2020 AIA/ACSA Intersections Research Conference: CARBON

Thomas Fisher
University of Minnesota

The 19^th Century economist William Stanley Jevons described a paradox central to the carbon economy: the more efficient we are in using carbon-based fuels, the more carbon we produce and consume. The Jevons paradox also applies to current efforts to “decarbonize” the built environment. These efforts can increase the overall consumption of fossil fuels and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere unless we position technical innovations in buildings within broader institutional and behavioral change, as part of larger complex-adaptive systems. This paper applies research in the field of complexity science, specifically in holonistic and panarchic bio-physical behavior, to the problem of reducing carbon consumption in the built environment. The paper shows how buildings are nested in a set of carbon-dependent relationships at ever increasing scales, in what scientists call a “holarchy,” and how those relationships have affected the function and structure of buildings to become more carbon-dependent themselves. At the same time, the paper explores the ways in which architects can positively affect carbon use not only in the components that make up a structure, but also by re-positioning buildings as disruptive components of larger social, political, and environmental structures. The paper further explores how this disruption can occur in a process that ecologists call “panarchy.” Having gone through a carbon-extraction phase over the last two centuries and currently under-going a carbon-conservation phase through energy efficient technology, developed countries face an impending carbon-crash, with a highly vulnerable, “fracture-critical” fossil-fuel system. In a world shockingly unprepared for this crash, architects have a leadership role to play by designing everything – now – with a post-carbon-crash in mind and by showing what a reorganized, non-carbonized future might be like. Energy efficient technology or materials are not enough. Indeed, the more we see buildings as separate from the complex-adaptive systems of which they are a part, the more the well-intentioned carbon-reducing efforts of architects will only accelerate the crash. The paper ends by showing how architects have considerable agency when it comes to complex-adaptive systems. As participants in the many local, emergent relationships that go into the construction of the built environment, architects are also skilled at recognizing new patterns and imagining paradigm shifts, skills essential to helping complex systems adapt to new realities. The greatest function of architects in the future may be not only designing a carbon-free built environment, but also revealing and visualizing the new patterns of behavior and relationships that emerge in a post-carbon world.

Jessica Garcia-Fritz
South Dakota State University

Federico Garcia Lammers
South Dakota State University

Indifference towards the politics of construction labor implicates architecture in the problematic history of colonialism, slavery, and immigration in the Americas. Seldom taught as the core of architectural education, this history is strongly linked to the effects of carbon upon climate and globalized labor forces. This paper proposes pedagogical research at the course and curriculum level. By positioning carbon footprints beyond technological deterministic outcomes, the relationship between carbon management and the politics of construction labor become central to the redesign of curricula at a nascent architecture school in an underserved region of the United States. The next ten years of curriculum design posits that long-term carbon management should be tied to core educational strategies. A faculty team is preparing a six-year, diachronically structured, undergraduate/graduate course designed to unravel the myths around the history of labor and its connection to carbon management. As a 4-credit hour course that combines history/theory and professional practice, the class investigates the role of carbon at various points in a student’s education. Voluntary and forced displacement of people across multiple territories and scales is connected to the construction of buildings, rapid-urbanization, rural communities, and public-health. In the past five years, organizations such as Who Builds Your Buildings and The Architecture Lobby have advocated for architects’ role in under examined questions about the politics of labor. Architects’ estrangement from historical labor practices produces a bright-burning nostalgia, which Albert Pope claims, serves to obscure the irrefutable evidence of an environmental crisis by alienating ourselves from the planned obsolescence of buildings. The proposal for a diachronic course enmeshes the production of architecture with the history of the movement of people to and within the Americas. Historically, the relationship between carbon management and immigrant labor has been tied to the methods of organizing industrialized building sites through skilled and unskilled labor. Following the mid-nineteenth century’s rapid industrialization – coinciding with the professionalization of architects and engineers and waves of immigration – “workers were increasingly treated as disposable machine parts and machines were treated as organism with an internal life that needed to be preserved.” Technical documents such as drawings, specifications, and calculations expose these relationships and serve as agreements that impact larger industrial technical systems. Making labor-centric aspects of these agreements the center of design education is fundamental to understanding the invisible DNA of carbon footprints, their dynamic nature, and how they may be imagined and managed in the immediate future.

Sarah Truitt
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Demand for high-performance homes and buildings is growing due to their marketability, environmental benefits, and increasing affordability. Growth for energy efficient technologies and building upgrades has driven expansion across many traditional industries including construction trades (which added almost 21,000 jobs) and professional services (which added 35,000 employees) in 2018, according to the 2019 U.S. Energy Employment Report (NASEO and EFI 2019). As buildings become more automated, digitized and interconnected, the workforce that supports the design, build, operations and maintenance of these buildings must evolve. It is critical to advance the American job force in accordance with technological progress. Scientific discovery continues to push new, more efficient technologies into the market. Internet connected “smart” devices bring a new level of functionality and convenience to building occupants. The U.S Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office (BTO) estimated that approximately 200,000 smart devices are being connected worldwide every hour in 2017 and that the U.S. had four times more market demand for these devices that any other area of the world. (U.S. DOE). In addition, distributed energy resources (DERs) continue to be adopted by residential and commercial customers across the U.S. Today’s behind-the-meter DERs (energy efficiency, demand response, solar photovoltaics, electric vehicles, and battery storage)—are typically valued, scheduled, implemented, and managed separately. Through the Grid-interactive Efficient Building (GEB) initiative, BTO is funding research to achieve a future where buildings operate dynamically with the electricity grid to integrate DERs and smart devices while meeting the needs of building occupants. Greater emphasis on cross-disciplinary teams and multi-disciplinary degrees is needed to facilitate adoption of GEBs, particularly among engineering and architecture/design disciplines. Without a workforce that understands energy efficient technologies and how building systems interact, high-performance buildings will be costlier, difficult to build, and lower performing than they should be. The BTO is leading an initiative called the Better Buildings Workforce Accelerator to increase the level of building science knowledge in a range of professions including architecture and design, construction management, and the trades. The three-year effort will facilitate cross-sector collaborations among academia and industry to identify and fill gaps in the workforce pipeline. The overarching goals is to increase the quantity, quality, diversity, and productivity of today’s building energy efficiency workforce. This paper will summarize market trends impacting the industry, discuss current efforts to overcome the challenges facing employers looking for workers knowledgeable about high-performance buildings, and present anticipated future workforce needs based on new technologies currently being developed by labs and industry. Stakeholder engagement is critical for facilitating change in the building sector, and the BTO is a vital catalyst for inspiring major shifts in the industry that will result in healthier, more affordable, resilient, and efficient buildings across the nation. This session will be designed to be interactive with the audience to gauge interest in participating in the Better Buildings Workforce Accelerator. Participants will learn about the benefits of participation and be able to provide input that shapes the future of the industry designing and building high-performance and grid-interactive efficient buildings.

Oswald Jenewein
University of Texas at Arlington

This paper summarizes parts of an interdisciplinary research and design project on climate responsive design strategies on the scale of architecture and the city within the case-study territory of Corpus Christi Bay in South Texas. In particular, this paper assesses the challenges of the emerging process of re-industrialization along the Texas Coast highlighting major impacts of industrial growth on the city landscape of Downtown Corpus Christi, which is loacted directly adjacent to the industrial oil port. A master-plan and a built intervention are shown in this paper to demonstrate how responsive design strategies may benefit post-oil city landscapes emphasizing on storm-water mitigation, walkability, alternative transportation, and urban place-making in response to community input as it relates to the AIA Framework for Designing for Equitable Communities. This paper outlines climate adaptation pathways of the built environment describing Post-Oil Environments not as a future scenario but as the current transition-period away from carbon-dependency towards a collective ecological awareness of human-based climate change. Post-Oil Environments acknowledge the climate crisis and therefore the changing environmental conditions as a direct result of burning fossil fuels. The lifting of the US oil-export embargo in late 2015 is the premise for this work as Texas is currently undergoing a fossil fuel renaissance exploring, producing, refining, and distributing oil and gas at an unprecedented scale. Clustered around Texas’ bays and estuaries, four major regions of urban environments are scattered across the 80 percent undeveloped lands along the predominantly rural coast. Corpus Christi Bay is an excellent case-study region for the current process of re-industrialization highlighting the conflict between two critical recourses: oil and water. Both oil and water have historically been a premise for settlement and a motor for growth along the Texas Coast. The late oil-boom has increased the dependencies of coastal Texas on the fossil fuel industry and also drastically increases the demand for fresh water. Simultaneously, coastal cities are on the fore-front of experiencing the repercussions of global warming as the impacts of climate change have started to materialize: flooding, sea-level-rise, and storms threaten the fragile eco-systems within and around the case-study-cities. The responsive design strategies shown in this paper propose the implementation of an infrastructural landscape addressing these challenges. A walkable green-belt which serves multiple purposes including disaster preparation and response infrastructure, storm-water management, and alternative transportation for inner-city and city-to-city connections has been developed as a strategy for adapting Downtown Corpus Christi to the projected ecological changes. Methodologically, this paper builds upon a mixed methods approach. It includes qualitative and quantitative data gathered through Action Research which has been a successful tool to connect the research team and students to local communities, stakeholders, and constituents. The paper suggests that this era of re-industrialization needs to be seen as a transformative process enabling aging city landscapes to adapt to both changing ecological conditions and the time after this last oil-boom. Urban identity, socio-economic diversity, and healthy conditions for urban ecosystems are as essential as comprehensive built interventions which form the background of every-day life.

David Fannon
Northeastern University

Michelle Laboy
Northeastern University

Mitigating future climate change demands rapid reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from the construction and operation of the built environment. Research and practice initially emphasized emissions associated with buildings’ operating energy, but increasingly seek to assess the global warming potential of the materials, construction process, maintenance, and end-of life: the so-called “embodied carbon” of buildings. As the design and construction industry improves tools and techniques for adding up buildings’ contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (typically in equivalent mass of carbon dioxide, or simply “carbon”), it must also consider and critique the methods used to normalize these data for analysis: how to divide them. Using Life Cycle Assessment methods, we developed detailed accounting of the carbon emissions for four case study buildings, each endemic of a different primary structural material: steel, concrete, masonry, and mass timber. Drawing on building data from practice, lifecycle emissions were calculated both cradle-to-gate for initial construction, and cradle-to-grave, including materials for maintenance and end of life. Because these absolute values are difficult to compare across buildings, it is tempting to divide by floor area (kgCO₂eq/m²) as with cost and energy. While this spatial carbon intensity might be useful, it neglects the urgent temporal and ultimately human dimensions that drive the importance in these metrics in the first place, including the fact that some materials sequester carbon for the life of the building. To provide a more critical understanding of the role of these denominators in making comparisons and decisions, we expanded the analysis and visualization of conventional assessments of lifetime carbon using novel metrics more closely associated with buildings’ purpose to shelter people over time. Attributing carbon to generations of people, rather than buildings offers a meaningful and nuanced basis for comparison. On the simplest level, considering the dimension of density clearly shows that as the occupancy increases, carbon intensity per person declines. Attending to the human complexity inherent to architecture enriches analysis, for example considering carbon through the metric of net area reveals that as building systems become more spatially efficient, their carbon intensity decreases, while simultaneously increasing the potential density. Recognizing the urgency of climate change, the concept of the time value of carbon acknowledges that future emissions reductions may be worth less than the present emissions to achieve them. A related but different dimension of carbon in buildings is generational—the carbon attributed to each successive cohort of occupants whose continued use extracts ongoing value from the same past emissions embodied in the building construction. As buildings remain in use longer, the temporal carbon intensity (per year, or per generation of service) declines. The long tail of the lifetime carbon intensity curve emphasizes the carbon value of adaptation compared to even the least carbon-intensive new construction. A critical reassessment of the denominators used to normalize carbon challenges any short-term consideration of life cycle assessment, and suggests carbon reductions in buildings demand an architecture of persistence: designed for human use and reuse, for adaptation and maintenance.

Alex Ianchenko
Miller Hull

Brie Jones
Miller Hull

Scientist-led think tanks have warned the world of environmental and socioeconomic damage caused by climate change since 1988 [1], [2]. Thirty years later, members of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have come to a consensus that this damage will become irreversible if average global temperatures increase by 1.5&[deg]C above pre-industrial levels. This can be averted if annual global greenhouse gas emissions are halved by 2030; however, the building industry is not on track to meet this goal [3]–[5]. To quantify their environmental impact, building industry academics and professionals are rapidly adopting life cycle assessment (LCA) tools. In practice, three gaps remain – (1) the communication gap in effectively conveying LCA results, (2) the method gap in negotiating with uncertain data, and (3) the knowledge gap in understanding upstream emissions from other sectors. This paper describes three LCA analyses performed by [firm name] during, after, and before the project design process. The lessons learned illustrate how communication, method and knowledge gaps can be addressed when integrating LCA and design. CASE STUDY 1: LCA DURING DESIGN During schematic design of a project, the design team used Tally to investigate the global warming potential (GWP) impact of three alternative structural systems using concrete, steel, and wood. After an initial comparison, the client requested to understand how wood procurement and certification would affect the GWP. The design team partnered with the nonprofit Ecotrust and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington to provide the client with a range of GWP impacts, as affected by varying forestry and transportation practices [6] (figure 1). CASE STUDY 2: LCA AFTER DESIGN Opened in 2013, the Living Building-certified [project name] has been operating at net positive energy; however, its embodied impact was not quantified at time of design [7]. Performed in retrospect using Tally, a whole building LCA of the project reveals that the top contributor to its embodied impact was [material/element], accounting for [xx] kgCO2e out of [xx] kgCO2e. CASE STUDY 3: LCA BEFORE DESIGN In the early stages of master planning a campus, a client requested to understand the relative impact of high-level decisions in transportation, energy use, and material procurement. Using carbon as a common currency, the design team communicated the existing, proposed, and high-performance design case in all three areas simultaneously (figure 2). Quick access to LCA-derived benchmarks informed further decision-making. CONCLUSION In practice, LCA tools are only useful when design teams consciously overcome the communication, method, and knowledge gaps. These case studies show that raising teams’ level of comfort with data collection, visualization and use is key to overcoming the communication gap; the method gap can be addressed by performing sensitivity analyses and providing a range of results to clients, and finally, the knowledge gap can be closed when practitioners engage with scientists and professionals in adjacent sectors.

Ihab Elzeyadi
University of Oregon

Even though over 200 net-zero energy buildings are operating or are in construction, getting to zero can seem an insurmountable goal to many districts. How can we remove non-energy barriers to net-zero architecture design and delivery? This paper presents a conceptual framework to net-zero architecture design in terms of process and product. This framework is built on a comprehensive research project that took a deeper look at a sample of exemplary Net-zero commercial buildings constructed within the last decade to specifically answer this question. The project compiled a data base of verified and emerging Net-Zero buildings in the US and documented them on a number of building performance metrics that included their design process, design strategies employed, performance goals, as well as their designs for the site, building, envelope, and indoor environmental quality performance that impact occupants’ comfort, satisfaction, and wellness. In addition to evaluating the verified buildings as products, the study uncovered the processes of which design teams followed with the various stake holders and economic analysis to design and deliver these exemplary educational buildings. The project employed a comparative case study survey design to systematically collect building and site design and performance data for the studied commercial buildings. Out of 41 verified buildings, the study on seven cases representing a wide range of net-zero buildings. While directly focusing on buildings that represents and impacts the building industry of this growing building type, the paper will provide lessons and conclusions that are applicable to a larger framework of Net-zero buildings design and delivery on national level. The study highlight best design strategies and metrics to set as design targets on six major categories: Design Process, Design Strategies, Site Performance, Building Performance, Envelope Performance, and Indoor Environmental Quality/Occupant Performance. The findings are summarized in crosscutting best practices, patterns, and detailed case studies that provide added-value to architects, engineers, and architectural educators by empowering them to instill these lesson in the next-generation of building designers.

Lori Ferriss
Goody Clancy

Elaine Hoffman
Goody Clancy

In order to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, we must reduce global emissions by at least 45% in the next decade. Building reuse is a critical two-part strategy to meeting this goal; it reduces embodied carbon emissions by reusing resource intensive structural and envelope elements, and it provides opportunities for dramatic reductions in operational emissions through energy retrofit measures. Best practices assume that deep energy retrofits represent the most sustainable way to reuse a building; however, the industry has neglected the embodied carbon emissions associated energy retrofit measures as well as the real-world constraints of cost and occupancy as owners work to retrofit entire portfolios of buildings. This research uses a case study of a prototypical higher education campus renovation to investigate what a “smart” energy retrofit looks like – one that considers the carbon payback as well as the cost payback of the renovation to target strategic energy retrofit measures that provide maximum carbon reductions with minimum carbon and cost investment. This project tested an innovative process that utilized multiple types of interrelated performance analysis during the feasibility study phase to inform the recommended renovation scope. These included thermal analysis to quantify the thermal resistance of complex envelope sections, energy modeling to calibrate and determine whole building performance, and life cycle assessment (LCA) to calculate embodied impacts. The use of these tools in concert with cost estimating allowed the design team and owner to evaluate the financial and environmental return on investment of potential interventions in the existing building envelope, building systems, and primary energy sources. The first iteration of modeling used thermal analysis to explore approaches to mitigate the most prevalent thermal bridges present in the envelope and energy modeling to understand the relative impact of a wide range of energy conservation measures (ECMs) independently. Measures that made a relatively small impact or required a disproportionate cost or carbon investment were excluded in the next steps. Parametric energy modeling was then used to understand the interrelationship of all ECMs; simultaneously, LCA was completed to understand the upfront environmental impact of envelope ECMs. Additionally, the LCA process identified how the original ECMs might be improved through smarter material use to achieve the same energy savings while reducing embodied carbon, or even storing carbon. This case study demonstrates a highly replicable process to optimize renovations for both embodied and operational carbon through early collaborative and iterative analysis. The process illustrates that not all energy conserving measures are worth pursuing when taken in the context of life cycle carbon and cost – a deep energy retrofit is not necessarily a smart energy retrofit. Additionally, energy retrofits should consider solutions that are appropriate to make immediate reductions while enabling further future reductions as greener energy sources become available. It is crucial that the design and construction industry rigorously analyze the quantitative tradeoffs of embodied versus operational impacts to significantly reduce the emissions of our sector rather than defaulting to best practice assumptions in order to meet critical climate targets.