oral histories of buildings, not people, and therefore not requiring human subjects research protection.

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As part of the outreach all interviewees that participated in this research were given a project description as reviewed by the Institutional Review Board. The individual’s agreement to participate in the interview was considered consent.

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The Life Cycle Assessment and tradeoff analysis for this case study has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication anywhere else.

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Laboy, M.M. Reimagining low-carbon futures: architectural and ecological tradeoffs of mass timber for durable buildings. Archit. Struct. Constr. 2, 723–741 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44150-022-00048-7

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