A hypergraph model shows the carbon reduction potential of effective space use in housing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hypergraph model to analyze building space configurations, showing that optimizing space use can significantly reduce operational carbon emissions and improve daylight access, surpassing traditional envelope upgrades.

Contribution

The study presents a novel hypergraph-based approach to evaluate and optimize building floorplans for sustainability and daylight access, highlighting the importance of spatial organization.

Findings

Space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in reducing carbon emissions in 72%, 61%, and 33% of surveyed buildings.

Automatically generated floorplans can increase daylight access by up to 24%.

The hypergraph model enables automatic geometry creation and analysis of spatial configurations.

Abstract

Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making buildings the leading cause of climate change. To incentivize more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and maximum energy use. However, they currently only reward energy efficiency measures such as equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and Singapore. Automatically generated floorplans for a case study in Zurich further increase access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in terms of environmental performance and access to daylight.