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. 

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.

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

Yun Fu, Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design

A useful way of regarding adverse environmental effects of various forms of urban settlement is by way of a metabolic and systems view of the material aspects of such settlement. In short, to be able to re-write settlements in a manner that creates links between natural domains like the geosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere with commonly defined land use types and activities. The method to be adopted is a stock-flow model involving Sankey diagram depictions of water, energy and material flows from originating domains to spatial settlement production and waste management using available data, or in other words, from ‘cradle to end use and disposal’. As a proof of concept, three manners of settlement co-existence will be explored. They are compact urban settlement, peripheral development and informal settlement. Cases will be drawn from Paris, France, Boston in the US and Monterrey, Mexico.

Niall Kirkwood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

REMADE aims to develop graduate design studio courses on the subject of the naturally occurring landscape as both a ground for advancing core knowledge on equity in climate change planning, as well as on developing practical design tools for city communities on sustainability and living with nature. Among these tools, the concept of the ‘climate change classrooms’ in the urban fabric will be developed and rethought. Site scale public spaces will be designed for access by all city residents and will provide climate change education as well as additional social and cultural amenities. The graduate studio course research will collaborate with existing researchers and organizations engaged with climate study and will advance understanding for local civic authorities and leadership, as well as local educational communities. The focus will be placed on naturally based approaches and the potential impact on climate equity and sustainability in Thailand.

Rachel Meltzer, Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics

Extreme events, like the wildfires of California, can cause massive damage to the built infrastructure in their paths.  In rebuilding after the disaster, there are not only the material costs of re-erecting those structures, but risk assessments of any future event that could once again compromise or destroy those very same structures.  As we consider the planning and building of communities and infrastructures in the face of increasing climate change threats, like wildfires, the risk calculations, and who bears those risks, will be important considerations.  In this project, we focus on the risk calculations of doing business under the threat of massive wildfires, and how that informs the valuation of commercial properties in California. In addition, we assess how the increased risk from the fires is differentially borne by property owners, tenants, and consumers. Commercial activity is an important component of any municipality’s economic and social health, and we know very little about how the risk of wildfires affects the decisions to invest in and use commercial infrastructure.  For this study, we focus on retail commercial activity, as it provides clear delineations for risk calculations across the consumers and producers of those services. We then ask and test the following research questions: (i) how are wildfire harm and risk capitalized into commercial property values and rents?; and, to disentangle the mechanism of real estate price adjustments, (ii) how does wildfire harm and risk affect the type and intensity of retail services and productivity? Using longitudinal micro-spatial data on property leases and transactions, building features, establishments, and wildfire exposures, we exploit the conditional exogeneity of the wildfire events and very fine-grained spatial controls to identify the impact of wildfires on property prices, rents, and establishment viability.

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

Aligning the timing of electricity demand with periods of clean generation is a key strategy in enabling the transition to a carbon-free electricity grid.  Yet this has not been a traditional goal of the energy analysis methods or building energy codes informing and governing building design. This talk explains these concepts through a case study of glass selection. We hypothesized that, as solar power generation capacity grows, contrary to current practices and building code requirements, a low solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) on south-facing windows may not be the optimal design in, at least a subset of, electrified mid- and high-rise residential buildings in colder climates. As a case study, we simulated 13 permutations of glass properties in a prototypical apartment building in 19 US cities from mixed to very cold climate zones. We found, on average, a 37% increase in non-solar electricity demand when SHGC is optimized based on traditional goals. This large percentage suggests that glass selection is an important variable that requires careful consideration in an evolving energy context.  As a surprising finding, even considering today's electrical grids and traditional energy efficiency goals, the established practice of using low SHGC of south-facing windows was not optimal for our subset of tested buildings.

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology, Director of the Master in Design Engineering Program

Juan Pablo Ugarte, Lecturer in Architecture

Why do building occupants make the choices they make when it comes to environmentally friendly or unfriendly actions? How do buildings themselves contribute to shaping these behaviors? This research project explores if, and how, visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, haptic, and other spatial and material factors may covertly and indirectly sway building users towards more sustainable behaviors.   The sustainability-related behavior of building occupants has been studied extensively. Typical topics of research include data collection methods and related analysis frameworks, behavioral studies of window, lighting and space heating and cooling, and the quantitative modeling of human behaviors in numerical simulations, to name a few. These are all relevant topics, especially when considering the estimated potential for behaviorally driven energy savings, which is generally assumed to be in the range of 10-25 % for residential and 5-30 % for commercial buildings (Zhang et al. 2018). Buildings with little to no integration of data-driven control technology have a much higher potential for energy savings than those that include it (Sun and Hong 2017). With a US renewal rate of around 1%, and the technical, financial and political challenges of improving the existing building stock, this proposal is investigating how we might change occupant’s behavior through simple interventions in existing buildings towards more sustainable, energy-saving habits.  Efforts to understand and influence the motivations behind human sustainable behaviors —or lack thereof— have been conducted in contexts as diverse as marketing, retail shopping, tourism, and nutrition, to name a few. In design, the interest in these topics is compounded with a growing body of work in other behavioral aspects of building occupancy such as productivity, mental health, and creativity. Methods and theories to shape user behavior include behavioral priming (Bargh et al. 1996) from behavioral psychology, Nudge Theory (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) from behavioral economics, subliminal priming (Strahan et al. 2002) from the marketing industry, as well as system theory (Simon 1957). The effect of education on our behavior in buildings has also been studied (Carrico, Riemer 2011).  The proposed study investigates the potential impact of spatial and material factors on occupant behavior in relation to sustainable practices. We focus on what we tentatively call ‘implicit cues’ —i.e., aspects or portions of the built environment that may be used to promote specific behaviors in users in a covert fashion. These factors are different from explicit cues that include, for example, the known effect of revealing energy consumption data to occupants in order to encourage more mindful use of lighting, appliances, heating or cooling. The literature has largely focused on explicit cues, leaving much to be understood about the design-centered implicit cues!

Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This research project will enable three months ‘landscape fieldwork’ in Lagos, Nigeria focused on the materials, objects—and colors—that comprise Lagos and their thermal and environmental properties.1 The result will be three live projects in three sites in Lagos: the Makoko slum, the Brazilian Quarters (founded by returned enslaved peoples), and the exclusive neighborhood of Victoria Island. These live projects will demonstrate to Lagosians how color can change perceptions of the built environment and adaptability to the effects of climate change. The project builds upon a 2021 CGBC grant that investigated the relationship between urban colors and the adaptability of Lagos to challenges posed by the increased temperatures associated with climate change. The previous project developed a cross-disciplinary methodology to evaluate urban colors and associated environmental potentials through an innovative mix of mapping techniques, remote fieldwork, computational analysis, data visualization, precedent studies, and design imagination. Color is rarely considered outside purely aesthetic considerations. Focused on Lagos, but applicable across African cities, the proposed second phase of the project will allow the PI to live in Lagos for three months. This immersive experience will facilitate the implementation of the “Chromatic Resilience Framework.” The CRF from the previous grant aims to design opportunities to change Lagos’s environmental performance through color from a diversity of perspectives: artistic, cultural, scientific, spiritual, and spatial.

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Malkit Shoshan, Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design

Rosalea Monacella, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture

The aim of this project is to question how energy transition might allow us to reimagine landscapes of extraction, production, transmission, consumption: repair them on the one hand, and/or repurpose, rewire, and decentralize them for renewables while exploring issues of ownerships and governance, such as the commons. The research project is conducted at four scales of enquiry, including: extraction infrastructure (oil fields, mines, and fracking), energy production infrastructure (power plants, refineries, solar and wind farms), transmission infrastructure (grids and pipelines), and consumption infrastructure (the home, community, and neighborhood).

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology

Zachery Seibold, Design Critic in Architecture

Our aesthetic preferences are determined by a multitude of cultural and personal factors, but how exactly these preferences evolve remains largely unclear. Digital and other media certainly play a major role in shaping our taste, as does education, to just name a few. The present study seeks to understand the degree to which our aesthetic preferences are influenced by the importance we attribute to sustainability. We focus on materials used on interiors as the immediate interface between people and the physical world of buildings. The study is conducted in two parts: first we evaluate the degree to which study participants can accurately estimate the degree to which various typical interior materials are sustainable – the latter is quantified through a life cycle analysis. In a second step we then assess how the aesthetic appraisal of materials is influenced by their perceived sustainability.

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

This paper suggests that passive building design measures can play a significant role in shifting the timing of electricity demand to take advantage of solar power. As a case study, we tested the Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) of south-facing windows and used building energy simulation to compare two design objectives: 1) minimizing annual electricity demand, 2) minimizing annual electricity demand unmet by instantaneous solar power. We simulated 13 permutations of SHGC in a prototypical apartment building in 19 US cities from mixed to very cold climate zones. We found that in colder climates the maximum SHGC prescribed by current building codes may be too low for minimizing annual energy use in an electrified building (a potential problem already today). Further, we found that in mixed-to-cold climates, to take advantage of solar power, the optimal SHGC must be even higher. Results show the optimal glass selection under the two objectives tested is significantly different and on average there is a 37% increase in non-solar electricity demand when SHGC is optimized based on simple annual energy use. These results show that the choice of energy-related building-design objectives matter if we recognize that all kilowatt hours saved do not have equal importance.

Carole Turley Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning,

Elizabeth Christoforetti, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

Scholarship on green building for housing has generally focused on construction methods, materials, and energy efficiency (Yudelson 2010; Li et al. 2021) with less attention paid to what have been called the three most important characteristics of a property: Location, location, location. It has been well-established that residential location can have a large impact on household travel behavior (Ewing and Cervero 2010; McCormack and Shiell 2011; van de Coevering, Maat, and van Wee 2021; Boarnet and Wang 2019). Can a housing development truly be “green” if its location requires residents to maintain a carbon-intensive, car-oriented travel profile? We propose to develop a set of parcel-level, location-based metrics that represent various dimensions of housing sustainability, including access to open space, access to low-carbon transportation options, and likely commute-generated vehicle miles traveled for parcels across Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We will also develop a separate set of parcel-level metrics to describe likely housing affordability and the feasibility of housing development. Using these metrics, we will develop an interactive tool that will allow users to specific the relative value or weight they place on affordability, sustainability, and feasibility to identify a set of optimal locations for infill housing development, based user specified values. We will apply this tool to answer three questions:

• Research Question 1: To what degree to does maximizing location-based housing sustainability require trade-offs in terms of housing affordability and/or development feasibility?
• Research Question 2: Do LEED-certified housing developments in Allegheny County have better location-based sustainability than housing developments that are not LEED certified?
• Research Question 3: What relative values placed on location-based sustainability, affordability, and development feasibility are implied by the pattern of housing development within Allegheny County over the past ten years?

Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project researches the relationship between urban colors and the challenges posed by the increased temperatures associated with climate change. It proposes to comprehend the dynamics of urban colors and examine how they interact with the built environment and human activities in the urban ecosystem. To create more resilient cities, we need to understand urban chromatic values better and this project will do so using Lagos, Nigeria, as a living laboratory. Employing remote fieldwork, precedent studies and design imagination, we will examine the thermal and environmental properties of the materials that constitute Lagos’ colors and create a dossier of urban colors and associated design strategies suitable for Lagos.  Designers and planners rarely consider color outside purely aesthetic or metaphorical concerns. We expect sustainable cities to be green cities, but green is appropriate for temperate climates. To be good to the environment is often considered ‘green,’ but outside the temperate world, urban greens are often not very green from an environmental point of view due to the resources needed to maintain green, such as water and chemicals. How green should non-temperate, non-Western cities be? The solution is in not just having green, but other colors too. The first phase of the project will evaluate the environmental properties of a selection of Lagos’s various colors, where the rusts of corrugated tin roofs and the terracotta earth sit alongside yellow buses and taxi cabs. The project’s second phase will catalog a selection of Lagos’s primary colors, review innovative precedents that use color to effect environmental change, such as the City of Cambridge’s efforts to green the city though the tree canopy, New York’s efforts to paint roofs white to deflect heat, and Los Angeles’s efforts to color highways light gray to reduce surrounding temperatures by up to 10 degrees. We will also investigate historical precedents, such as Reykjavik’s multi-colored roofs and the changing roof colors of Chinese cities.5 The third phase will imagine and propose landscape architecture and urban design strategies to counter the effects of increased urban temperatures in Lagos in the future.

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?

Niall Kirkwood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology

This paper focuses on the possibilities for cities and their hinterlands to progress economically and culturally through advancing highly modern industrial manufacturing and production in concert with the environment and the changing forces in the contemporary urban landscape. I refer to this as the ‘Fifth Industrial Revolution’ and I will explain the term and its derivation but suffice to say that it sits uncomfortably with and challenges much of my own previous research work by demanding that the post-industrial city and its landscape be considered an interim step in the evolution of the site rather than a terminal point both developmentally and ecologically. It is also I believe where the fields of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture can lead through the design, industrial ecology and nature.  This is a research effort that is ongoing in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, it is still in need of continued intensive effort and study and it is worth noting that it overturns many of the Department of Landscape Architecture’s previous positions related to the role of ecology in design, the place of industry in the city landscape (usually swept away along with jobs to make room for verdant parks and waterfront promenades), as well as the source of design ideas for landscape designers and planners.  I want to suggest that it looks to the interrelationship of the technical, the humanistic and the symbolic through the collective ideas of work, energy and city form. It engages with advanced manufacturing as a vital agent in shaping a new form of a city landscape or at least in opening up questions regarding the tools of industrial ecology and industry’s role in continuing to be a force in society. We can urge on behalf of urbanity and the development of ‘smart cars’, ‘driverless cars’ and ‘compact folding cars’ but cars still need to be manufactured and who does it, where and how and can it ever be considered sustainable? This paper presents the nature of industrial work in the City as it is defined now and may emerge in the future and the role of design in leading the planning and design implications of this type of manufacturing practice. This addresses initiatives developed at Harvard crossing between the fields of industrial ecology, environmental engineering, and the design and planning disciplines that I will endeavor to show through the process and results of research carried out in the Summer of 2019  The subtitle of the paper is titled- Co-Opting Urban Industrial Symbiosis for Urban Resilience and is focused on the City of Ulsan and hinterlands, (population of 1.1 million) located in the south-eastern part of the Republic of Korea where established fabrication zones, industrial complexes and civic residential neighborhoods are all located within an intense natural setting of coastal shorelines, mountains and meadows and are to be rethought and remade over the next decade. I want to suggest how the basic elements of the city (land, water and infrastructure) integrate within the Ulsan industrial and civic culture to produce a modern city industrial landscape that takes account of the shifting collective concerns of public and private agencies and companies.

Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

In the Arabian Peninsula, public spaces are often most used after darkness falls and the temperatures with it. As a result, public spaces are often illuminated well into the early hours of the morning. This proposed research project will ask how, rather than fighting the night, designers can work with darkness to create socially and culturally acceptable public spaces? One aim of this proposal is to improve energy-saving in the Arabian Peninsula through more efficient design with darkness, taking more advantage of cooler nighttime temperatures and remediating lighting needs. A secondary aim is to conduct field research on the topic of nocturnal public spaces through a Design Anthropology seminar.

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 rethinking 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 50year 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.01 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.