The role of digital workflows for lowering the climate impact of residential buildings: a case study in Northern Sweden

The Swedish government has introduced a requirement to conduct a climate declaration for new buildings, and climate impact limit levels are set to be implemented by 2025. This has put pressure on structural engineers, who are an important part of the decision-?making process regarding materials for and design of the superstructure of buildings. Since climate calculations usually occur towards the end of the project and are a time-?consuming and manual effort, structural engineers seldom evaluate the climate impact of their designs daily. The literature also suggests that while integrations of building information modelling software for structural engineering with climate calculation software exist, there is still a long way to go before this becomes fully automated. Moreover, even if automated, does this really help the housing companies and consultants where they are today? The aim is, therefore, to discuss the role of digital workflows in lowering the climate impact of residential buildings.

This paper presents a case study examining a recently built apartment building in Northern Sweden in collaboration with the structural engineers and the housing company. The digital workflow used during the design phase was mapped, and several redesign ideas (e.g., climate-improved concrete, timber instead of concrete, innovative foundation design) were evaluated for their climate impact, cost, and feasibility from the perspectives of the architect, the client, and the contractor. The connection between the redesign ideas and the digital workflow is discussed.

The results show that while there is potential for enhancing the building information models and tools used in the project, the digital workflow is not the primary challenge to reducing the climate impact. Instead, other factors, such as limited access to climate-?improved concrete and a lack of early discussion of the climate impact of the design ideas between the different actors involved, present more significant challenges.