LAB Living Art of Building

"We need the paradigm shift in building.
Not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, now." - Manfred Curbach

The state today

We are consuming and overexploiting our earth's resources and massively changing them. The consequences are climate change, scarcity of resources, natural disasters, hunger, flight and poverty.

The construction industry is massively involved in these developments. In 2018, it accounted for 5.3% of nominal gross value added in Germany, but causes around 25% of CO2 emissions and consumes around 40% of the energy generated. This discrepancy alone should lead to enormous productive activities. Yet research is receiving grossly under-average funding. In view of this further increase in the world's population, we will not build less, but more. Contrary to this, we must radically limit resource consumption and CO2 emissions. It is therefore obvious that in the future, building will have to be completely different, not just marginally, but fundamentally.

Because of the enormous leverage effect, a significant intensification of research in the building sector is therefore one of the most important tasks nationally, but also internationally, with extremely great significance for society as a whole in the future. There is an acute need for action.

A construction research centre in the heart of Lusatia would be an important first step towards meeting and ultimately solving these challenges.

Looking ahead

The focus of future work in the building sector must be on the needs of people and society with regard to the built environment:

• sustainable, climate neutral
• resource-efficient, recyclable at all levels (structures, components, materials)
• durable and easily repairable
• variable, changeable in use
• aesthetic, safe and valuable (in the sense of "creating value")
• humane (thought globally)
• oriented towards people, respecting the human scale
• Considering life in all age groups

The mission

The buildings of the future will not be designed and built with the materials or methods we know today. Instead, they will be planned, designed and calculated using artificial intelligence methods, manufactured in a resource-efficient way, equipped and operated with AI-supported building technology, monitored and controlled with highly sensitive sensors and accompanied by a Digital Twin. To achieve this, we need knowledge gains on a large scale - towards a completely different way of thinking about building than today.

In view of the increasing use of renewable energies as well as their storage, we can assume that the energy problem will decrease over time, while the problem of resource use will increase due to the limitation of matter. As construction is one of the biggest consumers, we must be prepared for this and initiate a resource-efficient material evolution. In this respect, an important goal is for every building to have as long a life as possible, accompanied either by a long life and different uses, or by several lives in which any large or small parts are reused. This reuse and recycling is treated on the scales of structure, component and material.

This also applies, mutatis mutandis, to all infrastructure structures such as bridges, tunnels, roads and hydraulic structures, where the utilisation parameters are optimally determined, e.g. by digital systems, in order to create optimal conditions for users and the environment, both locally and on a large scale (avoidance of CO2-generating traffic jams, variable utilisation of lanes, etc.).

Further information: https://lab-lausitz.org

Information for journalists:
Sandra Kranich
Tel.: 0351 484-56714

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)