Multidisciplinary research aims to ‘clean up’ the world’s tall buildings

The LOCAST (Low-Carbon Structures) project has received £1.2m in funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The team said that while tall buildings use urban space efficiently, constructing them has a high carbon cost compared to the same floor space spread across several shorter buildings.

“We’re at a point where heating and lighting are so efficient that most of the lifetime climate emissions from any new building come from making the concrete, steel and glass that go into it,” Professor Ian Walker, an environmental psychologist from Swansea University, who co-authored the funding bid, said in a statement.

“Using less of these materials in tall buildings would put a big dent in the emissions from the built environment. But to do this, we need to understand how making tall buildings more lightweight would affect the people inside them.”

According to the Swansea team, the reason engineers put so much material into tall buildings is not for safety, but so that their occupants won’t feel them sway in the wind.

The LOCAST project aims to challenge this approach by measuring how much movement people can feel when buildings sway, assessing how occupants might be affected if the buildings were more flexible, and asking whether lower-carbon construction could be enabled by shifting people’s expectations about how buildings should behave.

“Most people can happily sit, or even work, inside a train that is swaying and bouncing all over the place,” said Dr Jennifer Davies, a physiologist from Cardiff University who specialises in human posture and motion. “They expect to feel a train move and so the motion doesn’t surprise them. Could we avoid using millions of tonnes of concrete and steel if people expected buildings to flex a little bit? Is it realistic to sit 200m up in the sky and have it feel exactly the same as a bungalow?”

The LOCAST research team will use Exeter’s VSimulators structural motion simulator, which lets researchers precisely sway a small climate-controlled room while using virtual reality to give it realistic interiors and views.

This facility will enable the LOCAST project to measure ‘each link in the chain’: structural engineers will look at how real tall buildings sway in the wind and recreate this in the simulator. Physiologists will then measure how the movement affects people’s bodies, and a psychologist will measure how these body responses – as well as people’s expectations of movement – shape comfort, wellbeing and workplace performance.

The team said that they will pass the project’s findings to the construction industry, with the hope that these will underpin the next generation of building design codes.