The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities was established to push the boundaries of architectural research, focusing on the most fundamental problems with buildings and cities. The Inaugural Challenge Conference, held on Friday, November 7, 2014, was the first of an biannual series that convenes visionaries from diverse disciplines to articulate the global environmental challenge of climate change and new strategies for sustainable building and planning.

Our launch event was meant to articulate the challenges we are confronting, and to help us refine our agenda in a way that builds upon the fantastic work that is already being done across various sectors around the world. In its first few years of operation, the CGBC aims to host several global Challenge Conferences that invite outside experts and organizations to focus attention on areas where there is widespread agreement about the global challenge in green building and identify the ways in which the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities can move the frontier of knowledge and practice most effectively. As the Center gains momentum, its research trajectory will be guided by the outcome of both our preliminary research projects and the feedback from the focused symposia organized by the Center.

 

Click to view the 2014 Challenge Conference Highlights reel.

 

Click photos below to view as a slideshow.