Background and scope 

Life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of buildings show a clear reduction trend due to improved operational energy performance. However, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analyses also reveal an increase in relative and absolute contributions of GHG emissions embodied in new buildings. Such embodied GHG emissions are caused during all stages leading up to final construction of the building, including in the choice of materials and their subsequent fabrication. Achieving net GHG emission reductions by at least 55% by 2030, ^[1] and net zero by 2050, will require changes in our built environment and, with that, changes in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) value chains.

Moreover, with 70% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, it is also essential that the construction industry can avail of innovations that will positively impact the quality of life and the human experience in cities and buildings from environmental to social, cultural, and aesthetic points of view.

Decisions taken today by professionals and firms in the AEC sector impact the lives of generations far into distant futures. Initiatives such as the European Green Deal ^[2] or the New European Bauhaus ^[3] can offer context and targets in this domain to steer us towards better built environments.

These transformations can gradually interweave numerous scientific and technologic innovations into an interdisciplinary fabric that is interconnected by a common thread of digitalisation.

New digital technologies advance the state-of-the-art in areas such computational design, algorithmic design, physics simulation, agent-based modelling, topology optimisation, or parametric design. They can open whole new disruptive pathways of design, with higher degrees of system integration, optimisation, and complexity, if they are coupled with the parallel development of advanced digital fabrication and workflow technologies. Moreover, such digital fabrication technologies can in turn materialise such ever more complex designs, using or reusing known materials, and expectedly introducing more advanced innovative and engineered materials, including new classes of “meta-materials”.

This Challenge seeks to develop research and early innovations with a breakthrough potential related to design, fabrication and materials for the AEC value chain enabled by novel algorithms and advanced digitalization. In such a digitalized AEC value chain design, fabrication and materials are symbiotic and mutually dependent and enabling.

This combination can enable designers, architects, engineers, and fabricators to imagine, design, optimise and create complex and efficient structures within a digitalisation pathway, in response to ever more ambitious requirements for climate neutral, sustainable, inclusive, aesthetic, and inspiring buildings.

Overall goal and specific objectives

The potential of the digitalised, mutually interdependent, mutually reinforcing, intertwined triad of design, fabrication and materials can potentially exceed our wildest imaginations. This Challenge seeks the realisation of disruptive solutions for AEC in one or more of the following areas:

• Computational design solutions that advance the state of the art of algorithmically generated design, topology optimisation, agent-based modelling, physical simulation, digital representations such as digital twins and nature inspired design. New algorithmic design solutions may enable breakthroughs in functional integration of complex systems. These solutions may also blur boundaries of nano-scale, micro-scale, meso-scale, and macro-scale, and allow for new developments in meta-materials or bio-mimicry in terms of building structures and patterns.
• Digital fabrication solutions synchronous with a vast potential of the nearly unlimited complexity of computational design. Digital fabrication can relate to all digitally enabled manufacturing technologies, in particular to novel concepts for additive manufacturing such as new 3D printing techniques to realise the highly complex design definitions at voxel level with ever-higher resolution. Beyond advancing and further building on the known practices of layered extrusion and binder jetting, processes such as rapid liquid printing in a carrier suspension can be a promising new pathway for digital fabrication for the AEC. In addition, quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) may be enabled by new scanning technologies such as Computed Tomography (CT/ μCT) to detect defects and build a digital “as built” model, albeit at the dimensional scale and fabrication context AEC needs.
• Alternative materials as a field where the mix with digital design and digital fabrication technologies can be demonstrated by the AEC sector to vastly reduce the use of cement and its CO2 emissions in the transition to net zero. With a deeper adoption of digitalisation in design and fabrication on the potential of adopting alternative materials widens. Digital design and digital fabrication can enable a widespread adoption of bio-based materials, as for example all known and new timber derivatives, fungal architecture, bamboo, hemp, and others, natural materials such as earth, clay, stone as well as recycled and waste-based materials currently considered as inferior. By a similar token, new pathways for engineered materials can also emerge here, as for instance applications of composites and algorithmically generated “meta-materials”. The adoption of such materials allows the AEC sector to reduce or even remove carbon permanently from the atmosphere and economic cycle.

Projects are expected to target organisations and collaborative endeavours that develop ways to incorporate the digitalised triad of design, fabrication and materials in the reduction of embodied CO2 emissions, following principles aligned with key EU initiatives such as the European Green Deal or the New European Bauhaus. In this instance, ideas that are primarily centred on operational carbon emissions and/or operational energy efficiency are not in scope of this Challenge. However, it is important to highlight that innovations envisioning reductions of embodied CO2 emissions shall be at least as effective in reducing operational carbon emissions as the technologies they substitute by the time of market adoption. Also, projects should consider for the future commercial adoption, the issues of compliance with relevant standards of building operational performance.

Expected outcomes and impacts 

Projects must clearly achieve a proof of principle and validate the scientific basis of the breakthrough technology. The development and expression of techno-economic views on geometric and economic scalability of the technology itself, coupled with an entrepreneurial path towards commercialisation and future adoption by the AEC value chain are strongly encouraged.

Proposals are expected to demonstrate interdisciplinary and collaborative processes to create critical interactions between disciplines, economic sectors, and other partners with relevant skills as appropriate. The overall goal is to support the formation of new partnerships with innovative approaches and unique solutions that foster new R&I communities and ecosystems to nurture long term changes in the AEC sector.

Expected adjacent impacts of this AEC Pathfinder Challenge are also to inspire an ambition for the AEC sector to create higher quality jobs in a more progressive and appealing business culture that is ready to deliver a transformation of the built environment in line with the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus.

For more details, see the EIC Work Programme 2023.

[1]Fit for 55 - The EU's plan for a green transition - Consilium (europa.eu)

[2]A European Green Deal | European Commission (europa.eu)

[3]New European Bauhaus: beautiful, sustainable, together (europa.eu)