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research article

Office densification effects on comfort, energy, and carbon lifecycle performance: An integrated and exploratory study

Hoxha, Endri  
•
Liardet, Cédric  
•
Jusselme, Thomas  
January 14, 2020
Sustainable Cities and Society

Generally, the environmental impacts of buildings are benchmarked per square meter as a functional unit. However, this practice prevents developing a user-centered approach in which performance is linked to real usage and not building size. Currently, the less a building is used, the lower the energy consumed during its use and, consequently, the impact per square meter, which does not make sense regarding both usability and environmental performance. Following user-centered design principles, the goal of the present research is to assess the environmental impact of buildings based on novel user-based functional units and to understand the environmental impact consequences of office occupation density. An experiment within the area of an academic office offered the opportunity to test the densification of working spaces and evaluate the resulting environmental and comfort impacts. In the end, the new user-based functional units highlight a reduction of all environmental indicators by almost 50 %. Also, the functional unit "eq-nominal people per effective presence" is introduced as most suitable to evaluate environmental performance according to real building usage, as a complement to square meter function units.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.scs.2020.102032
Author(s)
Hoxha, Endri  
Liardet, Cédric  
Jusselme, Thomas  
Date Issued

2020-01-14

Published in
Sustainable Cities and Society
Volume

55

Article Number

102032

Subjects

Office densification

•

User-centered assessment

•

Life cycle assessment

•

Functional unit

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
BUILD-O  
Available on Infoscience
January 21, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/164728
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