In the aftermath of the global pandemic, the widespread embrace of flexible working models has led to suboptimal occupancy levels in office buildings. Despite this shift, traditional space management practices persist, contributing to increased energy consumption per person. This study investigates how integrating smart lock systems can enhance space utilization within flexible working environments, ultimately reducing energy use. A case study of an office building in Milan, Italy, is used to evaluate the proposed approach. The methodology includes a comprehensive assessment of building design and functionality, coupled with impact analyses using Building Energy Modeling and Life Cycle Assessment. The results indicate that innovative occupancy management strategies can achieve energy savings of from 9% up to 14% compared to baseline operational energy use, leading to a reduction in CO₂ emissions of 7.5 to 17.6 kgCO₂eq/m² depending on occupancy scenarios. The life cycle assessment reveals that, while smart locks introduce an initial embodied carbon footprint of approximately 2 tons of CO₂, that is recovered through the savings obtained after a few months of installation. The findings demonstrate that this methodology is effective in buildings that allow both functional and temporal flexibility, enabling partial shutdowns and the redirection of certain services when not in use, ultimately improving energy efficiency through lean interventions.

At present, building design is faced with a need to properly manage complex geometries and surfaces. This fact is not only driven by the increased demand for visually stunning spaces but also stems from the rise of new design paradigms, such as “user-centred design”, that include bespoke optimization approaches. Nevertheless, the escalating adoption of customized components and one-off solutions raises valid concerns regarding the optimal use of energy and resources in this production paradigm. This study focuses on the Life Cycle Assessment of a novel Cement–Textile Composite (CTC) patented material. It combines a synthetic reinforcing textile with a customized concrete matrix, to generate rigid elements that are able to statically preserve complex spatial arrangements, particularly double-curvature surfaces. Moreover, the CTC offers a low-volume cost-effective alternative for custom-made cladding applications. The study performed a comparative carbon footprint assessment of the CTC production process in contrast to other technologies, such as CNC milling and 3D printing. To facilitate meaningful comparisons among diverse construction alternatives and to derive generalized data capable of characterizing their overall capacity, independent of specific production configurations, the present study implemented a generalized parametric shape of reference defined as a bounding box (BBOX), which encloses the volume of the target shape. Comparing different production technologies of the same shape with the same BBOX results in a significant carbon saving, up to 9/10th of the carbon footprint, when the CTC technology is adopted. The study therefore highlights the potential environmental advantages of CTC in the fields of architectural design and building engineering.

Windows and glazed facades provide outdoor views, serving as vital sources of visual information that aid navigation and interaction within buildings. These views can trigger psychological and physiological responses, affecting individual well-being. However, optimizing outdoor view quality is challenging due to the complex interplay of factors influencing the building’s experience of vision. Managing the complexity of optimizing outdoor view quality within current digital frameworks for building design presents significant challenges. A key issue lies in the ambiguity of certain visual metrics, which are often difficult to translate into explicit descriptors of spatial configurations. Even when such metrics are available, their practical use as guiding tools in the design process is frequently obstructed by complex data interoperability procedures. These procedures are necessary to enable seamless data transfer across the multiple software environments involved in the design process. This study advocates for the softBIM paradigm, which optimizes workflows by embedding visual analysis results into target geometries. Supported by this process, the calculation of a metric to measure the impact of existing and planned visual obstructions on the vision of the targeted landmarks is proposed and analysed. This metric is specifically applied to assess the visual information incoming to the vertical facades of building envelopes, a context of application that denotes criteria of assessment different from the ones usually applied in the most established frameworks for visual analysis (e.g., isovist analysis). SoftBIM enables effective automation strategies to aid the metric computation and the processing of the results to implement seamless export and data implementation. The visual metric is built upon implementing the Ladybug suite and addresses the different limitations in the target-based visibility calculation supported by the tool.

The Italian school building stock is largely outdated, with structural and technological inadequacies leading to low comfort and high energy consumption. Addressing this challenge requires large-scale renovation supported by an integrated, data-driven approach. This study conducted a nationwide analysis of over 40,000 school buildings. After incomplete or inconsistent records were filtered out, a refined subset was selected. Building forms were reconstructed by cross-referencing GIS data with multiple open data sources. Using supervised machine learning, the research identifies and classifies recurring morphological patterns to define a set of 3D school building archetypes. These archetypes are enriched with spatial configurations and physical characteristics aligned with national educational standards. The result is a macrotypological classification based on form, conceived as part of an operational tool to support policymakers, designers, and public administrations in selecting effective retrofit strategies. This contributes to the creation of large-scale national renovation strategies, as well as Renovation Roadmaps and Digital Building Logbooks in line with the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD IV), specifically tailored to the Italian context. The novelty of this work lies in its unprecedented scale and the use of AI to enable fast, replicable assessments of retrofit potential, thereby supporting informed decisions in energy-efficient renovation planning.