The developed methodology and workflow on Embodied Carbon (EC) assessments and flexible building systems was initially specifically catered to residential projects in South East Asia, a region of massive urban expansion with increasing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Since this is taking place in close proximity to one of the world’s largest forested areas with vast resources of wood, a renewable and sustainable material. The research was exploring the potentials and constraints of hybrid concrete-timber construction systems in residential typologies. Currently, the available concrete technologies are on a very advanced level whereas timber is rarely applied in construction despite recent technological innovations and the increasing application in buildings around the world. The illustrated Concrete-Glulam system and Variant 2.1 below are inspired by CREE buildings, other hybrid systems exist in various forms. This specific timber-concrete system was also implemented in a school building in Singapore in 2019 with Kimly Construction.
After it has been replaced by concrete and steel as the predominant materials for the construction of cities in the past century, we are here assessing the potential impacts of partly supplementing concrete structures with timber. This has an immediate impact on the embodied carbon and indirectly offers the possibility of keeping the more lightweight timber elements adaptable during a building’s lifetime. We adopted the 'Open Building' approach and segmented designs into permanent support and adaptable infill systems. Here, it goes further and differentiates into various degrees of flexibility in each of the main systems: concrete construction systems would normally be used as permanent support structures such as cores (containing circulation, infrastructure, and service functions), whereas partly load bearing components made from timber could be adapted and changed over long periods of time, and hence they would have a basic degree of flexibility. The infill systems are also further distinguished into conventional partitioning systems (such as drywalls that already have a higher degree of flexibility, but to the cost of their destruction) and modular systems that can be altered in various combinations.
