The eminence of climate change and global warming has received considerable international awareness in recent decades. Construction industry sector consumes a substantial amount of natural resources and leads to the emissions of million tonnes of carbon into the environment. Consequently, Malaysia is one of the countries with the highest level of carbon emissions in the world. The commercial sector has been identified as one of the major contributors to carbon emission by energy consumption. Building developers should take action in promoting sustainable building practices to reduce carbon emission and energy consumption. Selection of appropriate building materials can lead to significant reduction in greenhouse gases emission. In this paper, an absolute quantification and estimation of embodied carbon emission are presented. Furthermore, this paper investigates the amount of energy consumed. It also presents a novel optimization model for embodied carbon emission which has been developed by evolutionary Genetic Algorithm (GA). GA evaluation has been rarely used to address environmental performances of construction projects, particularly in Malaysia. In this regard, the adoption of the ISO 14040 framework and evolutionary GA were used to evaluate the office project. This paper presents an assessment model that can be beneficial for carbon emission management. According to findings, the developed GA model can be used in practice which has been validated by an application to the building. © 2019 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.