Tag: featured-news

The Salata Institute recently announced the first cohort of awardees from their Seed Grant Program, which serves to enable interdisciplinary research in climate and sustainability. CGBC core faculty researchers Holly Samuelson and Martin Bechthold, alongside CGBC researcher David Tish, were among those awarded. In their project, “Insulating buildings with algae foam,” Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology Martin Bechthold, co-principal investigator Jennfier Lewis, and researcher and former DDes student Daniel Tish […]

a“Optimal control of HVAC and window systems for natural ventilation through reinforcement learning,” authored by Yujiao Chen, Leslie Norford, and CGBC/GSD researchers Holly W. Samuelson and Ali Malkawi, was selected as one of the “Ten best research papers” between 2018-2022 in Energy and Buildings.   The research paper explores issues of natural ventilation and energy efficiency, specifically through a reinforcement learning control strategy that makes optimal control decisions for heating, […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., February 17, 2022 – The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC), in its latest peer-reviewed paper in Energy and Buildings, demonstrates that Harvard’s HouseZero, which serves as both a laboratory and as the CGBC headquarters, can achieve high energy efficiency with combined natural ventilation and a thermally active building system. The article presents the first comprehensive assessment of the operational performance of the coupled natural ventilation […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., November 20, 2021 – The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) at the Graduate School of Design has just published “Zero-carbon Balance: The Case of HouseZero,” the first full accounting of the structure’s embodied carbon and a detailed methodology behind calculating its zero-carbon balance in the peer-reviewed journal Building and Environment. In tandem, the CGBC has also released a summary of the lab’s full-year performance results. Prof. Ali Malkawi, […]

The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) announced today the completion of HouseZero, the retrofitting of its headquarters in a pre-1940s building in Cambridge into an ambitious living-laboratory and an energy-positive prototype for ultra-efficiency that will help us to understand buildings in new ways. The design of HouseZero has been driven by radically ambitious performance targets from the outset, including […]

Ali Malkawi, Marius Nygaard, Anne Beim and Erik Stenberg have edited a book entitled Sustainability in Scandinavia: Architectural Design and Planning. The book contains a collection of case-studies—most written by participants of the CGBC’s 2015 Fall Conference: Sustainability in Scandinavia. The book is published by Axel Menges and is currently available for pre-order. Summary  The challenges of the global climate crisis are heightened in large part by a pervasive uncertainty regarding how architects […]

On Tuesday, April 3, 2018, the CGBC’s Harvard HouseZero, an ambitious living laboratory and prototype for ultra-efficiency, was officially commissioned during a private ceremony in Harvard GSD’s Piper Auditorium. Event participants included Drew Faust, President of Harvard University; Alan Garber, Provost of Harvard University; Ali Malkawi, Founding Director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, and Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Representatives from […]