A hypergraph model shows the carbon reduction potential of effective space use in housing

Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making buildings the leading cause of climate change. To incentivize more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and maximum energy use. However, they currently only reward energy efficiency measures such as equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and Singapore. Automatically generated floorplans for a case study in Zurich further increase access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in terms of environmental performance and access to daylight.