Peter Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor

Entry into the Anthropocenic Era will require heightened vigilance and appropriate action regarding the negative externalities of urban settlement and particularly those that are environmental. A useful way of identifying and analyzing these kinds of impacts in in terms of the metabolism of constructed environments. Among the few methods for doing this are stock-flow models and the use and discipline of Sankey diagrams. Effectively, this approach allows the links between characteristics of the natural world and land-use activities to be established and traced through to constructed outcomes together with residuals of this spatial production in the form of waste, recycling potential and management. It also does so in a manner directly reflective of temporal variations, such as obsolescence rates and life-cycle assessment. This project expands upon a previous study of several case studies.

David Moreno Mateos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Urban tree health is commonly weakened by the hostile environmental conditions that cities create. This weakening commonly translates into shorter life spans, limiting how much trees can provide in our aims to adapt to and mitigate climate change in the same cities that weaken them. Trees provide key benefits to cities, this project is particularly focused on their ability to store carbon in cities' soil and their contribution to urban biodiversity. Research shows that increased underground tree connectivity increases tree health in forests. However, we don't know if the same principle applies to cities. We content that by improving the microbial communities (specifically fungal mutualists) in urban soils at the city level, we can increase tree connectivity, which will translate into increased tree health. Healthier trees will grow more, accumulating more biomass, will attract more biodiversity aboveground, including pollinators or birds, and will absorb more solar radiation in their chloroplasts, reducing the heat island effect. Our approach aims to first understand the status of soil fungal communities in a representative case study, Central Park and the street trees in New York City. The project then explores urban design approaches to enhance those communities in the urban soil by facilitating the expansion of underground tree connectivity.

Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Despite the commonplace image of the oasis as a natural occurrence emerging from the desert sands, most oases are agricultural landscapes, i.e., environments deliberately designed and built to produce food for human consumption. And while agriculture often constitutes a driving force in land degradation, in the aridest regions of the world, traditional agricultural practices sometimes lead to the rise and long-term establishment of vegetation at levels of abundance and intricacy that would otherwise not be possible. The object of this project is the vernacular oasis, that is, a system of spaces created in an environment characterized by conditions of extreme heat and aridity, designed for the cultivation of specific forms of life for human consumption, and whose evolution has been slow and mainly driven by the cultural practices of those people inhabiting them. It looks at the morphology of seven different oases in different desert environments along a transect that connects the snowcapped mountains of the High Atlas with the salt flats of the deep Sahara desert in the Maghreb region. Using drones equipped with visual and thermal cameras, we have produced footage of some of these oases, which we then have processed photogrammetrically to produce unprecedentedly detailed 3D models of their physical conditions. These models allow us to analyze and understand critical elements in their fine-grain configuration, such as topographic profile, irrigation patterns, vegetation cover distribution and density, and the thermal gradients and microclimatic conditions induced by the agronomic transformation of the preexisting desert geomorphology. Because of their fragility, these landscapes have historically been associated with declining vegetation, soils, ecosystems, economies, and, ultimately, cultures. However, such processes do occur in any environment, and in the current context of climate change and environmental degradation, the possibilities and limitations of these arid landscapes will offer great insight into the future of the built environment in other regions of the world.

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

Building codes and rules of thumb typically promote low-solar-heat-gain window glass for improved energy and carbon performance. However, this research demonstrates how high-solar-heat-gain-glass can, in some cases, provide a win-win-win-win, lowering annual energy use, carbon emissions, peak energy demand, and construction costs. The presentation includes original findings for new construction in ten representative US cities and for retrofits, testing approximately 5000 models representing the residential building stock of Chicago. Unlike past studies, the presented methodology considers each façade orientation separately and includes the changing HVAC and energy generation context.

Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology

Climate change and its accompanying environmental challenges have contributed to making the presence of nature one of the fundamental urban issues of today. The green city appears as a rapidly rising urban paradigm destined to become even more pervasive than the smart city. Under what conditions is this paradigm realistic and what does it truly entail? Does it imply a deep rethinking of some of the categories on which we rely when dealing with cities and their transformation? With these questions in mind, this research project offers a critical investigation of two fundamental aspects of the presence of nature in the city, when we consider significant historical precedents as a way to better understand contemporary evolutions. The first aspect is the technological dimension of this presence. Despite so many current discourses about the self-sustaining character that natural elements should have in cities, these elements are inseparable from all sorts of technical problems. Furthermore, there is a tendency to blur the distinction between nature and infrastructure. A second aspect lies in the political character reflected by the presence of nature in cities. Urban nature is not only supposed to improve the overall health of inhabitants; it is also expected to pacify their social relationships. Epitomized by contemporary practices such as shared gardens and urban agriculture, urban nature seems inseparable from the way we live together, and from the social contract that is meant to bind us as part of a collective.

Elizabeth Christoforetti, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

The Urban Stack Unit from the Laboratory for Design Technologies is conducting research to develop new socio-technical processes, systems, and small-scale building designs for affordable and sustainable Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) for low-to-median income (LMI) homeowners in the City of Boston and beyond. The goals of the project are three-fold: 1) to build upon existing knowledge to prototype culturally relevant, affordable, and low-energy ADU designs, 2) to partner with the City of Boston to link these designs to policy by co-developing integrated approaches to the permitting process, and 3) to collaborate with experts in finance to co-design a linked financial product to lower the barrier to entry for LMI homeowners, to facilitate wider ADU access and construction, and to meet the racial wealth gap head-on. This systems-linked design research operates within and outside of traditional disciplinary silos to enable simplified and dignified design with the necessary technological and social processes that will enable it to create scalable impact for residents who are most vulnerable to the housing and climate crisis.

Jonathan Grinham, Assistant Professor of Architecture

By 2050, air conditioning is conservatively projected to consume 6,200 terawatt-hours globally, more than triple today’s demands. Today, air conditioning’s massive electricity use and refrigerant leakage represent 4% of annual greenhouse gas emissions, making air conditioning a key driver of climate change. To address this problem, collaborative research on a latent-cooling-driven invention called Vesma is proposed (GSD, SEAS). The proposed solution combines two innovative and field-tested solutions, sub-wet-bulb indirect evaporative cooling (cSNAP) and isothermal vacuum membrane dehumidification (DryScreen) that de-couple the two primary functions of most legacy air conditioning systems. The resulting system provides effective cooling and ample fresh air supply to building occupants using a fraction of the energy legacy air conditioning units need while reducing lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions. Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities support will be used to develop and test a lab-scale prototype with the intention of using the HouseZero LiveLab to prove that the innovation is a globally transformative solution to decarbonizing air conditioning.

Hannah Teicher, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning

Policy discussions of receiving communities, or places likely to be more livable as the climate changes, have been piecemeal at best. Certain locations that appear to have lower risk of climate impacts have started to gain political traction and take on a life of their own through media echo chambers. However, conditions in these locations will be complicated by housing supply, infrastructural performance, and adaptation and integration capacity. Conversely, many locations conducive to climate-related resettlement have been overlooked. In response, this research will contribute a more systematic perspective to the receiving communities conversation by developing and synthesizing indicators of housing supply, infrastructural conditions, adaptation capacity and integration capacity in regions of the US with less propensity for climate extremes. The project will also compare current migration patterns to receiving community capacity to identify mismatches and opportunities. The results can be leveraged to inform planning and policy for climate migration at multiple scales from the local to the national.