You are kindly invited to a seminar organized by the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design.
Speaker: Dr. Nuri Cihan Kayaçetin
Title: “Towards A Life Cycle Sustainability Framework in The Built Environment”
Date: June 15, 2023, Thursday
Time: 12.30-13.20
Place: FF Building, FFB06
Abstract:
The effect of climate change on the built environment and the question of how the construction industry can mitigate environmental impact proposes a great challenge for researchers and practitioners. Measuring and validating sustainability of a product or a building has been a point of interest in the last decades. The research efforts have been progressing in different pillars of sustainability, namely environmental, social and economical. Recent developments identify the environmental pillar as an overarching component where there has to be a close relationship to the remaining pillars. In this context, understanding sustainability in the built environment requires a comprehensive methodology. Labelling a product or a building as sustainable could be misleading without exhausting available parameters. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is considered as a method with a strong scientific background that takes into account the whole life of a building. With a life cycle thinking, we need to re-consider our approach to energy efficiency with inclusion of material efficiency. Moreover, end-of-life (EoL) of buildings also proposes a new challenge to the field: how can we extend the lifetime of our buildings or how can we benefit the most from the construction waste in EoL? These concepts then lead us to the emerging applications under the circular construction methods (instead of the traditional, linear one). In this context, the seminar introduces a progressive research and implementation arc on different domains including energy efficiency, whole-life sustainability assessment and circular construction. The conclusion puts emphasis on integrated decision support framework for building design and its reflections on teaching & contributions in the Turkish context.
Bio:
Nuri Cihan Kayacetin is an architect with an academic specialization on life cycle sustainability. Having worked as a professional architect for more than ten years, he progressed in the field of academia with his masters and PhD studies at METU. His dissertation titled ‘A Life Cycle Assessment Based Decision Support Tool for Early Design Phase of Mass-Housing Neighbourhoods in Turkey’ focused on the environmental impact of TOKİ housing developments on different scales; component, building and urban. Meanwhile, he contributed to international energy efficiency projects as national expert and coordinator with the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization. He also has experience in architectural practice on office and health-care facilities design in Turkiye and abroad. With a group of architects, he participated in architectural competitions and received multiple national awards. In 2020, he joined KU Leuven in Gent for his post-doctoral studies on socio-ecological construction. The study was based on a living lab approach where several circular and bio-based materials & methods were tested in a real-life setting. In the end of the study, a demountable housing prototype that is composed of hybrid bio-based wall panels was achieved. His current research areas are integrated sustainable design, energy efficiency, circular and bio-based construction and socio-ecological life cycle assessment of the built environment.