Architects working with city planners and developers in the shaping of urban environments typically consider multiple factors in isolation, from urban design and socioeconomic relationships to data analyses. Analyses regarding urban life cycle scenarios are exemplar of this trend, with considerations made in isolation at the later stages of the designdevelopment process when the scope for decisions which could ultimately affect the sustainability of an urban environment is much more limited. This paper defines our effort to introduce a new tool, named "Clark's Crow", which aims to address this shortcoming by promoting awareness of the impact of different design options through a biophysically based ecological accounting method in the early stages of urban design-development. The tool is used within existing architectural design environments with an aim to offer a socio-ecological analysis during the design decision-making process. Clark's Crow is underpinned by the emergy analysis method, which aims to consider both the energy, material, and information flows of a system, such as an urban ecology, and to understand both the work of the techno-sphere in constructing our urban environments and that of the geo-biosphere in sustaining such development. Clark's Crow facilitates emergy analysis in the early stages of urban design, thereby allowing queries

Current strategies for net-zero buildings favor envelopes with minimized aperture ratios and limiting of solar gains through reduced glazing transmittance and emissivity. This load-reduction approach precludes strategies that maximize on-site collection of solar energy, which could increase opportunities for net-zero electricity projects. To better leverage solar resources, a whole-building strategy is proposed, referred to as “Quality-Matched Energy Flows” (or Q-MEF): capturing, transforming, buffering, and transferring irradiance on a building’s envelope—and energy derived from it—into distributed end-uses. A mid-scale commercial building was modeled in three climates with a novel Building-Integrated, Transparent, Concentrating Photovoltaic and Thermal fenestration technology (BITCoPT), thermal storage and circulation at three temperature ranges, adsorption chillers, and auxiliary heat pumps. BITCoPT generated electricity and collected thermal energy at high efficiencies while transmitting diffuse light and mitigating excess gains and illuminance. The balance of systems satisfied cooling and heating demands. Relative to baselines with similar glazing ratios, net electricity use decreased 71% in a continental climate and 100% or more in hot-arid and subtropical-moderate climates. Total EUI decreased 35%, 83%, and 52%, and peak purchased electrical demands decreased up to 6%, 32%, and 20%, respectively (with no provisions for on-site electrical storage). Decreases in utility services costs were also noted. These results suggest that with further development of electrification the Q-MEF strategy could contribute to energy-positive behavior for projects with similar typology and climate profiles.

Conventional construction materials which rely on a fossil-based, nonrenewable extractive economy are typically associated with an entrenched linear economic approach to production. Current research indicates the clear interrelationships between the production and use of construction materials and anthropogenic climate change. This paper investigates the potential for emerging high-performance biobased construction materials, produced sustainably and/or using waste byproducts, to enable a more environmentally sustainable approach to the built environment. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is employed to compare three wall assemblies using local biobased materials in Montreal (Canada), Nairobi (Kenya), and Accra (Ghana) vs. a traditional construction using gypsum boards and rockwool insulation. Global warming potential, nonrenewable cumulative energy demand, acidification potential, eutrophication potential, and freshwater consumption (FWC) are considered. Scenarios include options for design for disassembly (DfD), as well as potential future alternatives for electricity supply in Kenya and Ghana. Results indicate that all biobased alternatives have lower (often significantly so) life-cycle impacts per functional unit, compared to the traditional construction. DfD strategies are also shown to result in −10% to −50% impact reductions. The results for both African countries exhibit a large dependence on the electricity source used for manufacturing, with significant potential for future decarbonization, but also some associated tradeoffs in terms of acidification and eutrophication.

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Current architectural design practice is limited in its consideration and understanding of life-cycle energy flows which comprise multiple phases, from material resource extraction, construction, building occupation within the built environment, and after demolition. Furthermore, bioclimatic environmental flows interact with the buildings, particularly at the building envelope, making it a rich interface for shaping energy flows towards buildings that are energy self-sufficient with clean on-site energy resources. The buildings we inhabit directly affect the greater built environment which is an inherent part local ecosystems that compose part of larger ecologies at global scales, ultimately affecting the overall biosphere. As a result, the buildings we construct, directly and indirectly, affect our economies, the health, and well-being of our societies and our natural environments. This paper explores the development of a computational framework that allows designers to visualize, understand and evaluate their design choices in terms of their environmental implications and ecological efficacy. The framework for design analysis offers a more comprehensive ecological analysis than existing sustainability assessment tools by collecting live environmental and human biometrics towards considering the entire comfort cycle. Working with SEVA, Socio-Ecological Visual Analytics, platform a web tool designed to allow for interactive feedback in real-time. This research is proposing to investigate the visualization of human data as a metric to analyze the well-being of the environment, which is an inversion of received perspectives. This paper will use a case study, assessing a built environment unit tracking the environmental conditions, building systems performance and the user human biometrics, demonstrating the qualitative and quantitative environmental impacts of the building design on the users.