The Impact of Decisions Made in Various Architectural Design Stages on Life Cycle Assessment Results

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an advantageous tool for the analysis of the overall environmental effects of a building. Most of the decisions that influence the final result of an LCA are made during the design process of the building. Therefore, LCA in early design stages is crucial, because the changes in this period of design are cheaper and more effective. However, there are many other aspects that influence the design of a building. During the design process a high number of variables have to be defined, and in each design stage a specific number of variables have to be fixed depending on various engineering considerations. In this paper we investigate the effect of decisions made in each design stage on LCA results. Within this paper the available possibilities are compared with the variant that was actually selected in each stage, and it is evaluated how environmental indicators evolve during the whole design process. The approach is demonstrated on a case study of a realized single family house