Architect magazine recently announced that Tally®, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) application developed by KT Innovations, has won a 2016 R+D Award. The Autodesk® Revit® plugin is one of only five recipients of this year's award, which is given annually to specific projects that bring together innovative research and technology in the field of architecture.  
 
The software, created in partnership with Autodesk and thinkstep, garnered praise from the jury because of its ability to conduct LCA throughout the design process. Unlike the traditional method of performing a life-cycle assessment after a building is constructed, Tally provides on demand feedback about a material's environmental impact, allowing architects to make decisions that reduce a building's carbon footprint in the same time frame, pace, and modeling environment in which designs are generated.

After its initial release in 2013, a new Tally version has been released that provides compatibility with Revit 2017 while also adding transportation and construction life cycles to the software's database. These latest additions make Tally fully compliant with the LEED v4 Whole Building LCA credit. “You can imagine this being absolutely necessary for any kind of building design,” juror Elizabeth Whittaker, AIA, noted, while fellow juror Mic Patterson remarked that Tally fulfills a “critical need for a simple, early-phase design tool to provide feedback related to the embodied energy impacts of material selection.”  
 
To learn more, visit the Tally website here. 
 
To read the full article from Architect, click here.