2020 AIA/ACSA Intersections Research Conference: CARBON

Rubén García Rubio
Tulane University

Taylor Scott
Tulane University

The changing global climate has led to rising sea levels, severe droughts, and substantial flooding events within urban populations worldwide. Over 500 million people across the planet live in highly populated areas along river basins, where severe weather conditions threaten their everyday lives. Moreover, a large percentage of these people live in mega-cities, where the urban population is 10 million people or more. These cities account for a majority of the world’s food, freshwater, and economic output. As architects and designers, we must engineer new and innovative ways to increase the resilience of these communities that are at the frontline of climate impacts. The Addis Ababa Research Project is an international and multidisciplinary research project based in one of the most evolving and important megacities affected by climate change in Africa: the capital city of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. The main objective of this research project is to design a holistic urban resilience strategy for Addis Ababa and its 50km of river tributaries that weave through the city. The methodology of the project is organized into three unique scales. The first is a focused study of how climate change has affected Addis Ababa’s history, ecology, and culture. The second scale proposes solutions to these issues through a comprehensive master plan for a specific area of the city: the Upper Kebena River watershed. The third and smallest scale includes specific architectural interventions at the most significant sites highlighted by the masterplan. The design logic of the masterplan is continued into the design strategies specific to each site’s urgent ecological, infrastructural, and socioeconomic issues. In this way, each site strategy serves as a part of a holistic understanding of how to implement adaptive reuse strategies to solve urban ecological and anthropological issues. This presentation will highlight one such site strategy: the redevelopment of Peacock Park. Currently, this underutilized parkland also doubles as an informal urban agriculture hub and marketplace. The proposed design intervention includes the implementation of retention ponds and vegetated slow sand filtration systems. This creates a new ecological environment that can withstand seasonal flooding, polluted waterways, and sequester carbon into ground soils, which are, in turn, used for urban farming practices. The use of vernacular design typologies and building materials reduced the embodied carbon levels associated with redesigning the existing farmers’ residences and marketplaces. A phased approach to redesign also allowed for the adaptive reuse of existing commerce sites into agricultural learning centers. If Implemented, this three-step methodology of urban ecological and anthropological research, master planning, and site intervention could create a more resilient Addis Ababa. Moreover, this approach could serve as a new framework for understanding and designing for resiliency in cities worldwide. Megacities such as New York, Lagos, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Mumbai all face water-related issues exacerbated by climate change, where traditional solutions have not been enough. Further research would apply this comprehensive, three-step process to other urban sites to elucidate sustainable strategies to solve complex ecological problems.

John Doyle
RMIT University

Graham Crist
RMIT University

The Supertight refers to the small, intense, robust and hyper-condensed spaces that emerge as a by-product of extreme levels of urban density. These ideas were explored through a site specific architectural installation and curated exhibition that was held in Melbourne in 2019 and drew on contributions from practitioners throughout Asia to explore the role of design in negotiating and expressing density in urban environments. The project explored the term ‘Tight’ as a positive and more nuanced approached to thinking about urban density. Tightness is the reconciliation with and adaptation to social behaviours for hyper dense environments. It is exemplified in fast changing Asian cities, the by-product of unprecedented metropolitan convergence which demonstrate new urbanisms, new architectures, and new models for living and making culture. This paper will expand upon the content of this exhibition and explore the broader regional and planetary impact of urban density. If the Supertight is focused on cities, its consequence is equally on the landscapes that support cities. While we as architects focus on the object of density, the centre of cities – their organisation, occupation and formal characteristics, we often overlook the vast hinterland that supports dense urban cores. Cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which were explored heavily through the exhibition and are in many ways models of the physical and social management of extreme density, are equally exemplars of cities that rely heavily on supply chains that stretch well beyond their borders. Hong Kong imports up to 90% of its food from as far afield as Brazil, while Singapore has effectively colonised Johor and the south-eastern areas of the Malaysian peninsula to provide resources for its growth. This paper will build upon discussions emerging from the Supertight exhibition, and will critically reflect upon, map and document the relationship between particular architecture projects and urban locations and the broader networks that support their existence. While urban density and compact cities are generally understood to be more sustainable than sprawl, to what extent does the close settlement of cities result in an expansion of terrain and resources to support them? Do dense cities require more to enable their existence, and how does behaviour and patterns of consumption impact that potential for density to be sustainable? The paper will explore how productive landscapes that support dense cities be absorbed within dense urban cores, and what would need to shift in order to enable this. Reflecting on design studio teaching and research-based design work, it will speculate on how this might change the way our cities look and work. Ultimately, we will argue for the importance of tightness as a cultural and social practice. For cities to be truly sustainable the answer to any question must always less rather than more. However, this cannot be limited to simply meaning less footprint, but must extend to the cultivation of a culture tight consumption in which dense settlement is coupled with contiguous production frameworks and a tightening of the resources required to sustain them.

Joshua Lee
Carnegie Mellon University

Leila Srinivasan
Carnegie Mellon University

Liberia experienced two devastating civil wars during the 1990s and early 2000s that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and nearly total destruction of its centralized electrical and water infrastructure systems. The loss of these systems has been especially acute and persistent in rural areas. Yet Liberia is on the rebound and is currently among the top 20 countries in the world for population growth rate and has recently begun to aggressively rebuild its power system. It currently has an installed capacity of 126 MW with a 2030 target of 300 MW. Unfortunately, most of this electricity is generated using diesel and heavy fuel, which produces large quantities of black carbon. In rural areas, power is generally provided by small, inefficient, gas-powered generators to power lighting and electric fans but may rejoin the grid as the system is rebuilt. Thus, it is imperative that buildings in Liberia reduce their carbon footprint while improving thermal comfort by employing a variety of passive strategies. Proper building orientation, cross-ventilation, generous soffits, roof color, roof ventilation, stack ventilation, wing walls, solar fans, and landscaping can be combined to significantly reduce heat gain and increase cooling through natural ventilation, but these strategies are not commonly practiced in Liberia for a number of social and economic factors. Thus, this project tested a variety of passive strategies and adapted them to the specific program, climate, society, materials, and methods of construction currently available in rural Liberia. The team used a series of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations to assess the best combination of ventilation strategies for thermal comfort. These simulation models take into consideration the material properties and the solar radiation on site but place a greater emphasis on improving the wind speed as studies show that increasing air speeds improves thermal comfort in hot and humid climates. A comparison of the baseline design against interventions such as wind funnels and angles of the slats in jalousie windows show the way the wind speeds and patterns of wind movement thereby enabling informed decision making. These recommendations were then constructed in the first built project, a communal home for orphans on a new eco-village near Buchanan City. This made it possible to calibrate subsequent simulation models with the actual ventilation metrics and air flow patterns onsite as the campus expands. An iterative process of simulations and physical site measurements has led to a number of important insights for this development and those in the surrounding area as elements of this work are already being copied in the area, creating a new, more sustainable vernacular for rural Liberia.

Daniel Barber
University of Pennsylvania

Discussions of the relationship between carbon and culture have proliferated in the past decade. Scholars have sought to emphasize how energy has played a role in cultural, economic, and policy developments over the centuries. This has especially been the case relative to the processes of industrialization – to be modern, many scholars have argued, is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by fossil fuels. Increase in energy use has been essential to the expansion of democracy and freedom around the globe in the 20^th century; the dynamics of energy, economic growth, and democratic governance are also of concern in the face of increasing environmental pressures and rapid increase in economic inequity. Social justice movements are now attentive to how carbon has shaped social relations, and are looking for alternative future pathways. Cultural relations to energy are foundational to the patterns and contours of social life, and also to understanding how to adjust these patterns as new contingencies emerge. Architecture sits in the center of this dynamic, as both a material force for energy transitions and as a cultural reflection of energy systems. The intentions of designers – and policy makers, economists, developers, and others engaged in the design process – reveal the contours of cultural interaction with carbon. Architecture is in this sense a kind of media: a screen on which to watch environmental change, and a medium from which to produce it. This presentation will examine Fry and Drew’s British Petroleum Headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria, built in 1960. Fry and Drew had been active in west Africa since the middle of World War II, exploring design methods for the region often referred to as Tropical Architecture. They built headquarters for British corporations and villas for executives, as well as universities, libraries, concert halls and other public structures. The BP Headquarters building exaggerates the complications evident in these practices. British Petroleum was essential both to the economic expansion of the Niger Delta, and also to the inequitable extraction of its resources. The Headquarters is the most visible of a diverse building program in the region, including office and technical complexes at extraction sites; company towns with schools, housing, and executive villas; consumer gas stations; training facilities for Nigerian BP workers; and the infrastructure of extraction, processing, and transportation of fuels, especially around the new coastal refinery at Port Harcourt. BP House was built as a thin slab building with a south facing solar exposure, with banks of shading devices set within an extruded frame. The building was one of the first in Lagos to have a mechanical air-conditioning system; the shading devices intended to reduce solar incidence and thereby temper reliance on the mechanical system in hotter months. By the end of the 1970s, however, the shading system was removed and the extruded platforms were used to support air conditioning units. The presentation will summarize the thermal conditions of the building as initially built and today, and to assess the viability of a retrofit towards a zero-carbon future.

Frank Jacobus, Tahar Messadi, Kimberley Furlong, Michelle Barry, & John Pijanowski
University of Arkansas

Advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing (additive process) and pasting are opening new frontiers in the production of complex shape and form geometries automatically from a 3D computer-aided design model without any traditional tooling. In parallel, these new processes have the potential of achieving better strength, lightness, and renewability of materials, key characteristics desired by architects, designers and engineers. In this paper, the authors discuss a variety of 3D printing experiments done in an interdisciplinary advanced research studio at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design using wood flour and a robotic arm potter extrusion printer. The semester started with the assignment of a paste recipe that had been developed the previous summer and containing 33% wood flour, which had yielded prints that varied in their levels of success but were very informative about the strength and weakness of this product. Building on this knowledge, the next assignment was to improve this recipe in order to maximize the amount of utilized wood, thereby reducing the adhesives required to create the final printable paste. For the next several weeks, students experimented with numerous mixture types, using various adhesives and wood flour proportions. Each mixture was then tested in the robotic arm printer. Eventually, we were able to develop a printable recipe that contained 65% wood flour. This represents a substantial improvement from the common wood/plastic spool-based printing techniques which contain only 20%+/- wood product and 80% plastic. With the new recipe of the printable wood paste we were then able to determine, through extensive iterative work, the construction possibilities and limitations inherent in the printing process. As a result of an established collaborative course work, Civil Engineering faculty and students analyzed the structural capabilities of these new material mixtures. With this growing body of knowledge, the next assignment evolved into the testing of joinery and assembly techniques, and speculation on formal possibilities. As a culmination of the semester research efforts, the students were asked to construct a shade and seating pavilion using the materials and processes we had developed. The outcomes of this interdisciplinary studio experiment shed a new perspective in what the future may yield in the deployment of such green materials in the design and construction of buildings.

Alyssa Kuhns
Auburn University

2018 marked the 100th Anniversary of Sheetrock. Sheetrock, a proprietary eponym for gypsum wallboard, is the dominant material used in the construction and finishing of interior partitions. It, along with other stock materials used in interior finishing such joint compound and drywall tape, is a readily available commodity and is specified in nearly all new construction. Despite its proliferation, both the product manufacturing and installation methods of Sheetrock have remained essentially unchanged in the hundred-year span of its existence. This paper investigates the carbon impacts of this lasting, ubiquitous material in contemporary construction practices. It examines both the environmental effects of unaltered characteristics and processes associated with Sheetrock and other gypsum wallboard products as well as past and future modifications that consider carbon management strategies. Although gypsum wallboard is commonly understood as a physical building product, it is only one part of a larger ecological system of materials and practices. This system includes the procurement of raw material – either raw or synthetic gypsum, manufacturing, transportation of goods, installation, finishing, and removal. Every aspect of this system has various ecological, environmental, and economic impacts each with upstream consequences. For example, while the use of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) gypsum or synthetic gypsum is generally thought to be a more energy-conscious alternative to the mining of raw gypsum, it may contain high levels of mercury and could be in short supply as coal-fired power plants close. This paper considers the costs and benefits of industry decisions such as raw material procurement on carbon management throughout all phases of the gypsum wallboard system. Unlike other modular interior finishes – suspended ceilings grids, hardwood flooring, ceramic tile – gypsum wallboard is a mass-produced modular unit that is finished as a homogeneous surface. The finishing process gives a uniform aesthetic to interior partitions but requires highly skilled labor and creates excessive debris and waste. Due to taping and finishing processes, gypsum wallboard cannot be deconstructed and, therefore, becomes waste after a single-use. This waste, along with board scrap resulting from the customization of standardized modular panels, contributes to the ‘13 million tons of gypsum wallboard debris generated in the US every year, 85% of which is landfilled’.   Focusing on the material composition, manufacturing, installation, and finishing processes of gypsum wallboard, this research investigates the carbon impacts of the gypsum wallboard industry as influenced by historical and environmental developments. This research also engages with the building product manufacturing and construction community through interviews, observational research, and data collection. The summation of this research will serve as design criteria to reconsider mass-produced interior finishing products – gypsum wallboard and joint compound – as a single, modularized panel system that would reduce necessary on-site finishing processes and associated waste through prefabrication.

Stephanie Davidson
Ryerson University

This presentation documents in-progress design research in temporary, biodegradable structures. The experimental, thin-shell monocoque structures have been cast using a variety of cellulose-based materials, and represent a sampling of the outcome of a studio taught at three different architecture schools. This work explores, in an experimental fashion, structures that would have a minimual carbon impact, because no demolition would be needed and the structures would naturally, aerobically decompose into their immediate environment. The work and the process of making the work serves as an example of how designers can take responsibility for both where the materials that they choose come from, and also, where they end up. Made of exclusively recycled paper and fabric pulp, the structures have the capacity to biodegrade completely. The idea for the experimental structures came from witnessing the dumpsters overflowing with models and scrap material at the end of each semester. The conviction underlying the work is that mindful handling of resources should begin in architectural education if it is going to successfully make its way further into the discipline, profession and construction industry. The design task shows students how materials are responsive and constantly changing; they are not static, fixed objects. Paper is a particularly ephemeral material, highly vulnerable to moisture. Designing something with an intentionally short lifespan, and witnessing how it can break-down and decay, introduces students to the transformative nature of materials, and shows how degradation and eventual decay could be a design strength. The projects are unique in that they expose students to an entire lifecycle of a full-scale spatial project, from conception through fabrication and finally, decay and complete disintegration. The process of decay and disintegration is studied with the same rigor and emphasis as the fabrication methods, through cast swatches. Because the work – both process and final, full-scale structures – is completely biodegradable, the studio avoids the creation of needless waste. Formally, the design research has, to-date, developed a range of small-scale studies and full-scale forms that defy straightforward typological classification. The geometries are imprecise and unpredictable and because they change as they disintegrate, the geometries are not describable as fixed things. The formal results can’t be anticipated with a high degree of accuracy before they’re actually constructed. In keeping with the low-waste ethos of the approach, formwork for each cast study is also kept to a minimum. Because of the irregularity of the cast paper shells, they’re difficult to draw with conventional tools and approaches. To-date, photogrammetry has been used as a way to document and analyze the forms as drawings. The work documented in this presentation is experimental and has very little precedent. It embraces the vulnerability of cellulose material to moisture and the elements, and views the inevitable disintegration and decay of the cast paper shells as a strength. The work asks designers to see materials as responsive and constantly transforming, and to take responsibility for where materials come from and where they end up.

Jerry Hacker
Carleton University

Sheryl Boyle
Carleton University

Architecture schools are not intended to be, nor positioned to be vocational schools, but once outside of the academic institution registered architects must assume full professional and social responsibility for a project. From the macro to the micro, architects must be synergistic thinkers, capable of taking seemingly incompatible or unrelated objectives and transforming them into holistic and aspirational works of architecture of the highest environmental standard. This paper illustrates how a graduate design studio can simultaneously address two current crises in the profession: A perceived disconnect between the abstraction of design education and the realities of practice; and, the critically time sensitive imperative of transforming ecological practices in building materials and energy consumption. The studio takes as its premise an adaptive reuse ‘workshop’ program; integrates a new synergistic course in advanced building systems and detail design; incorporates empirical learning with UHPC and mass timber (material experimentation, 1:1 fabrication); and models the deliverables on the office practice of iterative sequentially delivered red-lined working drawings. It makes no compromise in the pursuit of design innovation and imaginative thinking, using an anonymous peer reviewed international design competition focused on exceptional environmental stewardship as the dissemination platform. A key catalyst for the pedagogical research surfaced in July of 2019 when Patrick Schumacher (Principal of the Pritzker prize winning architecture firm ZHA) enlisted social media to articulate a perceived crisis: “Architecture schools operate like art schools without any curriculum. Accordingly architectural education is detached from the profession and from societal realities [and] needs as expressed in real (public or private) client briefs&[hellip]Students’ portfolios after five years of studying might not include a single design that could meet minimal standards expected from a contemporary competition entry”. [1] This speculative postulation is superimposed with another (at first) seemingly unrelated time sensitive crisis: A moral imperative to confront concrete, a long beloved material of architects. Pervasively consumed, concrete is chosen for its durability, fire resistance, or aesthetic qualities; however, because of this pervasiveness, cement, a critical component of concrete, is the second highest person-made and consumed resource in the world (water, another essential ingredient of concrete, is first), and accounts for 8% of world CO2 emissions. [2] Instead of disputing these two crises with words, the authors provide pedagogical evidence designed to refute the claim that architecture schools are in an imminent crisis. We instead demonstrate that rigorous and critical design thinking and making, the hallmarks of architectural education, can (and should) go hand-in-hand with the highest standards for execution and long term environmental responsibility. A comprehensive studio is chosen because it occupies a unique place in accredited schools of architecture. Programs routinely use comprehensive studios to demonstrate student exposure to technical and systems integration requirements; however, two main issues often undermine the typical approach: 1) The process regularly devolves into a predominantly technically driven exercise at the expense of creative architectural invention; and, 2) These inevitable and critical parts of architecture are over simplified, thereby diminishing their potential role. Here, theory fosters practice, and practice fosters theory.

Mohamed Ismail
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Caitlin Mueller
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

With roots in the modernist manifesto of Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino [1], the concrete frame gave freedom to the design of the interior and eliminated the need for external load-bearing walls. Today, due to rapid urbanization and constrained urban space, the concrete frame has become the ubiquitous system of construction in growing cities. As a result, steel-reinforced concrete frames dominate the skylines of Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDCs) like India. Consequently, the mounting use of concrete in India has garnered concern for the ecological impacts of construction. The production of cement, a core ingredient in concrete, creates up to 8 percent of global carbon emissions, and that figure will only rise as concrete continues to be the most produced synthetic material in the world [2]. This suggests a valuable opportunity to reduce the carbon emissions associated with concrete construction through efficient concrete construction, building more with less. Importantly, India already has a rich history of efficient concrete architecture that utilized material efficiency when material costs constrained the cost of construction. Examples range from the pre-independence architecture of Joseph Allen Stein [3] to the post-independence work of Mahendra Raj, B.V. Doshi, Charles Correa, Raj Rewal, and others. These designers cultivated a spirit of structural expression and a command of physical forces that informed a new architectural idiom for Modern India [4]. Today, the generally risk-averse nature of development has pushed concrete construction towards standardized typologies of monolithic construction and repeated modules for ease of construction. From a structural mechanics point of view, though, these modular systems of prismatic slabs, beams, and columns, are materially inefficient. In response to the demand for materially efficient concrete construction, this paper looks back at the work of novel designers in India and presents a potential application of their ideas to future urban construction in both India and beyond. The scope of this paper is the use of reinforced concrete as a structural material from the early 20^th century up to the early 21^st century. Several key structures and designers will be highlighted for their contributions to concrete architecture’s history before concluding with a discussion of the future of concrete in South Asian architecture. Ongoing research by the authors is looking at the past of India’s concrete construction to inspire the materially efficient designs of the future. Applying an understanding of concrete mechanics and digital structural design methods, this research explores structural systems suited to the constraints of Indian construction to reduce the ecological and economical costs of concrete construction. This paper highlights material efficiency and newly available methods of digital fabrication as a pathway to efficient and low-carbon construction, resulting in a structural slab prototype that has been influenced by the work of India’s structural designers. This paper reflects on the past, present, and future of concrete construction in India by tracing the lineage of historic construction practices and material efficiency to the research in structural optimization being done today, looking forward to the future of concrete construction in LEDCs.