The goal of sustainable and high-performance building requires an integrated interdisciplinary orientation that seeks not only to make advances, but also to find ways to change the behavior of firms, occupants of buildings, and local governments to adopt more environmentally friendly development and building use practices. The Center will draw together experts from across Harvard’s various schools to pursue highly interdisciplinary research and teaching to advance the state of knowledge and practice in green building. Experts from the Graduate School of Design will be joined by researchers from various Harvard institutions including the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the School of Public Health, the Business School, the Kennedy School, the Law School, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
FOUR DIMENSIONS
The Center engages in four interrelated streams of research that represent various dimensions and scales of the sustainable built environment:
- Modeling Dimension: Design and Operation »
- Application Dimension: High Performance Materials and Construction »
- Economic Dimension: Technology Adoption and Diffusion »
- Macro Dimension: Sustainable Planning»
IMPACT
A major advance in any of these dimensions has potential to improve lives around the world. The interaction of people, ideas, and knowledge across various disciplines at the Center will create greater potential for major advances.
SAMPLE RESEARCH PROJECTS
- Natural Ventilation Potential in China and Its Impact on Building Energy Efficiency
- Mass & Material Architecture: the Antidote to Air-Conditioning
- The Role of Simulation in Developing Evacuation Codes
- Building Design for Disassembly: Metrics and methods of evaluation
- Conceptual Life-Cycle Analysis
- Insulating Retrofits: Life cycle trade offs
- Investigating the Boundary Condition of Neighborhood Scale CFD Simulation for Natural Ventilation Design
- Urban Sustainability Hybrid System: A proposed framework for assessing urban environment and providing guidelines for future sustainable development
- Productivity and Performance in the U.S. Construction Industry
- What Explains the Air Pollution Changes in China: Trade or technology?
- Research and Development of an Open Platform for Automated HVAC Fault Detection and Smart Building Applications
- Smart Heating and Cooling Systems for Energy Efficient Buildings
SPONSORED STUDENT PROJECTS
- Designing Green Walls: An early-design framework to estimate the cooling impact of indirect green walls on buildings in different climates
- Morphological Spaces: Human centered design and development of building performance optimization
- House Zero Natural Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality: Sensing, monitoring and display
- Decision-Making Support System for Designing High Performance Naturally Ventilated Buildings in Early Design Stages