Design for Zero Carbon: Decarbonizing the Revit House Together

FIONA SHORT: Hi, everyone. I'm Fiona Short, an architect and lead of sustainability at Warren and Mahoney Architects, based in our Christchurch studio in the south island of [INAUDIBLE] in New Zealand at the bottom of the world.

But I work with the team in projects around the Pacific Rim. I'm passionate about our talk today because I really believe in the power of technology to amplify our impact. And collaboration is key to unlocking this.

Today is going to be a demonstration of exactly that. We're here to talk about the industry-led collaboration with Autodesk and One Click to accelerate the development of accessible live carbon insights so everyone can be part of the solution. This is a joint presentation today with a group of absolute superstars, who I'll now hand over to introduce themselves.

PANU PASANEN: Hello, my name is Panu Pasanen And I'm the CEO and founder of One Click LCA. We're working to decarbonize construction and manufacturing globally, glad to be here.

MICHAEL BEALE: Hi, and I'm Michael Beale. I'm with the Autodesk Forge team. I'm one of the developers that help customers build proof of concepts and reimagine their ideas.

FIONA SHORT: So today, this class is about how designers can address the climate change. To answer this question, I'll begin by sharing the broader challenge we face as an industry to decarbonize and share our unique approach on delivering low-carbon designs. We'll discuss the story behind the original Revit Sample House, which you'll all be familiar with.

And then we'll get into the main event, which is a practical demonstration of decarbonization using the tools and processes available today by taking the famous Revit Sample House. We'll see if we can meet a 40% reduction, in line with the Green Building Council global goal.

We'll then hear from Panu about how One Click LCA is advancing carbon measurement. And then Michael will give us a preview of an early prototype of Forge integration with One Click LCA that could unleash data embedded in our models to more parts of the supply chain. We'll then finished with a call to action for you to join us in this mission to decarbonize buildings globally.

Humanity currently faces the biggest challenge we've ever faced, a challenge that if not met will change the way we live on this planet. As our climate gets more unstable, so will our economies and societies. The systematic impacts we're feeling now may seem like ripples compared to a tsunami of climate-change-related systematic impacts, our ecosystems, our food systems, our coastal cities.

We've all seen the devastating impacts that extreme weather can have, and New Orleans is a testament to this. But it's also a testament to the power of people to do what needs to be done in an emergency and the wonderful way that people come together in the face of adversity. And this is what this presentation is about, people and organizations coming together to devise new ways for us to be better in an emergency.

We know 1.5 degrees warming is the likely threshold of no return. And we've already hit 1.1 degrees of warming. As a globe, we know we have a finite amount of carbon left to emit. And continuing as we have, we're heading down a pathway to devastation.

We all know the built environment has an impact, which accounts for around 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And it's estimated that 11% alone is attributed to the embodied emissions from buildings and the cities we all help proudly bring to life. And as our buildings become more energy-efficient, embodied carbon becomes more and more important.

Over the next 30 years, we'll be building 50% of the building stock that will exist in 2050 in our zero-carbon future. We're making decisions today that will affect that future. As an industry, we know we're not doing enough. But change is hard. And the challenge can seem too big that we can't make a difference.

But we're here to talk about how we can make a difference. And it might not be as hard as you think. I'm here today because my passion for the environment, along with my passion for architecture, has meant that I'm now a passionate climate design advocate. I've come here from New Zealand. For those of you who don't know New Zealand, we're at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

And this is a picture of the family farm that I spent a lot of time growing up on the west coast of the north island of New Zealand. New Zealand is a beautiful country at the bottom of the world. We're surrounded by ocean. We're globally connected, but we're also very isolated. And I think that this has fostered our sense of do it yourself and sustainability.

We're the first to see the sunrise each new day. And we were the first to give women the vote. And we were the first to legally grant national treasures, like a river and a forest, personhood to give them rights. There's an inspiring sense of achieving the impossible to find the odds. And we may be small, and we definitely don't have all the answers, but we're brave and we like to do the right thing. And I think it's those qualities that will help us overcome our climate challenge.

Warren and Mahoney is a third-generation design practice. It was founded in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1955 by 2 ambitious young architects, Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney, known respectively for their brilliant, creative, and technical thinking. And they shared a bold purpose to shape and influence the cities they served.

And this holds true for us today. We now have eight studios and are the fifth-largest practice in Australasia and have projects and influence across the Pacific Rim.

I joined Warren and Mahoney in 2011 as a graduate looking to be part of a green rebuild of Christchurch after our second-largest city was brought devastatingly to the ground in 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. I knew then that how we design our cities will influence the way we live, work, and play and commute for the next 50 years.

I was inspired by Warren and Mahoney's purpose. Our purpose is to design a bright future in partnership with people, community, and the planet. And we're in a privileged position to work alongside governments, local indigenous tribes, known as Iwi, and corporate institutions, who are long-term thinkers and care about the outcomes for people, communities, and the environment.

Climate has always been important to Warren and Mahoney. We were the first architectural practice to become carbon zero over 15 years ago. And we were recognized by the United Nations for our climate leadership at that time. When I asked our director why we had done this, he replied, given what we knew, we believed it was simply the right thing to do.

As part of my role as leader of sustainability at Warren and Mahoney, in 2019, we made this commitment for our business to continue to reduce the intensity of our operational missions. But more importantly, we wanted to give direction to the climate influence we can have through our work.

We have a goal that by 2030, all of our projects will be net-zero carbon in operation, be 50% more energy efficient, and 40% less embodied carbon. We are privileged to work on many very unique projects, as well as intensive typologies, like health care and sport and rec. So a percentage-based reduction was right for us. And it means that no project we can't apply this to.

A key part of this commitment is that we can't do it alone. None of us can do it alone. Achieving this, along with industry targets, requires us to partner, collaborate, and adopt integrated design like we never have before. And this has already led to many wonderful clients, exciting carbon-zero projects, as well as design research collaborations to discover the zero-carbon future.

But behind our focus on carbon is underlying holistic sustainability as a foundation. The concept and word sustainability stems from European ideas relating to natural resource management, historically forestry. But today we understand that our economies and societies all sit within natural systems that we rely on to our way of life.

And this diagram illustrates how our actions, whether a positive or negative, have an impact on the system, and they are not separate to it. It can be easy to understand how polluting a river will impact our own health if we eat from it. And it's easy to see the impact civilization has had on the wilderness.

What can be hard to see is how the health of our biosphere, which we can't see, has an impact on the health of our environment, communities, people, and economy. For generations, we've had a positive impact on people, communities at the expense of the environment. But we can't afford for this to continue.

We need to understand the impact of economic activity, such as projects, what impact it has on these outer spheres. And we need to make that impact positive. We need to leverage this impact to be regenerative.

To do this, we need impact metrics. And we can do this through a Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA for short. An LCA measures seven environmental indicators, but the one we'll be talking about today is Global Warming Potential, or GWP. This is the impact a project will have on our biosphere, which in turn warms our environment.

If you don't want to warm the planet any more, and I suggest you don't, we need to be aiming our global warming potential towards zero, what we refer to as net-zero carbon. You may hear people say that the true answers to climate change don't lie in technology but in cultural changes. Well, I believe that culture, technology, and sustainability can work together as an absolute driving force to inform new approaches to design and lead us to not only net-zero carbon but more resilient and vibrant communities too.

This is the future of design diagram we have at Warren and Mahoney to drive this design innovation. We believe the future of design will be defined by regenerative climate design, deep listening to people, their perspectives, and their story, and all of this enabled and amplified by technology. There are three strands to this diagram, culture, sustainability, and technology, when woven together, like a traditional Maori basket of knowledge, will lead us to new, interconnected ideas.

And today, we're looking at where technology and sustainability overlap. It's here where we find the idea of data-informed design for climate, a key approach to net-zero carbon. So what exactly do we mean when we say net-zero carbon? There can be many definitions of carbon neutrality, of net-zero carbon, of zero carbon, or carbon zero, each with their own inclusions, exclusions, and calculation methodologies.

However, the underlying contributing factors largely remain consistent. The climate impact of your building is essentially the sum of these design strategies. And we use this simple equation or diagram to structure a climate strategy for a project. And simply put, we want to minimize the energy demand and balance this with maximizing energy generation. And we want to think about how we can minimize embodied carbon and maximize carbon benefits, like biogenic carbon for building reuse.

So our shared goal an industry needs to be to lean this project sum towards 0 as quickly as we can. And to make informed decisions about parts of the equation, we need to understand the metrics behind design decisions. This is a data-informed design process that helps us go from a vision to success reporting. And normally, we would use this approach when designing a building from scratch. But today we're going to use it to guide our thinking to decarbonize an existing design.

The design that we'll be decarbonizing is the sample Revit house, which I'm sure you'll all be very, very familiar with. And I'm going to hand over to Michael to introduce the Revit Sample House.

MICHAEL BEALE: Thanks, Fiona. The Revit Sample House is a design by Sam Macallister from about 10 years ago. And it's since been used by Forge developers and Revit users for the last 10 years as well.

I can remember using this Revit Sample House in a number of demos and made the house reappear in downtown Boston, to making it explode for a walkthrough. It's just simply being that go-to Revit Sample House that lots of developers have used. And it's been just such a hallmark of what we do with the Forge platform, getting us started.

But I think, Fiona, you've probably got more of a background on its original design.

FIONA SHORT: So we reached out to Sam Macallister, the original architect, to tell us more about the design and materiality. The project was designed around 10 years ago for a very high-end architectural practice. And the building actually originally sits in [INAUDIBLE] in New Zealand, actually, just a few kilometers up the road from me.

But the building was designed using quite raw materials, but quite carbon-intensive materials that are expressed as part of the design in quite a modernist way. It's quite reductionist. So it's going to be really interesting to see how it measures up.

A few more images of the house, this was some of the design inspiration that Sam shared with us. And you can see the brutalist aesthetic that's coming through, especially with the use of concrete.

So now we get into the practical demonstration. So it's interesting to think of the life of that project has hit. And I don't think it's ever been quite interrogated in the way that we're going to interrogate it today. And I think it's a great design challenge for us to decarbonize this house, because it's such a strong design gesture. We're going to see how little we can do to it to keep its identity but also transform its impact.

So what might the Revit house look like if it was designed in 2030? For this exercise, we've decided to use the World Green Building Council target of a 40% reduction over the whole-of-life embodied carbon emissions. And this also aligns with our own 2030 commitment.

Here are numerous internationally-published benchmarks from embodied carbon. Their point of reference, the ones on the screen, are from the Royal Institute of British Architects, RIBA. And they're relatively consistent around the world. Even our own research into buildings where we have high seismic risk areas in many of our cities in New Zealand, we still get similar results. So we think they're a really good benchmark.

What we can see here is business as usual, benchmark in 2020 might be in the realm of around 1,000 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per square meter. And that this practice in 2030 might be in the realm of 300 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per square meter. We can also use One Click LCA carbon designer to create a simple reference design to improve upon.

The first step to creating a bespoke benchmark is identifying the scope of the assessment. In this case, we use the LP scope of building elements, which aligns with the zero-carbon certification. We use the Revit plugin to extract material and quantitative data from our BIM model and upload this to One Click web-based software.

From here, we did what is referred to as mapping, where we take the model data and match it with available material carbon data. Then One Click LCA calculates the embodied carbon for the design. So what did we get as our benchmark?

Well, Sam, I think Sam has a lot to answer for here. This is not looking good. And I think he may be planting a few trees this summer. Style over substance is one thing, but this is literally off the charts.

But more seriously, what has happened here is actually very, very common. Often, when we're looking to establish a benchmark, we're measuring a design that was not actually modeled with this use of the data in mind. This process can uncover some very strange things that we may have hidden in Revit.

One Click LCA has its own in-built [INAUDIBLE] checker called the completeness implausibility checker, which went off the charts when we first imported this building. It can help let you know if your results are in the realm of expectation or something has gone horribly wrong, which in this case, it did.

So we decided to look at the material impacts to find out where the issue was. And it doesn't take an LCA expert to see that the problem here was clearly resin. And what we found was that a generic floor had a resin material applied to it for visualization purposes. And this kind of thing happens all the time in practice.

We had a chat to Sam and asked what the design intent was and we found out that apparently, resin floors were very hot in London in the noughties. And we also found out that resin has a very high carbon intensity. So we adjusted the model to suit the correct buildup, which was a thin resin floor, and re-exported the data set.

And the results we have on the screen here are much more in line with what we might expect for a benchmark. In fact, I think Sam can be probably pretty proud. They're not off the charts anymore, and he may have to plant a few less trees this summer.

So our benchmark is going to be 828 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per square meter. And we can see this compares to the One Click LCA carbon heroes benchmark in the form of a G rating, which is higher on the spectrum against comparable buildings.

So our target is 40% reduction on the benchmark, which is going to give us 495 g of carbon dioxide, equivalent per square meter whole of life. And to reach this target, we need to reconsider the Revit house in a low-carbon world from the ground up. This is not exactly how we would start a new project. But we're going to demonstrate the thinking through various design strategies applied for this project.

I want to show you why bespoke climate strategies matter. This is the breakdown of embodied versus operational carbon from the Revit house if we place the exact house in two different locations around the world and use their typical grid electricity in those countries. This is New Orleans versus New. Zealand

This shows us that not only do different locations have different climates that we want to respond to, but they require different climate design strategies to maximize total carbon reductions. In New Zealand, we're very lucky to have a low-carbon grid due to high percentage of renewables.

And in the US, we can see that reducing operational carbon would have the greatest impact. But once this is achieved, the importance of embodied carbon starts to match that of New Zealand. So let's take a look at the breakdown of embodied carbon of the benchmark to see where opportunities for decarbonization may lie.

In One Click LCA, we can use the breakdown of building element contributions to interrogate the data and suggest where a change in design might have the greatest impact. And straight away, we can see that the horizontal floor buildup our really giving us a skewed result. So, sorry, Sam, that resin floor is definitely going to go.

But after that, we can see that the other four parts of the building are also contributing to a higher result, external walls, foundations, and the roof. Another way to carbon hotspot a design is to use the Revit One Click LCA plugin, which colorized carbon-intensive model elements.

So going back to our net-zero carbon equation, let's look at some of the design strategies that we could apply. So to minimize embodied carbon, we can think about things like materials with lighter carbon intensity, so less carbon per unit when compared with another material. We can think about how we can reduce the amount of material in the design using a less today or, architect speak, dematerialization approach.

And we can also think about less tomorrow, which is about selecting durable materials with a longer service life and less replacement required over the life of the building. And to maximize carbon benefits, we can think about how to increase the biogenic carbon storage in the building using plant-based materials and also ways we can avoid emissions through building re-use and recycling.

So let's go for it. Let's go for those low-hanging fruit first and see how far we can get. So step 1, we changed the standard foundation to a low-carbon foundation, which had a low carbon cement and lower carbon reinforcing, which was available. And we can see what products are available using One Click LCA. And this step dropped the total carbon per square meter down to 716, which is a great start.

Next, we looked at the tallest impact column, which includes the floors, upper floors, structures, and the roof. We got rid of the resin floor, as well as the carpet, which is really high in carbon, and replaced it with a beautiful, engineered timber floor. And we polished the concrete slab on the ground floor, removing the renewed need for material placement there at all.

And astonishingly, this has dropped it down to 346 kg of carbon per square meter. Fantastically, this has shot past our 40% reduction target already. So this is a really impressive impact for a relatively small decision.

Next, we targeted the cladding. We replaced the carbon-intensive concrete cladding of the main gable form with cedar shingles. And we thought that since this Revit house is for 2030, that it was important to increase the energy performance too. So we actually doubled the wall thickness, and with it, doubled the insulation. And we didn't know whether this would make the results go up or down.

It went down but only slightly, down another 3 kg. But we've also reduced the energy demand. So we're now at 343 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per square meter.

And finally, we want the roof cladding to match the walls. For a contemporary take on a traditional material, we replaced the metal seam roof with cedar shingles, and again, increased the thickness and insulation in the roof for 2030 energy efficiency standards. Oh, and it went up. But we think this is the kind of place where we should be spending our carbon budget. So we're happy that this is still under the 495 target.

So we managed to achieve and bring the total impact of the Revit house down to 115 tons of carbon. 71 tons of biogenic carbon is now stored in the building. Interestingly, we also looked at the site works around the building, which was outside of our scope, to see the impact that that would have if we expanded our scope. And we found that the site works was actually 171 tons. So it just goes to show the impact you can have outside of the building scope as well.

So all in all, we saved 484 tons of carbon dioxide, which is a huge amount. How much is 484 tons? Well, it's the equivalent of driving over 1.2 million miles in a standard gasoline car. So I think we're going to be saving Sam quite a few trees being planted this summer. I think we've saved him approximately 8,000. So I think he'll be happy to hear that.

We're going back to the wider carbon equation. And for design tweaks, we'll decrease the embodied carbon and increase the carbon benefits. And we've decreased the energy demand. And some quick calculations have also shown that in the remaining 40% budget, we have enough left to actually splurge on some solar panels so the house can actually generate more of its own power.

So I just want to thank Sam for being a good sport and letting us decarbonize the Revit house. So as designers, we can access this data with the help of BIM integration and One Click LCA. And this is how it works for us architects in the construction industry.

And as we've demonstrated today, we can decarbonize design using these tools. But we understand that not all customers and those who collaborate with us use Revit and can utilize this integration. So it's integral that everyone can have access to this data to help inform their decisions in all parts of the supply chain.

With a larger scale of utilization, this data and tool can have a more powerful effect and increased rate of change. I'm now going to hand over to Panu to discuss the different integrations available for all consultants.

PANU PASANEN: Thank you, Fiona. So my name is Panu Pasanen, CEO and founder of One Click LCA. We are powering the makers of the zero-carbon future. We're [INAUDIBLE] Fiona Short are one of the leaders. However, there are many more who need to be playing the game in order for us to be successful in mitigating the global warming sufficiently to be able to constrain the damage that the global warming will otherwise cause.

So we have basically just three problems to solve. We have an industry where we have roughly, let's say, 10 million professionals working as designers, working as product managers, working as purchasing officers, managing the funds, allocating money, basically, for projects to be built. And these people need to be enabled.

First, they need to be enabled with knowledge. Second, they need to be enabled with tools. And then considering they have other tasks than reducing carbon, we need to be sure that this work gets done automatically so they can scale it all their projects. So we need to automate LCA for every project, not only the projects that are working with leading designers.

And to these vectors, we need to get to the point where we actually decarbonize every project. So every Revit House going forward will be 40% or more less carbon than the baseline. So that's what we are trying to achieve here overall.

And that's how what we do as One Click LCA enters into the equation. For us, the key has always been making LCA as easy as possible, no PhD required. Because there's 10 million people in the industry who work on making day-to-day decisions about what kind of projects to commission, what kind of materials to buy, how to design things. And not everybody can get the PhD in LCA or even basic education.

We do provide free education for tens of thousands of people every year. But we still need to keep it as simple as possible. Guiding, visualizing, and explaining are very critical. But here, today, we talk about automation.

How can the data you have generated in your work, the [INAUDIBLE] quantities, the BIM models, other data you may have for your various projects, how can you use them to automate lifecycle assessment? We come from the design side, where we have been supporting for the longest time different types of designers and different types of design tools to be able to integrate cycle assessment in their daily workflows, be it with Revit or other tools or Grasshopper, Rhino type of early tools or any energy or facade tools, where you have some specialist software and also tools for contractors and BIM managers.

But today, we are able to actually reach, thanks to the cooperation we've had with and continue to have with Autodesk and Warren and Mahoney, also all the managers and owners who do not have the technical deft, let's say, to work with these designer tools but who make very important decisions and who need to be able to know if they get their money's worth in terms of the carbon reductions achieved so that they are able to set targets and hold their suppliers accountable for achieving those goals.

So today I'm going to talk about what we did with Autodesk Forge, which is primarily used by end users to the BIM 360 platform. For us, of course, we used it through the Forge API. I'll be demonstrating the integration shortly. I will just explain the main workflow so it's clear.

So the workflow is such that any user who wants to bring in data from Autodesk Forge to One Click LCA, they choose one of their projects that they want to get calculated or assessed or optioneered. They send it over. And it is at this point when the data is imported that the user can choose if they like to calculate according to one LCA methodology or other, or if they like to use the scope of [INAUDIBLE] or lead or any other.

They get to see the results. But, of course, those results, they are just telling you where you are today. So the next thing is to optioneer and decarbonize. We help them with that too.

So I will jump to now a demonstration of what we've built. And I'm here now on the start of the Forge integration, where you basically connect with the Forge platform and are able to access your projects. I have here some proof-of-concept projects from which I can choose. And I can import any one of them into the platform.

I'll jump to my platform, where it's going. And I can find the project landing on the One Click LCA side of the platform. And here you can choose if you want to use specific standard or methodology, if you want to scope the assessment in a certain manner, for example, only to evaluate structure, or if you also want to do building systems, or if you are doing infrastructure assessment and so on.

And I'm going to just push the data in. And this gives us a baseline LCA for the project. Of course, if we had some concerns about the data, we can always go to the review screen and look at what it tells us. In this case, considering it's a pretty worked-out example, like how we know what this contains, we don't have much of a worry.

So we have the lifecycle impacts from the construction materials with over 100 tons energy consumption material replacement over lifecycle. And total lifecycle emissions are working out to slightly different figures than Fiona because I'm using a slightly adapted model. And then we can see the biogenic carbon storage also, which is, of course, then among the benefits we would like to reach.

And now, of course, we have our baseline, so far, so good. But what we're going to do with this data matters more. First thing to do is, of course, to understand why you should be doing things. We have a lot of different visual options, which you can use to understand what are the-- let's say, most plausible action drivers. I will just start with here.

Looking at the different life cycle drivers, so materials, energy, material types, let's say concrete was big driver-- not terribly surprising, let's say, and external walls being a big driver too. So we can just go and look at, what are the most contributing-- what are materials in this model that would be here?

Precast concrete walls, already mixed concrete, or we can just see, what are the sustainable materials that would be available? And if one of them happens to be in a-- OK, my New Zealand geography is a bit poor. But one of them would be in a convenient location for the project at hand, then you can just choose it, and you can apply it on your project. And you will immediately know if that's a thing you can do better.

Of course, the other alternative is to go and do some design changes to change the complete composition of the product. That you can do too. But in the end, what you need to end up is with a number of alternatives where you compare them in consequential order, identifying the ones which get you the furthest, which are also acceptable for your other design purposes, just as Fiona mentioned.

The key here is to do this very early on in the project. It's not enough to do it when you get your half-built model and say, what could we have done? It doesn't get you anywhere. What you need to do is to start thinking about this before you commission the product.

So the minimum action for everybody who's an investor is to write requirement of the [? OJBC, ?] minimum 40% reduction in their briefs. But even better, consider doing a refurbishment if you can. And once you do that, the design team will take care of your problem. They will find a way. They can push 40%, 50%. It's all doable.

And how we have built our platform is to support these different user groups in different decision stages with different level of data, level of definition in the BIM parlance to be able to make their choices. And how that works in our approach is using a sequence of different tools. The very earliest is carbon designer 3D, which is when you haven't even thought of drawing anything, yet you can just create different masses and different types of construction strategies and just use that to steer your thinking, what kind of project you are looking to commission, actually.

Then we have tools for parametric phases, where you typically use some parametric tools or possibly energy simulation tools, which you use then to identify which direction you would go with the more technical aspects of the design. And then we move into the more building information modeling side of tools, where you use BIM authoring tools.

Then we go to the construction phase, where you specify and compare products. Hopefully, also, some other solutions may still be identified to improve if they are available in the local market, that eventually, you get to a point where you actually hopefully don't knock down the building, but you refurbish it or you have an existing building which you are then refurbishing.

And all of this should instruct a holistic decarbonization strategy. Continuum of tools and having these tools at the end of the value chain as well is extremely important for us, because that's a way to hold everybody in the value chain accountable.

One Click LCA is a global lifecycle assessment platform, so we can provide data for not only for New Zealand and Finland but also every other country in between and on the sides. And we do have our compliance with something like 70 different standards and certifications from different parts of the world so that you actually can calculate the assessment according to the way your national requirements or your customer requirements set them.

We have now demonstrated a proof of concept, which we have developed together with all the [? risk ?] Forge accelerator team. We are continuing now to launch it commercially. We have a lot more innovation coming from the pipeline so that we can match the richness, let's say, of the Revit integration and other integrations, which are already on the market for a number of years. Thank you.

MICHAEL BEALE: Thanks, Panu. So in collaboration with Panu's team at One Click and Fiona's team at Warren and Mahoney, we put together some ideas that can help improve that Revit desktop workflow, namely, by extending that Cloud Workflow. And that's done with the help of Forge.

So one of the goals of this prototype was to improve accessibility, to move the desktop Revit workflow into the cloud. And we do that through three main goals for the prototype. One was to make sustainability-focused tooling. The second one was to obviously make it accessible from a browser.

And then once you have something that's more accessible, it's in the hands of more experts, who can help influence the decision. So we essentially have more eyes on the problem when we have more experts in the room. And we don't need to wrestle with the complexity of, say, Revit desktop. And so that's really some of the goals that Panu mentioned from One Click LCA.

Here's an overview of the system integration you. Can see on the left, I've got BIM 360 Revit files. And they're saved from Revit desktop. Our prototype server pulls these Revit files and processes them with the help of One Click LCA integration.

And then finally on the right, we are in the One Click LCA website. And we can view and generate these final reports. So that's kind of the first prototype. This is one of our milestones.

So why was that milestone important? Well, once you have eyes on the problem-- in other words, you can analyze things-- you can start making smarter design decisions. And you can then modify that Revit design based on this new metric that you can see.

With Sam 10 years ago, he didn't have eyes on the problem and so he used resin floors. Today, with eyes on the problem with tools like One Click LCA, you can now see what's going on. And we can make better-informed decisions and modify that design, like Fiona's demonstrated.

So this becomes part of a feedback loop. You modify that design, and you then get an updated result. So our job is to make that loop faster by making the results a little bit more interactive, make them more accessible from not just the desktop but through things like the cloud, and maybe throw in a few new features along it away to speed things along.

But first, I should probably give you a quick elevator pitch of what the Forge platform is all about. So Forge is Autodesk's cloud platform. It's made up of lots of different APIs and services down to the bottom in the blue layer.

And customers like One Click LCA or Warren and Mahoney would build an application on top of those modules. So think of them as LEGO bricks at the bottom. You piece those LEGOs together to build a space station or maybe a building.

But Forge has lots of options. And so it's like a lot of LEGO bricks. There's too many options to choose from. So where do we start?

So for our prototype, we really only need to focus on these three APIs, the Viewer API for viewing CAD in a browser, Model Derivative for conversion, and design automation, which is what we're going to talk a little bit more in detail. And that's to tap into the details of the data.

Briefly, Forge Viewer lets you view Revit files in a browser. They could also be AutoCAD files or Inventor, SolidWorks, 70-plus different file formats. You view them in the browser. And then with some custom JavaScript code as plugins, you can modify the viewer to add charts and graphs and colorization and some of the features that I'm going to show you.

You can find the documentation for Forge Viewer on the Forge Autodesk developer section under Viewer under the API reference. And then you can also find the data management API. I won't cover this in too much detail. But basically, this lets you access the files, folders, hubs and projects of our BIM 360 docs.

Then there's conversion, in order to view that Revit file, we need to convert from a Revit file into something that's friendly for the web. And that's called our Model Derivative service. It also lets us extract metadata properties. And we produced a demo-- or, sorry, One Click LCA have been working on a prototype using this technique.

But one of the things that the One Click LCA IFC input prefers is a high level of detail. So ideally, we prefer this, which is on the left to what's on the right. And on the left, you can see that there's a wall. And inside the wall, it has many different layers. And so those things are generally hidden inside a Model Derivative service. This is sort of a lower level of detail produced by Model Derivative.

So with Model Derivative, I would take a Revit file, like this building. We would then use Model Derivative service to extract the geometry for visualization and the metadata. And it produces that sort of empty wall. It doesn't have the layers. So it's a lower level of detail.

Now, One Click LCA will still work with this, and it can infer the missing information. But we also wanted to explore what design automation could do. And so we took Design Automation for Revit, and we wrote a plugin to extract that missing metadata.

Design automation API from Autodesk is essentially Revit running inside the cloud. We take Autodesk Revit engine and we host it on Amazon, and we provide services to let you run your own custom Revit plugin and produce some sort of result on top of that.

So we sent a Revit file, like this building RVT file, and we also take a custom Revit plugin, which we've got some code for, and we feed that into design automation for Revit, which then goes and extracts the metadata we want, and that outputs the missing material inside the wall, the missing layers inside the wall.

Now, you can find the source code for this project under this GitHub repo at the bottom. And the purpose of the code is to essentially extract those material layers from all Revit objects. And you can see it in for loop in the middle on the right here that says foreach ElementId materialId in materialsIds, we extracted out the externalId Revit categories, IFC classes, and a whole bunch of other things, which I'm going to demonstrate.

You can find the setup instructions and how to compile this code into a Revit DLL on the GitHub repo. And it's all based on a blog post from Augusto on my team called custom properties using design automation. OK.

So once we have the plugin working, we now want to add it to our prototype server, this one. So let's dig into the details. This is a rough system diagram. You can see that the Revit file is selected and it's sent into the Retrieval All Layers box.

From there, we run design automation, extract the missing layers information we wanted. And then we map it to some class mappings to match the interface for One Click LCA and do a group by material to count the quantities based on the dimensions. So if it's volume, area, or length, we want to make sure we aggregate correctly.

And then we finally send that to One Click LCA, who then process that on the website and produce the final results. Here's the quick demo of a user interface that I'm going to show you. And this is the report that you've seen from One Click LCA.

So let me give you a quick prototype, demo of the prototype and the source code. So here we have BIM 360 and we have my project. You can see I've got my folder on the left, and I've got three Revit files.

When I go to my prototype server-- here's the source code. This is the GitHub repo for it. And if I just click on this link here to show the website itself, you can see I've got my website here. And I am going to log in really quickly.

Since I've logged in previously, it is going to just automatically log in as me. And you can see I'm now looking at the folder structure on BIM 360. When I click on one of these files, I can now view that Revit file in a browser using Forge Viewer. And in fact, I'll really switch over to the architecture.