Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project departs from the consideration that oases are the most extraordinary example of the capacity of landscape architecture to sustainably transform the material conditions of the environment into desired ones. Each oasis is designed to reverse the entropic tendency of the desert. A little depression is excavated on the sand, a simple fence made of dried branches is built around the depression, a small palm-tree is planted inside. The depression collects some water through gravity, the water helps grow the tree, the shadow of the tree protects the ground moisture from solar radiation, the fence of dried branches protects both water and tree from the wind and the sand it carries. A positive feedback loop has been triggered: a simple landscape architecture device able to regenerate and project itself into the future with the aid of a small but continuous input of maintenance. This simple scheme is aggregated and replicated over vast extensions of land in some of the most arid regions of the world. The scale is different, but the principle is the same: an initially small reconfiguration of the material conditions of the environment, so that some of the energy running through it is caught in a feedback loop that eventually leads to a profound transformation of those initial material conditions: to the production of a fertile niche, almost self-sufficient, and in sharp contrast with its environment. The redundancy of these agronomic techniques over the preexisting geomorphological structure of the land yields a relatively limited number of landscape patterns that are often replicated across distant regions of the world.

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

The research proposes to develop a model to capture, visualize and understand the atmospheric conditions of the network of open living landscape spaces that pervade the urban fabric utilizing emerging sensor technologies capable of continuous in-operation monitoring. The intention is to gather data specific to dynamic environmental parameters (such as solar and infrared radiation, air temperature, humidity, wind speed, carbon dioxide levels and significant air pollutants), to build a dynamic visual model capable of translating and visualizing the data in space and time. The goal is to make it possible to analyze the complexity of the landscape system and identify its propensities in the shape of its key operational characteristics in relationship to built form. The work aspires to understand the impact of the composition of outdoor spaces on the energy efficiency of building operation, and understand the atmospheric agency of the landscape to inform the design of spaces that contribute to the sustainability of the city and improve the health and well-being of its citizens. The challenge of energy efficiency and creating a healthy environment for a city’s inhabitants exist in establishing innovative ways to design and manage the thermal performance of the indoor and outdoor spaces of the urban fabric, and their interconnected relationship. This proposal recognizes it is ‘an imperative for the development of new observational strategies that are linked directly to innovative modelling approaches that directly address the most potent feedbacks in the climate structure. Because it is the feedbacks in the climate structure that set the time scale for irreversible change. The physical composition of the urban fabric acts to absorb, produce, and trap heat resulting in higher sustained temperatures 1-3 degrees (Celsius) warmer than neighboring rural areas. Heat generated in the city, including waste heat, is trapped along with air born pollutants generated by vehicles, transport infrastructure, commercial enterprises, and industry. Subsequently this condition adversely affects water and air quality, and the health and well-being of its citizens. Energy demands simultaneously rise due to the prolonged and increased use of mechanical ventilation and air conditioning in response to the hotter temperatures that strain energy resources and further contribute to the production of global emissions. Harvard’s Sustainability Plan to ‘maintain at least 75% of the University’s landscaped areas with an organic landscaping’ is commendable, however its contribution to sustainability could be augmented through an understanding achieved by measuring its performance to inform more effective landscape strategies and the potential to affect the built environment, including the environmental management of its buildings.

Ann Forsyth, Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning

Jennifer Molinsky, Project Director, Housing and Aging Society Program

As communities across the U.S. seek to enhance their resiliency in the face of challenges posed by climate change, older adults are a particularly vulnerable population. As in most countries, the U.S. population is aging, with the population 65 and over expected to increase by more than 30 million people in the next 20 years to a total 79 million. The population aged 80 and above will double in that time. By 2035, one in three US households will be headed by someone 65 or over, and one in five by a household aged 80 or over (JCHS 2016). Most report wanting to age in their “own” homes whether the home of their middle years or one they move to in retirement. Unfortunately, many of these homes are vulnerable to problems associated with climate change. The situation is echoed around the world. This proposal will explore two key questions: What are the most important connections between aging, housing, neighborhoods, and climate change? What are the important gaps in knowledge where Harvard and the GSD would have potential to make a contribution?

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

Local and state governments find it challenging to adopt aggressive residential building codes that require investment in energy efficiency upgrades beyond those with a reasonable payback. Thus, the progress towards a more energy efficient housing stock is limited by economic considerations that often only account for direct utility savings. A widely discussed solution is to look beyond energy costs and consider other impacts of energy saving strategies that affect their financial attractiveness. In this paper, we considered the case of a public housing project in Phoenix, AZ, and used several tools to calculate different economic, environmental, and health metrics associated with three levels of energy efficiency. Our result shows that while the payback calculated from direct energy costs may not be attractive, other savings should be considered. For example, we found that avoided health and climate costs can total around 40% of the direct utility savings. In addition, we quantify how energy saving strategies can cool the neighborhood, make buildings more resilient to heat, improve indoor air quality, and reduce the probability of airborne disease transport, all of which can be translated to avoided costs.

Grace La, Professor of Architecture

Erika Naginski, Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History

Environmental implications ground twelve student projects -- the focus of an exhibition at the Harvard GSD (Fall 2022) – that were the outcome of a studio and seminar jointly taught by the designer Grace La and the architectural historian Erika Naginski. Our project developed the folly as a typological springboard for coalescing formal creativity with sustainable imperatives. Whether at the scale of the structure, garden, or machine, the folly is a playful moniker in which the useless, extreme, theatrical, and daring are made to intervene in both intimate and civic spaces. With fantastical properties in mind, we used the folly opportunistically as a vehicle to foreground issues involving ecologics, environmental processes, and sustainable innovations. For us, the folly offered a means to translate theory into practice; by leveraging its discursive status, diverse scales, and programmatic flexibility, we created a space of design experimentation in which to explore the behavior of materials, the potential of first principles, and the evaluation of sustainable consequences.

Carole Turley Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning

State, local, and private-sector policies have created an increasing need to estimate site generated vehicle miles traveled for existing and proposed developments, but no established method exists for this purpose. In this paper, we review existing applications and methods for estimating site-generated vehicle miles traveled and ask how much influence the choice of methodology might have on such estimates. We propose a set of four plausible methods for estimating site-level trip generation and three for estimating average lengths of site-generated trips. Combining these yields twelve methods for estimating the site generated vehicle miles traveled. We apply these methods to estimate trip generation, average trip length, and total VMT generated by eight existing office sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Wasatch Front Region of Utah. We find that trip generation estimates and trip length estimates vary widely, with greater variation in trip generation estimates. This variation is magnified when the estimates are multiplied to produce site generated VMT estimates, with the minimum estimate at a given site ranging from four to 16 percent of the corresponding maximum. We conclude with a call for further research to develop a site-level VMT estimation method that prioritizes consistency, cost-effectiveness, closeness, and conservatism.

Andrew Witt, Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture

Jonathan Grinham, Lecturer in Architecture and Senior Research Associate

Achieving low-carbon design requires energy-matching strategies for heating and cooling. Water-based thermal regulating devices, such as radiant cooling and heating systems, provide an opportunity to achieve significant energy savings, peak demand reduction, load shifting, improved indoor air quality, and thermal comfort improvements compared to conventional all-air systems. As a result, the application of these systems has increased in recent years. These devices achieve reduced primary energy consumption by delivering cooling loads using large surfaces that exchange energy directly with occupants through radiant heat exchange. However, limited research has addressed how increasing the surface area available for convective heat exchange will improve the thermal performance of these devices. Here we propose research to develop a pilot study of a novel, high surface-area radiant cooling device that achieves required cooling loads using a low-temperature gradient, that is to say, working with a water temperature that is close to the temperature desired in the target space. The ability to deliver cooling at a lower temperature gradient has two benefits. First, the lower surface temperature of our device can reduce primary energy consumption and improve the chiller coefficient of performance. Second, when coupled to natural ventilation in buildings, the lower temperature gradient results in a higher temperate at the surface of our novel device, in-turn lowering the probability of condensation, which increases annual hours available to naturally ventilate a building.

Rosalea Monacella, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Jill Desmini, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project builds on the first stage of work that culminated in the exhibition titled ‘Energy||Power; Shaping the American Landscape’ at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Loeb Library in 2020.  This work explored the acute obligation to upgrade and expand the electrical power grid to meet the demands of growing urban communities, and simultaneously address global implications of climate change that require a re-thinking of these infrastructures to inherently hold a capacity for adaptation, and concurrently serve as the modulating organizational structure of the urban fabric. Much of the U.S. energy system predates the turn of the 21st century. Most electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy, and the more than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity. This design research pursues the creative potential that is to emerge through a study of infrastructure’s capacity to directly inform the shape of the urban fabric of the city, and the possibility to affect its agency in response to the need for cities to respond to future environmental, technological, economic, and social challenges.  The aim is to develop alternative urban assemblages as deployable prototypes that incorporate the territorial consequences at a regional scale in order to shift the structure of the city to a position of accountability for its own power and water consumption at the scale of the city and concurrently at the broader region from which its resources are harvested. This next phase of the work proposes to collect, capture and disseminate the first stage work of the exhibition into a printed publication for distribution and a one-day symposium to extend and share the work through the active engagement of key researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders with the larger design community.

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology

Daniel Tish, Instructor in Architecture

Reducing the embodied carbon footprint of the construction industry is paramount to delivering an impactful response to the climate crisis. A promising new avenue to reduce the embodied energy of the built environment is the development of new algae-based biomaterials. Algae take up CO2 during photosynthesis and require minimal processing. The technology could contribute to transforming the built environment into a carbon storage device, sequestering carbon in the material itself and holding it for the lifetime of the building. This project is a research collaboration with a team of material scientists at Caltech, led by Professor Daraio, who are developing this algae-based biomaterial. At the GSD, the focus has been on the development of novel fabrication processes and applications for this material in the built environment. The research broadly asks how we might fabricate components for buildings’ living materials. How can we overcome the challenges of working with materials with active behaviors, and what new efficiencies and opportunities might this new material paradigm offer?