Sustainable Built Environment Conference 2025
Members of the Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture were part of the organising committee, led workshops and presented papers at SBE 2025, which took place at ETH Zurich on 25–27 June 2025.
The triannual Sustainable Built Environment Conference (SBE) took place at ETH Zurich on 25–27 June 2025 under the theme “Shaping Tomorrow: Systems Thinking in the Built Environment”. More than 400 participants from across the globe gathered to explore how holistic thinking can unlock a just and climate-resilient future for our built environment.
SBE 2025 was jointly organized by ETH Zurich, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, TU Graz and University of Liechtenstein. Professor Catherine De Wolf and doctoral students Vanessa Costalonga and Ana Bendiek-Laranjo were part of the organising committee.
CEA members were involved in two of the five workshops:
- "From Waste to Resource: Digital Design and XR-Guided Assembly for Circular Construction" was organised by doctoral student Beril Önalan and postdoctoral researchers Eleftherios Triantafyllidis and Ioanna Mitropoulou. The full-day workshop, an earlier iteration of which was held at the Future of Construction 2024 Symposium, is part of ongoing research at CEA in digital workflows for the reuse of concrete waste. Over the course of the workshop, participants worked with discarded concrete elements. They explored 3D scanning and processing, and mapped elements into new wall assemblies using computational design workflows. This hands-on process raised questions about how one can design with material leftovers and how digital methods can support reuse under physical and geometric constraints.
- "Life Cycle Assessment of BIM models using LLM Workflows" was organised by doctoral student Heidi Silvennoinen, doctoral candidate Silvia Vangelova and postdoctoral researcher Kasimir Forth in collaboration with researchers from RWTH Aachen University and the Block research group at ETH Zurich. Participants spent the day working with open-source BIM and analysis tools, specifically IfcOpenShell and CompasIFC. The session also introduced methods for quantity extraction and material matching with environmental data from Ökobaudat using different NLP techniques and LLMs, including BERT and GPT-4o.
Four of the 240 paper presentations were given by CEA members:
- Postdoctoral researcher Kasimir Forth presented an automated similarity matching approach for optimising material selection in building life cycle and energy performance assessments. Read Kasimir Forth, Julia Kaltenegger, Ekaterina Petrova, Catherine De Wolf, "BIM-based material property enrichment using text-based and ontology-based semantic similarity matching" here.
- Doctoral candidate Silvia Vangelova presented a topic modelling framework based on natural language processing techniques for guiding the creation of digital product passport data templates. Read Silvia Vangelova, Kasimir Forth, Catherine De Wolf, "Towards a Compatible Digital Product Passport Data Template in Construction" external page here
- Postdoctoral researcher Pei-Yu Wu presented a data-driven approach for quantifying and predicting the service lifespan of building components using empirical moisture damage records and graph neural networks. Read Pei-Yu Wu, S. Olof Mundt-Petersen, "Empirical Quantification and Prediction of Building Component Lifespans with Graph Neural Networks" external page here.
- Doctoral student Loïs Lozach presented a methodology for assessing the correlation between circularity and environmental sustainability using such metrics as building circularity indicator and global warming potential.
The Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture (CEA) develops research on matching reused architectural materials with people and projects through digitalization for a circular built environment. For more information visit our webpage.