The climate crisis demands urgent and far-reaching action. Building operations account for 30% of the world’s yearly emissions (IEA 2022). Carbon accounting and reduction are critically interlocked parts of achieving low-carbon goals like the AIA 2030 Commitment from the American Institute of Architects. Although counting the carbon footprint of a building’s entire life cycle is a complex process, subject to idiosyncratic decisions and requiring extensive tools, research already exists for measuring such impacts at the building scale (Fenner et al. 2018). However, the scale of the climate crisis is planetary, and such problems require planet-scale solutions. Therefore, this article addresses the inherent challenges of scale when confronting climate issues in architecture, particularly the difficulty of evaluating early-stage design decisions through a framework for integrating carbon calculations into a generative design process. Such a framework can account for the compounding effects of different emissions sources and their trade-offs by leveraging datasets from existing software platforms and databases. This framework extends design concepts to encompass entire systems, from operational energy use to global material flows related to buildings and master plans.
