Sustainable Retrofit Design Framework Case Study for Multifamily Housing Structure

SimAUD 2021 Conference Proceedings: Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design

Kyle Nauman, David Gerber, Manuel Benitez Ruiz

April 2021
9 Pages

An overlooked but critical area for investment in energy and environmental impact reduction is existing buildings, especially in the residential sector. In the United States, cheap energy, short term economic thinking, and uncertainty around solutions and outcomes has left a nascent market. Barriers to sustainable retrofitting in the US and abroad have prevented what could be significant progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015). In this study, a design automation tool is developed and tested to drive decision making for sustainable retrofitting that may be applied across projects of varied type and climate in the US. Potential retrofit strategies are designed, analyzed, and compared for an existing apartment style building housing 466 residents. Sustainability solutions are assessed using a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) approach to provide a “cradle to grave” view of the impacts. Economic impacts are analyzed using Net Present Value (NPV) considering available costs for the systems and US interest rate data. The design automation looks at impacts related to sustainability, economics, and human health as well as providing relevant implementation information that can be used by project owners to plan retrofit projects. The goal of this research is to prove that this design framework can streamline the upfront design and decision-making process to drive greater adoption of sustainable retrofit projects by addressing stakeholder barriers early in the design process.