Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is considered as the most suitable way to assess the environmental impact of buildings. Due to its extensiveness and complexity, but also due to a lack of knowledge amongst architects, the LCA methodology is currently most often applied as a post-design evaluation and not used to support or optimize design decisions during early design stages. Therefore, this paper looks at possible solutions to apply LCA, including operational energy demand simulation, in early design from two different perspectives: design-oriented user requirements, derived from literature, a survey, interviews and a focus group with architects, and LCA simplification strategies based on a literature review. Both perspectives are discussed and merged into an evaluation framework that can be used to check the suitability of LCA-based environmental impact assessment (EIA) tools for use by architects during early design stages, but also to develop new design-supportive LCA-based EIA tools. In turn, this can contribute to an increased uptake of these tools in building practice.

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Legal actions towards a mandatory environmental impact assessment (EIA) of buildings can be expected in the (near) future. Due to the complexity of EIA, software tools will become an indispensable aid in the architectural design process. Especially in early design, feedback on the environmental impact is needed, since early design decisions have a major influence on the final impact of the design. However, most existing EIA tools insufficiently take into account the architect's needs as a user and are especially not suitable for use in early design. Therefore, an evaluation framework with criteria for architect-friendliness of EIA tools, with a specific focus on early design, is developed based on a large-scale survey, interviews and a focus group with practising architects. This framework can be used to evaluate the architect-friendliness of existing EIA tools and as a guidance for the development of new architect-oriented tools.

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