CKY 536E - Ecological Building Materials

Course Objectives

-To introduce the ecological building design principles.
-To introduce environmental impact parameters of materials and buildings
-To introduce the effect of a material in an ecological building design
-To teach the LCA of alternative building materials in terms of non-renewable resource use and environmental/human impact.

Course Description

Sustainability in Architecture; Building-environment relationship; Environmental impact parameters; Evaluation of the subject on case studies representing best practices in sustainable design; Importance of building materials in a sustainable design; Principles and methods for evaluating ecological performance of a building material; Standards and tools developed to identify an ecological building material; Ecological evaluation of the alternative building materials with respect to life cycle analysis (LCA) method; Analysis of the materials of an existent building with respect to their ecological properties and development of new proposals.