Over recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that there is a growing need for so-called green buildings with a lower environmental impact over the whole building life-cycle. The construction industry demands strategies that support a drastic change of the way we develop, construct and maintain buildings. However, new building concepts represent too much of an evolution of traditional building systems, which does not necessarily lead to the intended shift towards green transformable buildings. The research aims to acquire knowledge about the impact of specific design characteristics on the complete building lifecycle, develop possible scenarios to create green transformable buildings, determine how the various strategies relate to the building lifecycle and to create knowledge about how to measure the effectiveness of the chosen strategies. The expected result of this research is a decision support model for building concepts. The model should lead towards a better understanding of innovative green solutions for buildings and therefore provide a better opportunity to create innovative new building concepts. This paper describes the research design, which will address the goals.