Material Decisions Get Locked in Phase 3. The Data Arrives in Phase 5.
Life-cycle assessment tells an architect what a building will cost the climate — after the materials have been chosen. We built the decision support that arrives while the choice is still open.
European design studio · architecture and refurbishment
construction!The Need
An architect’s freedom to change a building is highest in the concept and early design phases and falls away fast once the strategy locks. Structured environmental data arrives in the opposite order: life-cycle assessment tooling applies at detailed design, phase five, by which point the structural system, the envelope and most of the material palette are already fixed. The result is a well-documented number for a decision nobody can revisit. Meanwhile the regulatory floor keeps rising — the EU Renovation Wave targets a doubling of renovation rates, the EPBD recast brings whole-life carbon reporting to new builds and major renovations, and the EU Taxonomy asks for evidence rather than intent.
The Approach
We built the tool for the phase where the decision is still live rather than the phase where it is documented. Instead of asking for a complete bill of quantities, it works from the coarse choices an architect actually has at concept stage — structural strategy, envelope build-up, whether to keep or replace an existing element — and compares material options against each other on embodied impact before any specification exists. Refurbishment is treated as a first-class path, not a variant of new build, because the decisive question there is what stays rather than what gets bought. A two-dimensional configurator lets a designer vary the parameters that matter and see the comparison move, so the tool argues with the design rather than grading it afterwards. The application is covered by 188 automated browser tests that drive the real interface, so behaviour is checked against the running product rather than asserted in a document.
