How AI Will Solve the Most Overlooked Challenge in Sustainable Housing

PETER BERTELS: Hi there, and welcome to our presentation about the most overlooked challenges in sustainable housing and how we at Oracle use artificial intelligence to solve these challenges. We, that is-- well no, before we do that, the Safe Harbor Statement.

So as you know, everything we show is a proprietary. Do not copy, post, distribute without express explicit permission. But if you want to collaborate with us, I will show you in the end, our names, our email addresses, and we are happy to talk to you to see how we can work together.

And we, so that is myself, I'm Peter. I founded Circle as a new sustainable construction company together with my colleague and co-founder, WIM. WIM is on the right. And in the middle, you see Yasmine. Yasmine Van Roosbroeck, who is our wonderful colleague.

She's BIM manager at Vanhout, and we, Circle, we are a spin off of Vanhout. So the thing is that Vanhout is a nice construction company that's founded as a spin off of Wim and myself's Circle construction company, focused on housing.

And we do that in Europe, but we are open to collaborations worldwide. And we have different backgrounds. Wim is our sustainable construction expert. He knows everything about sustainability in construction, and has real hands on construction experience.

Yasmine has lots of experience as project leader and BIM manager at Vanhout, a large construction company. And myself, I have a digital background. Until five years ago, I knew nothing about construction, but now I'm joining in. And as you will see in a minute, we try to combine digital and construction together to solve sustainability.

And it's all about climate change. As you might know, in 2015, in December, lots of people signed the Paris Climate Agreement. You might recognize your own president or your head of state or ex-head of state on the slide.

So they signed the Climate Agreement because of course, climate change is there. It's human, and we need to do something about it. And we, that is like all countries in the world. It was signed by 196 countries. And within Europe, the European Union specifically, because I'm also based in Europe, the European Union came with a Green Deal.

Within the Green Deal they focused on different areas to solve climate change. And one of the most important contributors to climate change is the construction industry. And therefore, the European Commission came within the European Green Deal with an action plan, a renovation wave to really focus on sustainable construction.

And that's where the first overlooked challenge in sustainable housing comes in. Because if we talk about sustainable construction, the first question, of course, is to make new houses that you build tomorrow more sustainable. And that's of course, an extremely important part of the work.

But what we also need to do, and you can see it on the bottom of the slide, for this renovation wave, that is we also need to tackle the existing housing stock. Because if we look at Europe, estimations are that between 85% and 95% of the buildings that we will have in 2050 are buildings that are already standing here today.

And so one of the most overlooked challenges in sustainable construction is to do these renovations, and to make sure that also these existing buildings are tackled. And if we look at all the buildings in Europe, we talk about 6,000 houses that need to be fully renovated every day between now and 2050, to achieve climate neutrality in 2050.

6,000 houses a day. That's like a huge challenge. We at Circle, we plan to do lots of these houses, but probably not all of them. We'd like to collaborate with others.

But this is the challenge that we are focusing on in sustainable construction, it is tackling the 6,000 houses a day. And I will show you in a minute how artificial intelligence will help us with that.

But if you talk about sustainability in construction, as I told you construction is far from sustainable, and it's far from sustainable on different levels. If you look at the figures from the United Nations Environment program, then we see that the construction industry, as an industry is responsible for 50% of all energy consumption worldwide.

It's responsible for 36% of the total industrial waste in the world. And it's responsible for 40% of all global CO2 emissions. So that's huge. Climate change, is there and construction is a large contributor to that.

But there's a second overlooked problem in sustainability in construction, and that is the business model. Because also, our business model, as typical construction companies, is not so sustainable. We have typically problems in quality.

Every project in construction typically is a unique prototype. It's always something new, coming up with new risks and problems that need to be overcome during the project. There's always pricing issues. Keeping a budget is not so easy.

We have unexpected costs, unexpected things that happen on site. We have rising prices. COVID also did not make it easier. And it's very difficult for a construction company or for a general contractor to guarantee upfront an exact price for the clients.

And the third part is labor. We in Europe, we lack skilled workers to do the work on construction sites. And of course, as always in construction, really being on site and making it happen is where it needs to be done. And that's crucial to have skilled people over there.

So that's the second challenge in sustainability in construction that is the business model. We at Circle, we try to tackle both challenges, and to really come up with-- and I will show you in a minute, a sustainable approach to construction that is sustainable for our business model and sustainable for the client, and for the planet.

Now, if we look at other industries, we see other industries, like for example, the automotive industry, that have already solved part of the problems. If you look at the cars on top of the slide on the left, you have this wonderful BMW car. On the right, you have the same car 40 years later.

And then we see that these cars are, from the outside, rather similar, but from the inside, it's completely different. Safety is different. Fuel consumption has dropped enormously over the last 40 years. Safety of the cars is better and also for production. It's completely different.

The car on the left was produced in about 30 days. The car on the right is produced in less than 30 hours. So that's 24 times more productive today, than it used to be in 1983.

If you look 40 years back in time for housing and we look at today, we see that houses look rather similar. But also they are rather similar. Probably the house built on the right in 2023 is built even in a longer time duration than the houses were built 40 years ago.

Because now we need to tackle-- the first energy challenges are there. We are talking about insulation. We have solar panels on the roof. We have some extra features that make these houses better than they used to be 40 years ago.

But we are far from total sustainability yet. We are not dropping by half the energy consumption yet. And if you look at total production time, it might be even worse than it was in 1983. So that's where we need to-- if you want to really renovate these 6,000 houses a day, then we need to tackle these problems.

We also see solutions. We also see solutions. Some of our competitors are really engineering a house, and they're making like 1,000 identical houses every year, which is a very good solution for part of the problem.

If you want to build all these new houses in a more sustainable way, then go to our competitors and you build one of these identical houses, and then you are done. Of course, the thing is, this can also only be done for greenfield solution, where you are building a totally entire new neighborhood part of a new city. And then this is a perfect approach.

However, for these 85% to 95% of existing houses that we need to tackle, it's difficult to come up with the same house and just copy the same house over and over again. European Union estimates that the Europe's building stock is unique and heterogeneous in its expression of cultural diversity and history of our continent.

This is an official statement from the European Union in one of these renovation wave papers. And it's also what you see on the picture, this is in Denmark. You see every house is different. Every person wants to build his or her own house, and it needs to be different. It needs to somehow reflect personality of the people living in these houses.

So if you want to tackle these houses and come up with even diverse new houses to renovate these houses, that's totally different. So you cannot just copy the same house 1,000 times over and over again. And that's where we come in.

We launched Circle as a construction company, as a general contractor. We create the perfect house for every client on every plot in Europe, and we do that radically digital in a minute, and physically in six weeks only.

So that's our approach. We build the perfect, unique house for every customer on every plot in Europe. Either a new house or a full makeover, where we demolish a full building and rebuild a new one.

Demolition, reconstruction, and we do that within a minute digitally, and we do it physically within six weeks. That is six weeks after applying for a building permit, which depending on the country might take a while. But if that's all done, and the legal stuff is done, then six weeks later our clients move to their new homes.

How do we do that? Well actually, we have a combination of two things. We have hardware and software. And the hardware is, we have developed a smart and optimized building concept. The thing is that we allow with our building concept, we allow for building entirely tailor-made, unique houses in six weeks, and we do that with a combination of 2D and 3D elements.

We have the walls, the floors, the roofs, are optimized and customized to the elements that we produce offsite in a very efficient way in a factory. And these flat elements, they are mass customized, so that we can use the same production techniques.

But every element is different and is tailor-made exactly for the specific building plot, and for the specific house, and to the desires of the specific clients we have. And then we have some fixed 3D elements, 3D modules, like our energy module that contains everything for the heating, for the solar panels, and all technical installations.

The bathroom is also a fixed 3D element. And we have a fixed 3D element that is the critical core of all our houses, which consists of the staircase and the technical shaft. So that's the fixed elements.

These fixed elements are mounted on site in about a week. So in the six weeks production period, we have two weeks for preparation for the foundation works, for demolition, if necessary. And we have then about one week that we just make the structural work done there.

And then this full house up to the roof is ready. And then we have three weeks left to do all the finishes and everything in the house. We have developed this building concept in such a way that it is plug and play and idiot proof.

Because we have this lack of skilled workers, we wanted to have the smartness of the system in the system and not necessarily in the people, so that we do not need specific skilled workers for electricity, and separate skilled people for plumbing, and for other technical installations, and for the structural works.

We have a fixed team of people that uses these standardized components and the universal connectors we have developed, so that we can have a plug and play system that one team can build the entire house. Up to the ifty nifty detail, everything is included.

And they do that in six weeks. And they also do it in a dry construction way, so that we can shorten the construction time. We don't need to wait for elements and connections to dry.

It's a fully circular thing, as the way that we construct it the same way we can also deconstruct and demount the entire house. So that all parts can in one way or another be reused later on. So that's the fully circular aspect of Circle.

And we have also a very low energy consumption with our balanced and standardized energy system. So the entire thing is like future proof. We have built the first commercial houses. We've decided to do that in Belgium in the middle of Europe. And you see these two houses here.

So these houses don't look very spectacular, but they are. They are sustainable first, these are the first circle buildings. But one of the nicest compliments we've got from our first clients when they visited these houses during the opening event we held in June this year, was, it's very cool, but you don't see anything.

You can't see from the outside that it's built in only six weeks. And that was a very nice compliment because these houses were built in only six weeks. They are fully sustainable. They are circular.

And they also contain 75% bioecological material, so we are really doing everything we can to tackle climate change. To come back to the sustainability, I told you that 50% of the energy consumption worldwide is caused by the construction industry.

Well if you look at the energy consumption of our houses, it's extremely low. If you look at a family of five living in one of our houses, in a conventional house, they would pay monthly 217 euros a month for their heating, electricity, and warm water, for their bath or their shower.

In our circle home, it's only 42 euros. If we look at the industrial waste, we are responsible as an industry for 36% of that. Our houses are almost fully demountable. We did these studies together with the University of Leuven, and they calculated that for an average conventional house, the demountability is estimated at 51%.

In our houses, our circle concept, this raises to up to 79. The best in the test was about 80, so this is really, really, very good. And we are also as an industry responsible for 40% of the global CO2 emissions, and also there we reduced dramatically the CO2 equivalent per square meter to only 257 kilograms per square meter.

So that's the full life cycle calculation by KU Leuven, and also there, we have a huge improvement compared to these conventional houses. Now, I told you that we had a smart combination. So we solve these climate change issues by hardware, and this building concept, but also with software.

And the software we have is fully integrated in BIM first approach, where we as Circle do the entire design of these houses, and we generate a house for every client on every plot in Europe, and we do that within a minute.

So that digital approach is also part of how we will tackle sustainability. As I told you, we are talking about 6,000 houses that need to be revamped or renovated every day. So that's a huge challenge, and we believe that our software approach will help to really scale it up.

So we have the sustainable building concept that makes sure that we have a sustainable buildings. The software approach will make sure that we can really scale it up and make sure that for every house of the 6,000 houses a day, we come up with a solution.

And we have five key advantages. One is we have tailor-made houses with an optimal layout. So our software and artificial intelligence generative design comes up with the optimal layout for every house.

And we see that compared to conventional buildings, we can have 7% more useful floor space within the same building volume. We have transparent pricing. So the price on our quote is the same as the price on the invoice.

So we really have an upfront price guarantee for our clients. Circle is a turnkey construction company we cover the clients from A to Zed. I will show you in a minute how that works. All our houses are energy efficient.

We have a guaranteed negative energy label according to the European standards. And we are circular and sustainable construction company, every house that we build is also adaptable for future living needs.

For example, the inner walls in our houses. They can be removed, or added, or changed in the future, as well as parts of the building. We also did a first test with KU Leuven of even deconstructing a house and reconstructing it in a different city in Belgium.

And also that is possible with the building concept that we have developed. Now, I was talking about artificial intelligence and generative design. This is a slide we borrowed from our friends at Autodesk.

So from traditional design we went to parametric design and now we are taking the next level, the next step up, to generative design, where we describe the goals and constraints. And then the computer or artificial intelligence comes up with the optimal design for a specific problem.

In our case, the Circle software artificial intelligence, with the help of the client and some customer features, comes up with the optimal design and exact price quote for a house. So I will show you in a minute how it works.

So actually, this is the starting point of our Circle software. A client can enter his address that can be an address for a new house, so an empty plot. Or it can be an existing house where we will demolish the existing house and reconstruct a new one.

So as I told you, we are a turnkey construction company that covers the real project from A to Zed. So clients can really, with Circle, start with an initial old, crappy house. Or even if before they plan to buy the old, crappy house, they can see on our website, get a price quote, of what it would cost for Circle to demolish and reconstruct a new house in situ.

In the next step, we ask the customer some of his contexts. Some of his desires and priorities. How many master bedrooms and bedrooms for children you need? How many bathrooms you have? Workspace. A man cave. You name it.

We can see what you as a client want to have. We have some prioritization. Some people are really home cooks and they like the kitchen, and that's very important. For other people, the living room might be more important, or people need some workspace.

So based on these prioritizations, we can offer the client a custom layout. And so there the idea is really that for a specific building plot, and this is a case that we do in Antwerp, where we are demolishing and reconstructing a new house really surrounded by a couple of different apartment buildings.

So this is really a small plot within the city center. And within the city center this is a first layout that we propose. So you see a ground floor, first floor, second floor. But there's also this alternative approach.

And we also made a third potential layout. So all these layouts are optimized within these different layouts the client can choose. And then after choosing, you see that we make different optimal layouts and the client can make a choice.

After making a choice, we go to step four where the client can even further customize the layout. So there the idea is that we are really future proof in the sense that all inner walls can be replaced, removed, or changed.

And so that's also in the first design phase. Our customers get this opportunity to change and to make sure that, for example, the storage space or the entrance, they can change.

They can change the location of the kitchen or the dining room. Based on these changes, in step five, we also optimize the kitchen. Within this specific building plot, there's this option to have the kitchen on the first floor, and then the kitchen can follow different design options.

It can have a cooking island, no cooking island. The customer can choose and then we optimize for that. Same for all other rooms, like the master bedroom. We can in the bathroom, we can optimize and add some choices.

For example, the floors or the facade tiles, that's all possible in this step. In step six, we have some add-ons. We have lights, we have a potential furniture, we also have the screens for the windows.

The nice thing about this step is that we, at Circle turnkey, we know exactly where this building will be built. We know the surrounding buildings. We know also how sunlight will fall into your living room in summer, in winter. We have all these simulations.

So that's also how we can simulate upfront whether we need for the large window facing the south. That we need some screens over there. So we can really optimize and add everything needed for a customer or not add what's not needed.

So there, we are really focusing on this customer experience where we guide the client from A to Zed through the process. In the end, an option can be chosen for the outdoor style. This is also some tailor-made solution. Possible To also change positions of windows, et cetera, in the last step.

And in the end, you get a customized price quote. So the idea is that every client can get a price quote and a preliminary first design for his house in a minute. With transparent pricing, you see exactly the price, and we guarantee you that we can build this house for this specific price.

But what's even more, if somehow as a customer you do not like the price, if the price is too low, if the price is too high, you can step back a few steps and add some extra features, or remove some features, or take some different choices, and you see the direct impact of your choices on the price quote.

So this is really where we have this end to end link from the design to the exact price. And then if the client agrees, approves the design, approves also the price quote, and we have an agreement on that, then we go to the Autodesk world.

We import everything in Revit. We add the details needed for applying for the building permit. We add details needed for our production partners to produce the wall elements, the facade, the roofs, the everything that is mass customized will be produced based on information that we extract from our 3D model in Revit.

And that's how we think that we can indeed, really tackle this climate change. Because we have now a first step that we take our customers from the initial design phase on their building plot to the desired home, and then we take it to the next level. Make it production ready.

We add even everything needed for-- this is the ventilation, for example. And this is how hardware and software come together to solve these sustainability challenges in construction.

We guarantee our clients upfront, right price quote guaranteed price. Guaranteed energy level, because everything we do is sustainable. Guaranteed more flexibility and more space in your home, because we have the optimal layout.

Our software can generate thousands of layouts and choose really the best ones for you, something which is more difficult for an architect to do by hand. And in the end, the hardware and the software come together with a sustainable business concept, and the software to make it scalable, so that we can tackle the 6,000 houses every day.

Because that's what we need to do. I would like-- and also my colleagues WIM and Yasmine, they would like to learn about you. What's your challenges? How we can collaborate?

How you see potential partnerships with Circle. With Autodesk. And how we can really make sure that together, all of us can tackle climate change and can make our politicians proud.

And can make sure that we all make sure that happens, what we promised in the Paris Agreement, that we can make the world climate neutral by 2050.

Thanks for having us. And have a nice day. Thank you.