Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology

Daniel Tish, Lecturer in Architecture

The built environment plays a significant role in the climate crisis, contributing approximately 39% of global carbon emissions, according to the UN Environment Programme. For buildings, these emissions occur primarily in two phases of the lifecycle. The extraction, manufacturing, and installation of construction materials and systems account for 11% of global carbon emissions. Building operation makes up the remaining 28% of carbon emissions, which is dominated by the emissions generated when heating and cooling buildings. The expected electrification of heating systems and the incremental decarbonization of the grid will likely shift more attention to embodied emissions. However, during the decades-long transition, both aspects will need to be addressed simultaneously. As a potential solution to both aspects of this issue, this research team proposes to develop a proof-of-concept for a novel carbon-negative building insulation material based on algae. The research will produce a scenario-based impact assessment to consider the lifecycle carbon emissions, thermal and mechanical properties, and cost of various building insulation materials. Using this assessment to guide the material and process development, the team will develop high-throughput fabrication methods for algae-based foam materials. A range of material characterizations and projected cost analyses will then help the team to benchmark this new material against currently available products. It is expected that the use of photosynthetic microalgae will lead to a system that performs thermally comparably with a dramatically lower carbon footprint, satisfying the demands of operational and embodied emissions for insulating materials. 

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

Researchers have experimented with building design and controls, implementing demand response strategies to alleviate the stress on the grid during peak hours. The demand response strategies have traditionally been focused on reducing the energy demand by means of energy storage devices such as batteries, thermal storage such as TABS (thermally activated building surfaces), phase change materials, ice systems, or altering the setpoint temperatures and window controls to name a few. However, due to changing electricity infrastructure i.e., the rise in distributed energy generation, especially intermittent sources like solar, and the fact that the least efficient (dirtiest) power plants generally come online only to meet demand at peak times, emissions from the grid vary drastically depending on the season and time of use. With increased availability of high-resolution grid emissions data, it is now possible to operate buildings to offset their embodied and operational carbon requirements. This study will use state of the art systems and controls of House Zero for temporal shifting of loads to battery systems when the grid GHG emissions are relatively higher. The research team will test the hypothesis that data from the grid and the building can be used collectively to minimize the lifecycle carbon emission of the building. Owing to its ultra efficient technologies and data informed building management systems, HouseZero will be used as a test bed for the validation of our hypothesis. 

Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture

Kira Clingen, Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow

Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine is a place-based scenario planning design research project that explores multiple plausible futures on the Gulf of Maine. The aim of this project is to assist decision makers on the Gulf in making infrastructural choices in the present to adapt to near future climate impacts. Proactive planning is particularly important on the Gulf of Maine, where climate vulnerabilities, including rising sea surface temperatures and levels, are accelerating faster than almost any other ocean on the planet. The scenario planning methodology integrates probabilistic modeling, including scientific and engineering projections, to understand climate impacts on transportation, physical, and social infrastructure systems. Working across scales from individual buildings and low-lying roads on the coast to a regional perspective, this project develops a suite of resilience and adaptation strategies. These strategies are visualized in four scenarios for the future of infrastructural systems on the Gulf of Maine including reinforcement, defense, elevation, and relocation.

Peter Rowe, Ramond Garbe Professor of Architeccture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor

Entry into the Anthropocene 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 is in terms of the metabolism of constructed environments. Among the few methods of doing this are stock-flow models and the use of Sankey diagrams. Effectively, this approach allows the link between technocratic sphere of settlement to be established with the natural domains of the geosphere, biosphere and so on. Ot also allows these links to be traced through to constructed outcomes together with forms of waste and recycling potentials and management. Over the past several years a project team under the direction of Professors Rowe and Doussard have developed such a modeling capability and applied it to settlement coexistences in compact urban circumstances, peripheral urban developments, informal settlements and to desakota areas. At this juncture though, the circularity of functions associated with the reuse of building stock is poorly described and represented. So, to is the approximation to ‘cradle-to-cradle’ as distinct from ‘cradle-to-grave’ understanding building settlement life-cycles. It is proposed to focus on these two aspects during this phase of research. 

Carole Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning

Ideally, new housing units will be constructed from sustainable building materials, will be powered by renewable energy sources, and will offer energy-efficient heating and cooling. Minimizing the climate impacts of new housing will also require that new units be located on sites that minimize the need for occupants to rely on carbon-intensive modes of travel (such as single-occupant private vehicles) to complete routine daily activities. This can be achieved by siting housing developments in close proximity to activity centers (to allow for travel by walking and cycling) or in close proximity to public transit nodes. This research team hypothesizes that many such potential housing sites exist throughout a typical metropolitan area, but that they are underutilized because developers seeking to build housing at a scale that can generate an adequate return on investment find it easier to acquire and subdivide large parcels on the outskirts of an urban area than to identify a large number of non-adjacent small parcels on which a specific housing type can be repeated at scale. Relatedly, existing owners of isolated parcels that are accessible by low-carbon transportation modes may not be aware of the development potential of their properties. The purpose of this project is to develop a method that can automate the process of searching for parcels throughout a region (including multiple municipalities that may have very difference zoning regulations) that will allow for development of specified multi-unit housing building types. This will in turn allow the research team to identify types of small-scale housing developments that can by repeatedly developed as infill housing in the Boston region throughout a region to make maximum contributions to creating more housing, more affordable housing, and more walkable neighborhoods. The methods developed will be distributed as open-source software that real estate developers and municipal planners can use to repeat our analysis for regions throughout the United States. 

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. With the help of this CGBC Summer Grant, the research team plans to visit three old agricultural oases in the Grand Erg Occidental, a 30,000-square-mile patch of sand in the Algerian Sahara. During this fieldwork, the research team will travel with colleagues from the University of Biskra in northern Algeria, who will host me and drive me around this remote and inaccessible region of the Sahara. The research team will use the fieldwork campaign to document these different oases' architecture, landscape, ecology, and technology through drawing and photography. With the help of a spatial analyst and long-term collaborator, the research team will also conduct flights with drones equipped with visual and thermal cameras. Using our previous experience with other oases in Morocco and Tunisia, the drone footage will then be measured and interpreted photogrammetrically to build unprecedentedly detailed 3D models of these landscapes. With these models, the research team will be able 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. Documenting these three different oases in Algeria would be the last stage in the construction of a graphic taxonomic framework the research team started two years ago, which seeks to offer a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the morphology of various vernacular oases in different desert environments in the Maghreb region. 

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

The research operates at the nexus of the social, ecological, and technological in the built environment exploring remote sensor technologies capable of continuous in-operation monitoring to measure atmospheric conditions at a hyper-local scale. This approach seeks to make visible and reconstitute the urban landscape as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space shifting across multiple scales in a constant state of flux. The work explores how a careful measuring and description of airborne territories might augment traditional concepts of an urban landscape site in which air is described as a matter of entanglement and interconnection. The goal is to analyze the complexity of the atmospheric landscape and identify its propensities in the shape of its key operational characteristics in relationship to the city's built form. It aspires to understand the impact of outdoor spaces on the energy efficiency of building operations (specific to HouseZero) and understand the atmospheric agency of the landscape to inform the design of landscape spaces that contribute to the sustainability of the city and improve the health and well-being of its citizens.