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

ABSTRACT: Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings, which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and are a leading driver of climate change. Incentivizing more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and minimum energy efficiency requirements. However, they currently only reward 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. Using automatically generated floorplans in a

SUBMITTER: Weber RE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11437132 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature