LCA at Herzog & De Meuron: Building an Integrated Digital Workflow

In this session, we'll explore creating a custom lifecycle assessment (LCA) pipeline for our international practice's complex needs. We'll tackle the challenges of traditional tools, which often falter in integrating with various project-specific building information modeling (BIM) standards and local requirements, and generally relegate LCA to a terminal project phase rather than using it in the design process. Our motivation to develop our own workflow arose from existing solutions being "black boxes" that fail to accommodate different levels of detail needed for design stages. Our pipeline not only offers flexible calculations, but it also aids in documenting and benchmarking construction systems. This development was achieved through collaboration within our design technologies team and extensive interactions with industry peers, resulting in a scalable, effective tool. Attendees will gain insights from our case studies and learn about our process, which improves efficiency and transparency in environmental assessments.