Fabian Kastner

Last Name

Kastner

First Name

Fabian

ORCID

0009-0002-0128-1572

Organisational unit

09724 - Langenberg, Silke / Langenberg, Silke

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Publications 1 - 10 of 12

Whats behind the façade? Mapping building materials using artificial intelligence and architectural history
Schmid, Carlo; Kastner, Fabian; Zhang, Dachuan; et al. (2025)
SBE Conference Series ~ Sustainable Built Environment Conference 2025 Zurich - Extended Abstracts
Spatiotemporal mapping of Swiss exterior wall material stock using a large language model and architectural history
Schmid, Carlo; Kastner, Fabian; Zhang, Dachuan; et al. (2025)
Journal of Industrial Ecology
Building material stock studies are essential for advancing the circular economy in construction. However, existing models often lack both accuracy and scalability. While machine learning has demonstrated significant potential to enhance predictive accuracy, its adoption has been hindered by a shortage of high-quality training data. In this study, we introduce a novel methodology leveraging a large language model to extract previously untapped building material data from building energy performance certificates with a focus on exterior walls. This approach enabled us to create a dataset of over 20,000 buildings—significantly larger than those used in previous studies. Leveraging this dataset, we developed a machine learning model to predict material composition based on building characteristics such as construction year, use, and location. Furthermore, we integrated knowledge of construction history to estimate the material stock of walls in terms of volume, mass, and associated CO2 emissions for each building in the dataset. Our analysis revealed significant regional variations in material use patterns, emphasizing the critical role of location—a parameter often overlooked in existing building material stock models. These findings provide valuable insights for improving building stock modeling and highlight the importance of regionally tailored policies in advancing the circular economy in the construction sector
Adoption of Life Cycle Thinking: Impact-driven comparative assessment of Japanese construction corporations’ trends in practices
Kastner, Fabian; Zea Escamilla, Edwin; Langenberg, Silke; et al. (2025)
Building and Environment
Although life cycle thinking offers a well-founded set of concepts, methods, and tools for organizational contexts, only little is known about its relevance in the construction sector. In this sector, construction corporations are key players. In this work, a novel impact-driven method to assess the adoption of life cycle thinking by construction corporations is introduced. Japan, as a high-income country with a relatively long history of environmental policies informed by material flow analysis, is chosen as the context. Five Japanese construction corporations and respective reporting are used as case studies. Trends in environmental impacts over time of the case study corporations are assessed using two indicators: resource and carbon productivity. In comparison, an automated text corpus analysis workflow is presented to explore the corporate report’s life cycle thinking-related content in a meaningful way. Comparing the period of 2014–2018 and 2019–2023, an overall relative increase in framework adoptions (77%) and their integration in corporate categories (85%) in corporate reports indicates its increased procedural relevance among Japanese construction contractors. Findings show how the carbon indicator is embedded in various frameworks and, for instance, reveal an increased relevance of Scope 3 emissions as a framework on a low level. However, Scope 3 is also utilized as a performance indicator. To this end, considerable temporal differences in adoption practices are observed. Finally, a potentially effective corporate adoption model is identified through the comparative research design. The proposed method can be applied to other construction corporations and regional contexts.
Transition in Architecture Education? Exploring Socio-Technical Factors of Curricular Changes for a Sustainable Built Environment
Kastner, Fabian; Langenberg, Silke (2023)
Sustainability
Curricular changes in architecture can support to meet the increased demand for sustainability in higher education (HE). Identifying their associated factors is necessary to understand ongoing and future transitions in architecture education. Transition management (TM) frameworks have been frequently used to analyze structural changes in various institutions but have received little attention in architecture education. This study explores the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) as a case study, focusing on its architecture curricula within 32 years from 1990 to 2022, corresponding to multiple generations of academic careers. A multiple-level perspective (MLP) document analysis on curricular changes is conducted in three steps, drawing on a specific perspective on sustainability in architecture. First, generic characteristics that may influence curricular changes are identified from the literature. Second, shifts in the undergraduate curriculum of ETH Zurich are systematically mapped. Third, a classification of implemented curricular shifts results in seven nuanced variations in generic factors. These socio-technical factors involve the development and dissemination of new disciplinary (1) and interdisciplinary (2) approaches to a sustainable built environment (SBE), a relocation of the viewpoint on sustainability from physiology/hygiene to building physics (3), experimentation with inquiry-based learning in niches (4), extended spheres of influence in teaching (5), early committed intra-faculty opinion leaders (6), and the formation of educational networks (7). The proposed approach based on longitudinal curriculum mapping offers a way to locate structural curricular changes, identify hidden educational trends, and inform institutional changes.
Implementation of life cycle thinking for the built environment
Kastner, Fabian (2025)
The implementation of long-term-oriented practices in the built environment falls short of expectations as they have not yet reached the mainstream. This thesis investigates potentials for further implementation through life cycle thinking (LCT). To this end, the scope of life cycle-oriented use cases has widened and does not only cover products via WBLCA (whole building life cycle assessment) but also processes, for instance, via organisational LCA. However, although LCT offers a well-founded set of concepts, methods, and tools for various contexts, evidence-based studies remain scarce. In the context of professional built environment practice, an implementation gap between science and practice might hinder advancing long-term-oriented strategies for the built environment. Aiming to support bridging this gap, this thesis examines how the implementation of long-term perspectives on the built environment can be advanced. It is guided by three questions: (1) What are the characteristics of long-term curricular dynamics toward sustainability in architecture education? (2) How do construction corporations adopt LCT and how can the procedural relevance of LCT among construction corporations be assessed? (3) How can LCA-oriented digital games for the built environment be realised and used? To answer these questions, this thesis draws on a socio-technical stakeholder perspective and focuses on higher education organisations, large-scale construction corporations, and individual non-experts. Accordingly, this thesis examines the implementation of LCT within a multi-case study design by stepwise moving from higher-level scopes of analysis to more detailed ones: emergence and disappearance of sustainability knowledge in architectural education (Chapter 3), LCT in the construction industry (Chapter 4), and digital WBLCA tools for building preservation (Chapter 5). The findings show how diverse the implementation of LCT unfolds regarding different levers. In the area of higher education organisations, a longitudinal analysis of the architecture curriculum allows for empirically nuancing generic socio-technical factors that are decisive for anchoring sustainability-related perspectives. In the area of construction corporations, it is crucial to distinguish between conceptual LCT-oriented adoptions and materialisations in terms of resource and carbon productivity. A newly introduced methodology within a comparative case study design makes it possible to correlate these two aspects. To address non-expert individuals, an iteratively developed WBLCA simulation game shows how tools can be used to deal with the complexity of environmental impacts over the entire life cycle of buildings in a playful and low-threshold way by emphasising a transdisciplinary development workflow, information architecture, and use cases. Finally, all results are brought together through LCT implementation-pathways across all stakeholder levels by reflecting on the problem approach, and combining bottom-up and top-down considerations. Moreover, the individual projects open up new research directions in the broad fields of higher education, corporate responsibility, and digital mediation. This thesis shows that it is necessary to establish inherent links between these fields to improve the implementation of long-term perspectives for the built environment.
Tracing the Dissemination of Building Preservation as a Sustainability Strategy
Kastner, Fabian; Kasap, Orkun; Faraji, Aydin; et al. (2023)
AMPS Proceedings Series ~ (IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)
Teilhabe am öffentlichen Raum
Hess, Regina; Kastner, Fabian (2022)
Book of Abstracts INUAS Konferenz Urban Transformation: Öffentliche Räume
Games and Architecture – Developing a Prototype Simulation Game on Building Durability
Kastner, Fabian (2022)
Design for and from disassembly with timber elements: strategies based on two case studies from Switzerland
Grüter, Cäsar; Gordon, Matthew; Muster, Marcel; et al. (2023)
Frontiers in Built Environment
When a timber building gets disassembled and its elements either are burned or biodegrade, the carbon stored in the timber structure gets released to the atmosphere as CO2. Reusing timber elements prevents this process from happening and thus delays the global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Even if there is a long historic tradition of timber reuse in Switzerland, currently a low fraction of a timber building’s elements is being reused after its disassembly. In this study, strategies that could facilitate circular use of timber elements are analyzed. The focus lies on the design process, which is investigated from two perspectives: strategies at the start-of-life of buildings to enable new timber element cycles to emerge (design for disassembly, or DforD), and strategies at the end-of-life of buildings to keep existing timber elements cycles closed (design from disassembly, or DfromD). Two case studies of recently completed multi-story timber-hybrid buildings in Switzerland were analyzed from both perspectives. Regarding DforD, a scoring system was developed that assesses single elements according to their disassembly and reuse potential. Regarding DfromD, a building design optimization tool was created that takes dimensional design tolerances of a building as an input and proposes a procurement-optimized and structurally safe arrangement of reused elements, which are taken from an inventory that is based on the two case studies. It was found that connections between reinforced concrete and timber parts play a crucial role in terms of DforD and that building layouts with DfromD elements may vary widely according to the chosen optimization variable. In conclusion, both applications have the potential to scale up the competitiveness of reused elements.
Digital Transformation, Sustainability and Construction 5.0
Ng, Ming Shan; Bock, Thomas; Kastner, Fabian; et al. (2024)
International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction. Proceedings ~ Proceedings of the 41th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction
The United Nations has set the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for the society, the environment and the economy with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Countries act in collaborative partnership to take transformative steps to shift industries and society onto a sustainable and resilient path. Among all, digital transformation is one key domain of transformation to achieve sustainability. In the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) sector, the industry is slowly adopting digital transformation to different extents such as the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM), Internet of Things (IoT), computational tools, as well as automation in design and construction. Despite the commonly known practices and benefits of digital transformation such as productivity increase, the impacts of such transformation on sustainability have not yet been fully examined in research. The industry entails the corresponding digital transformation practices and their relationships with sustainability, so as to consider appropriate strategies. This work first investigates how the current practice in AECO adopts digital transformation, with case studies of the Japanese industry as examples; this is followed by the study of the relationships between digital transformation practices and the SDGs based on existing literature. Hence, the strategy propositions to assist the industry in current practice are elaborated. The research contributes to science by taking an initial step to examine the relationships between digital transformation and sustainability and present ready-to-adopt strategy propositions. Future research includes in-depth validations of the strategies and comparisons of the approaches in Japan with other countries.

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Fabian Kastner

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