STRUCTURAL SUSTAINABILITY—— THE FOURTH DIMENSION?
The demand to abandon the short-term satisfaction of needs based on economic planning and the economic construction of buildings in favour of a holistic consideration of the entire lifecycle of the buildings that takes into account ecological, economic and social/cultural aspects represents a genuine paradigm shift and is therefore an enormous challenge for the entire construction sector.For more than 20 years, load bearing structures have been designed in Europe on the basis of the semi-probabilistic safety concept and the Eurocodes, the demands for buildings and construction products have been laid down in the Construction Products Directive. For the Future we have to extend these requirements by sustainability aspects.Whereas in the past, considerations to guarantee the long-term stability and fitness for use of buildings used to concentrate primarily on the influences of the environment on the building and its structural components, it is now-additionally!-necessary to consider the effects of the building on the environment. Hence, the big challenge for architects and engineers in the future will be the necessity to integrate holistic considerations about the lifecycle of buildings in their planning. This means that the three dimensions of sustainability need to be networked with the requirements profile of the Construction Products Directive and the Eurocodes, I.e. With the Technical and Functional Performance of Construction Works. Therefore, a fourth dimension needs to be added to the three classical dimensions of sustainability, namely the structural sustainability.In the light of holistic considerations in line with the three dimensions of sustainability, it is necessary to extend the unidimensional eco-efficiency by adding the two other pillars of sustainability (economic,social). It follows that in the context of buildings, requirements such as structural safety, reliability and fitness for use have to be integrated into future assessment concepts. Therefore eco-efficiency has to be extended to sustainefficiency.There is an urgent need that structural engineers as well as architects should also study these issues more intensively. It is the duty of the universities to ensure that their education programmes create the necessary conditions in this respect if the construction engineers are to be empowered to shape our future and the future of our children rather than being mere constructors.
construction products eco-efficiency eurocode structural design structural sustainability sustain-efficiency
MAYDL, Peter
Graz University of Technology Graz, Austria
国际会议
上海
英文
52-61
2007-05-16（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）