Built heritage as catalysts of environmental sustainability: A pragmatic paradigm for Anthropocene

摘要

Addressing the fundamental causes of anthropogenic global warming is inextricably linked with achieving the criteria for environmental sustainability. To this effect, mitigating global GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emission has procured primal significance and dominated global debates. Sadly, despite the global coalesce and plenitude of scientific perspectives, only a mixed success has been achieved so far on the GHG emission mitigation from the building sector which produces arguably one-third of the global emissions. This is owing to a couple of reasons and sometimes, fundamental misconceptions. Against this background, this paper argues that reinventing traditional building materials and traditional design construct holds a huge potential in the carbon emission mitigation in the building sector. Therefore, this paper examines and measures the energy consumption and carbon emission rates of built cultural heritage in comparison to modern buildings under the same energy supply and climate conditions using a parametric computer based comparative simulation procedure using REVIT Architecture with green studio plug in.