Life Cycle Thinking principles for the design of sustainable seismic retrofit interventions

Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) is an approach aimed at minimizing environmental, economic, and social impacts along a product’s life cycle. When applied to the construction sector, such an approach allows the design of sustainable retrofit solutions, not just by reducing energy consumption, but also embodied carbon emissions and other impacts along the whole building life cycle. This would require a paradigm change in structural engineering, which should shift from the sole respect of sectorial codes to the adoption of a new holistic perspective of the building, evolving over time and addressing different disciplines. An enlarged vision of Life Cycle Structural Engineering (LCSE) is proposed in the present paper. An analysis of the current state of the art is made to define new performance objectives and new LCT principles for the design of sustainable seismic retrofit interventions. The efficiency of applying these principles from the early stages of the design is assessed with two practical examples.