Australasian architecture firm Warren and Mahoney (WAM) has set a target to reduce the embodied carbon emissions of their building designs by at least 40 percent by 2030, and is using technology to help achieve their goal.

Having neutralised their carbon operations every year for 15 years, the practice is looking to continue to maximise their positive environmental impact through low carbon design of 300 active projects. In 2020, WAM’s annual business emissions amounted to approximately 700 tons.

“We’ve found that when we can achieve a 700-ton reduction on one project, it is the equivalent to operating as net-zero emissions as a company for approximately one year. When we consider the number of active projects, it’s clear where our focus as an industry needs to be,” says Fiona Short, principal at WAM.

To deliver this impact, WAM says it deployed design, modelling and information management solutions (in this case from Autodesk) to support data-informed design and collaboration between 400 employees and 264 consultants and contractors from anywhere and across the full building process. This includes intensive 3D rendering, remote and mobile project management, and maintaining quality, safety and commissioning processes in the field.

“WAM has built an advanced way of working between technology, processes and people to create low-carbon solutions for an industry often criticised for ‘bricks and mortar’ thinking,” says Brad Sara, digital design leader at WAM.

The firm is using building information modelling (BIM) software for all architectural design, enabling their team to develop high-quality and data-rich building models with climate impact at the forefront.

For instance, WAM says it saw a 60 percent improvement on an eight-storey office tower design, when compared to typical construction, with the 5,000-ton savings on emissions being the equivalent of taking 1,087 cars off the road for a year.

According to Sara, the BIM technology allows WAM to scale their impact and ability to research and innovate by powering a centralised database that holds 400 of their projects, making data accessible at any time. “This has ultimately inspired new ways of thinking about the impact of every project, and led us to define transformative standards for carbon data management, measurement and ultimately what ‘good’ looks like for all of our projects, specific to their location in the world.”

The technology partnership, especially the accessibility to data and collaboration it enables, has also allowed WAM to build a prototype ‘game-changing machine learning engine’, through which it can lean into artificial intelligence (AI), giving its design team ‘superpowers’. Instead of manually pairing quantitative BIM material data with material carbon intensity data, a project’s data can be automatically mined and calculated, producing a high probability carbon estimate in moments.

“We want as many people as possible to have access to carbon data to maximise impact and this integration means the carbon data can be available to everyone from designers, consultants, contractors, and projects leads to clients,” says Short.

Image: WAM saw a 60 percent improvement on an eight storey office tower, 90 Devonport Road

Branko Miletic

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