  Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings which account for 40% of
anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making buildings the leading
cause of climate change. To incentivize more sustainable construction, building
codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and maximum energy use.
However, they currently only reward energy efficiency measures such as
equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration
and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan
organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that
space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon
emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and
Singapore. Automatically generated floorplans for a case study in Zurich
further increase access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated
floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in
terms of environmental performance and access to daylight.
