Buildings designed today will shape our carbon future. As the industry moves from operational to whole-life carbon, curtain walling façades present a major opportunity to reduce emissions – if we rethink how they’re designed and delivered. This publication is the result of a year-long collaboration between Arup, Scheldebouw, and Alinea, aimed at accelerating low-carbon solutions in curtain walling.

By 2030, the built environment is expected to halve its carbon emissions. Achieving this target will depend on open collaboration and a willingness to challenge the status quo. Every stakeholder – from designers and engineers to developers, manufacturers, clients, and investors – has a role to play.

The imperative is clear: we must design better buildings now.

By applying these actions, you could achieve a 20% upfront cost saving and 55% A1-A5 embodied carbon saving on your project today.

Accelerating low carbon curtain walling:

• Sets out six practical, design-led and cost-effective actions that can be implemented immediately, developed through collaboration between Arup, Scheldebouw, and Alinea;
• Highlights the importance of dialogue with clients, developers, architects, contractors and investors, which has surfaced valuable insights around feasibility, compromise, and shared responsibility;
• Provides actionable guidance to inform better decision making and accelerate sustainable outcomes.

#buildless, #buildclever, #buildefficient, #buildclever

Other information

The six actions we’ve identified are not a checklist of ready-made solutions, but a starting point for collective progress. They reflect what’s possible now, and where we need to go next: the opportunity is not just to reduce emissions, but to redefine value in façade design. Three clear points emerged from the discussion: the need to bring the industry in the design earlier, to prioritise practical over purely academic approaches, and to interrogate our assumptions more rigorously as an industry.