The impact of a building’s construction and operations on carbon emissions has been well established by the AEC community. “Buildings, in fact, contribute 40 percent of the CO2 emissions worldwide,” according to the Carbon Leadership Forum. The AEC industry is moving on an imperative to address embodied carbon (EC), the carbon emissions associated with the manufacture of building materials and processes over the life of the building.

Contributors: Craig Stauffer, Alex Legé, Jason Collins, Ted Ryan, Brian Phair, and Todd Parke
PCS Structural Solutions | October 4, 2019

In a long-awaited, historic step toward “real" not cookbook wind engineering, the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers recently issued a recommended alternative to the building code’s prescriptive procedures for the wind design of buildings. Properly implemented, the Prestandard for Performance-Based Wind Design, available free of charge for all structural engineers to use, results in buildings capable of achieving wind performance objectives specified in the ASCE 7 design load standard, and in many cases, superior performance, according to SEI.

As the height of a building increases, the most dominant wind forces on a building change from those on the roof to those on the walls of the building. This concept has been the basis of the dual set of provisions in the ASCE 7 Standard and building codes since the original wind tunnel studies were completed in the 1960’s and 1970’s.