Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been widely adopted to identify the Global Warming Potential (GWP) in the construction industry and determine its high environmental impact through Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, energy and resource consumptions. The consideration of LCA in the early stages of design is becoming increasingly important as a means to avoid costly changes at later stages of the project. However, typical LCA-based tools demand very detailed information about structural and material systems and thus become too laborious for designers in the conceptual stages, where such specifications are still loosely defined. In response, this paper presents a workflow for LCA-based evaluation where the selection of the construction system and material is kept open to compare the impacts of alternative design variants. We achieve this through a strict division into support and infill systems and a simplified visualization of a schematic floor layout using a shoebox approach, inspired from the energy modelling domain. The shoeboxes in our case are repeatable modules within a schematic floor plan layout, whose enclosures are defined by parametric 2D surfaces representing total ratios of permanent supports versus infill components. Thus, the assembly of modular surface enclosures simplifies the LCA evaluation process by avoiding the need to accurately specify the physical properties of each building component across the floor plan. The presented workflow facilitates the selection of alternative structural systems and materials for their comparison, and outputs the Global Warming Potential (GWP) in the form of an intuitive visualization output. The workflow for simplified evaluation is illustrated through a case study that compares the GWP for selected combinations of material choice and construction systems.

Timber is coming to the fore as a contemporary construction material. Not only sustainable, its suppleness, adaptability and strength make it highly attractive for experimental designers. Yves Weinand founded the interdisciplinary timberfabric research project at IBOIS, the Laboratory for Timber Fabric, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in order to fully explore innovative timber construction techniques. Here Yves Weinand and Markus Hudert describe the Textile Module, which Hudert developed, in order to investigate timber's ability for ‘social behaviour’, or greater structural strength, once woven into a textile‐like form. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. with different assembly conditions. The proposed geometrically nonlinear FE model allows evaluation of the stresses that are induced during the construction process and which may affect the structural integrity of the module. In particular, the risk of failure during assembly is identified using the anisotropic Tsai-Hill criterion.The structural behavior of the timber Textile Module is then investigated through bending tests using the constructed prototypes. During the loading procedure, the vertical deflections are measured at different locations on the prototype surface by means of external displacement transducers. Using the FE model, the corresponding deformed shapes are simulated by applying the bending loads on the prestressed Textile Module. Experimental displacements and FE predictions are thus compared and found to be in good agreement.

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