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Published SEPTEMBER 2024
IN THIS ISSUE , the third in a series exploring materials, we consider carbon. While not a building material in the conventional sense, carbon is present in everything we do.
FEATURES 14
BUILDING AND CARBON
Solving the global carbon crisis will demand the kind of innovation that has been the legacy of architecture and design By Alan Organschi
ABSORPTION IN THE LANDSCAPE
We must build biodiversity and connectivity into the urban environment By Tim Kerner, AIA
BIOGENICS AND LESS
These materials are an important tool in the fight to reduce carbon, but we can’t let them obscure the real goal By
Timothy Lock, AIA
Suggestions? Comments? Questions? Tell us what you think about the latest issue of CONTEXT magazine by emailing context@aiaphila.org. A member of the CONTEXT editorial committee will be sure to get back to you.
VIEW OF MAHANEY PLANE FROM FRACKVILLE, PA PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHAEL FROIO
2024 BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Brian Smiley, AIA, CDT, LEED BD+C, President
Danielle DiLeo Kim, AIA, President-Elect
Rob Fleming, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Past President
Robert Shuman, AIA, LEED AP, Treasurer
Fátima Olivieri-Martínez, AIA, Secretary
David Hincher, AIA, LEED BD+C, Director of Sustainability + Preservation
Phil Burkett, AIA, WELL AP, LEED AP NCARB, Director of Firm Culture + Prosperity
Kevin Malawski, AIA, LEED AP, Director of Advocacy
Erick Oskey, AIA, Director of Technology + Innovation
Ximena Valle, AIA, LEED AP, Director of Design
Fauzia Sadiq Garcia, RA, Director of Education
Timothy Kerner, AIA, Director of Professional Development
Michael Johns, FAIA, NOMA, LEED AP, Director of Equitable Communities
Anne Bigler, Graphic Designer, annebiglerdesign.com
TIM KERNER, AIA
Principal, Terra Studio and CONTEXT Co-Chair
TODD WOODWARD, AIA
Principal, SMP Architects and CONTEXT Co-chair
CARBON: NO SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
This issue of CONTEXT is the third in our annual series exploring building materials: Wood in 2022, Brick last year, and now Carbon. But wait. Does “carbon” belong on this list? Carbon is not a building material in the conventional sense. It is not something we select or specify or collaborate with craftsmen to form or mold. However, carbon is present in everything we do as designers.
Carbon has become a topic that all design professionals must be fluent in discussing and factoring into decision making. The terms carbon emissions, embodied carbon, carbon sequestration, carbon neutral, carbon dioxide equivalent, and others are increasingly common parlance among architects, other designers, and building owners. This chemical element with periodic symbol C and atomic number 6 is a necessary component of all forms of terrestrial life, and yet we now find ourselves in an existential race to reduce its impact on life.
This issue contributes to the expanding conversation around carbon. Alan Organschi takes us on a 400-million-year ride from the Devonian period to mass timber. Timothy Lock explores biogenic materials and espouses the necessity of using less of everything. Your co-editors also take turns on the topic. Tim opens a discussion with landscape architects on the greener, absorbing side of the carbon cycle. Todd reviews a new book, Not the End of the World, which sounds a data-driven call to action. The Expression section takes a look at the physical properties of Pennsylvania’s most famous and purest form of carbon — anthracite — through the work of artist Andrea Krupp. We also profile four local AIA projects that offer exemplary architectural responses to the carbon crisis.
There are no simple solutions when we talk about carbon, and this issue just scratches the surface of this enormously critical material. CONTEXT invites you to embrace the complexity of carbon and bring its consideration into all aspects of design. For the health of our world, we need to understand it better and exploit it less.
STYLE MEETS DESIGN IN PHILADELPHIA.
The Brickworks Design Studio in Philadelphia is host to an array of captivating products, exclusive industry events, and expert insights from those at the forefront of design.
Dear Members and Friends of AIA Philadelphia,
As we step into the vibrant and promising fall season, I am excited to share some significant updates regarding our strategic business model. Crafted by our Board of Directors, these changes reflect our unwavering commitment to inclusivity, collaboration and the sustained growth of our organization.
One of the pivotal adjustments to our business model involves a partnership with DesignPhiladelphia. We founded this initiative and it has since flourished, capturing an ever-expanding audience with a dynamic rebrand. In light of this growth, AIA Philadelphia will now share the executive director’s salary with DesignPhiladelphia. This collaboration symbolizes not just a financial alignment but a strategic effort to foster synergy between our two entities, ensuring both organizations thrive while serving our communities more effectively.
Our allied members have long been the backbone of AIA Philadelphia, serving as partners, thought leaders, and steadfast sponsors through countless events and initiatives. However, just as our environment has evolved, so too have the worlds and sponsorship budgets of our members. We recognize these shifts and are deeply committed to navigating this new landscape together. By investing time and resources to understand the evolving needs of both our architecture firms and allied firms, we
aim to foster a robust and mutually beneficial relationship that maximizes outcomes for all involved.
This fall, our focus will also be directed towards enhancing our Business Series programs. In partnership with DesignPhiladelphia and the City of Philadelphia Office of the Creative Economy, we will help our members sharpen their skills and stay ahead in an ever-changing industry. Additionally, we plan to offer more project tours and social events, creating opportunities for networking, learning, and community building. These initiatives are designed to strengthen the bonds within our community, and inspire innovation and collaboration.
In closing, I want to express my gratitude for your continued support and engagement. Together, we are shaping a future that not only adapts to change but also leverages it to create a thriving, inclusive, and dynamic architectural community.
Warmest regards,
Rebecca Johnson Executive Director, AIA Philadelphia
Design Education Saturday Workshop Series
DesignPhiladelphia will be offering free fun and informative workshops for various ages during our Fall 2024 Saturday Workshop Series. There are options for families with young children, as well as opportunities for high school students to build their skills and explore design career paths.
AIA PHILADELPHIA HOME TOURS MAKE A TRIUMPHANT RETURN OCTOBER 5 + 6
AIA Philadelphia is thrilled to reintroduce Home Tours as part of the DesignPhiladelphia Festival. Last year, this event captivated over 500 attendees, 70 percent of whom were not design professionals, showcasing the broad public interest in architectural endeavors.
What sets these tours apart is the unique opportunity for attendees to experience properties through the eyes of the architects and designers who brought them to life. This insider perspective fascinated the participants, who relished the behind-the-scenes stories of overcoming unexpected challenges during construction.
With approximately 120,000 architects across the country, many people have never met one, sparking immense curiosity about the profession and the creative problemsolving it entails. We encourage you to consider submitting your project for next year’s program. Start discussions with your homeowners and developers now! We are eager to feature more multifamily projects, so keep that in mind. Join us for an engaging journey through some of Philadelphia’s most intriguing homes and gain insights into the architectural process directly from the experts themselves.
The Beaux Arts Ball Returns: A Grand Celebration at Lynnewood Hall
Mark your calendars: The Beaux Arts Ball is back in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the DesignPhiladelphia Festival. This year’s event promises an unforgettable evening at the exclusive, not-yetopen-to-the-public Lynnewood Hall in Elkins Park, Penn.
This is an invite-only affair. If you’re on our email list, you should be receiving your golden ticket soon. We’ve recently migrated our lists, so if you think you should be on it and haven’t received an invitation, please reach out to the DesignPhiladelphia staff.
Get ready for an evening of elegance and celebration as we toast to two decades of design excellence. Don your finest attire and prepare to be enchanted by the architectural splendor of Lynnewood Hall, all while mingling with the crème de la crème of the design world. This is a night where Philadelphians from all backgrounds are welcomed to revel in the beauty and creativity of our shared community.
Business Workshop Series: Master Your Potential
This Fall, AIA Philadelphia invites you to transform your business acumen with its exclusive workshop series. Learn the essentials of brand identity creation, uncover your unique value proposition, explore innovative revenue diversification strategies, and conquer the nuances of discovery calls. Additionally, master the art of social media management on platforms like Meta and LinkedIn to elevate your professional presence.
Offered in partnership with DesignPhiladelphia and the City of Philadelphia’s Office of the Creative Economy, this series is more than just skill-building — it’s a cornerstone of AIA Philadelphia’s commitment to empowering member firms. By fostering profitability and growth, we aim to equip firms with the tools necessary to combat the climate crisis, champion equity and justice within the profession, and propel the advancement of architecture and design. Join us for a series packed with actionable insights, practical tips, and a touch of wit to keep the sessions engaging and dynamic.
Collaboration is Key to Resilience
Get ready for round two! AIA Philadelphia is thrilled to host the second annual Urban Resilience Forum. Following the smashing success of last year’s debut, this year’s event promises to be more inspiring and informative than ever, bringing together a stellar cast of multidisciplinary experts to tackle the hot topic of climate resilience.
Teaming up with Green Building United, Preservation Alliance, and ULI Philadelphia, we’re diving deep into strategies and real-world case studies aimed at helping property owners and communities fend off climate hazards such as extreme heat and flooding. It’s all about collaboration, folks! We’re joining forces to combat our climate crisis and bolster our collective resilience.
Mark your calendars for September 12, 2024, at the Center for DesignPhiladelphia (1218 Arch Street). The forum will feature a series of conversations that explore urban resilience from every angle at a regional, neighborhood, and property scale. Expect to walk away with a toolkit of valuable insights and practical solutions.
We’re putting the spotlight on the power of teamwork in tackling climate challenges. By gathering a diverse group of architects, urban planners, sustainability gurus, and community leaders, the event aims to foster a holistic approach to resilience. You’ll have the chance to learn from fascinating case studies, participate in engaging discussions, and share your own creative strategies.
AIA Philadelphia and our partners believe that solving our climate crisis takes collective effort and a dash of innovative thinking. The second annual Philadelphia Urban Resilience Forum is set to spark change, inspiring participants to take proactive steps towards building a more resilient future.
Don’t miss out on this pivotal event. Together, we can create a sustainable future for all.
GLASS HALF FULL
A NEW BOOK USES DATA TO MAKE THE CASE FOR CLIMATE OPTIMISM AND INNOVATION
REVIEWED BY TODD WOODWARD, AIA
Is it possible to tease apart the seemingly inextricable relationship between global economic prosperity and growth, on the one hand, and resource consumption and ecological degradation, on the other?
— from Carbon, A Field Manual for Building Designers (Kuittinen, Organschi, and Ruff)
I recently participated, as the design professional, in a contentious public task force meeting regarding the master planning for a new park. One of the task force members noted that climate change would likely have a more significant impact within the park than any of the proposed actions contemplated by the master plan. There was an immediate response from another member: “Where is your data for that?”
Hannah Ritchie, author of Not the End of the World, has an answer to that question. Ritchie is the deputy editor of the nonprofit Our World in Data. The organization’s mission is to publish “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.” Our World in Data aggregates and allows appropriate use of data in a number of categories, including Energy and Environment, Poverty and Economic Development, and Human Rights and Democracy. The website is a fascinating way to explore a wide variety of information within a user-friendly interface.
As an extension of her work with environmental data, Ritchie has written a unique book about sustainability. The book emerged from an observation that most young people have feelings of anxiety regarding the state of the environment, believe that the future is frightening, and/ or fear that humanity is doomed due to climate change. It
is personal, too: Dr. Ritchie notes that her own feelings regarding environmental issues as a college student verged on depression. She credits Swedish physician Hans Rosling with changing her perspective and allowing her to see environmental issues through a different lens. Rosling studied and interpreted data — big picture and long-term data — on poverty, health and other social issues. Dr. Ritchie has since been on a quest as a scientist and researcher to do the same with environmental data. She makes the argument that the world has never been sustainable, but also that we have new opportunities to make strides toward that goal.
Not the End of the World considers issues of climate change and carbon, but also addresses other aspects of environmental concern, including deforestation, food production, biodiversity loss, and the health of oceans. In all of these realms, exaggerated negative scenarios and attention-seeking headlines have obscured genuine progress toward solutions. News reporting and social media have a strong bias towards the negative and the calamitous at the expense of positive stories, long term trends, and incremental improvement.
Ritchie’s strategy in exploring the various categories of environmental performance is twofold. First, in the spirit of Hans Rosling, she “zooms out” to identify where underap -
preciated progress has been made toward sustainability. And second, she emphasizes the key points where our action today can be most impactful. Most chapters have a section entitled, “Things to Stress Less About.” She argues that if we can stress less about small things — recycling a bottle, using that plastic bag, or eating imported food — there will be more attention available to focus on the bigger decisions that impact energy use and carbon emissions.
Not the End of the World functions as an effective call to action, especially when viewed alongside popular writing on the environment that embodies doomsday thinking. Ritchie thoughtfully walks the line between acknowledging environmental challenges and pointing out responsible future paths to sustainability. She notes that we must hold contrasting ideas in mind at once: Environmental conditions may be bad, but they are in many ways improving. And further, that conditions can in fact be much better! The message is that we should not deny the problems but also not ignore the progress. While catastrophic thinking can and does leave people feeling paralyzed with inaction, Ritchie’s approach allows room for optimism. For those interested in additional reading, this understanding pairs well with Michael Mann’s recent book, The New Climate War, in which he articulates his crusade against climate doomsayers and “inactivists.”
I believe that the design professions and those that practice them are inherently optimistic. We are imagining future realities, constructions, and places where people’s lives will unfold. What is more optimistic than that? According to Ritchie, the world needs more urgent optimism and I interpret that, in part, as a prompt for designers. “I used to think optimists were naïve and pessimists were smart,” she writes. “But science is inherently optimistic, too.” She makes the case not for blind optimism, but for an understanding that challenges are also opportunities.
Neil Bohr reportedly said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” As designers, we attempt to predict the future all the time. We need to make sure that those predictions, our proposed plans and designs, are grounded in data, and that they focus attention on the big things that will have positive environmental impact. The only way to answer the question posed at the top of this
Not the End of the World
By Hannah Ritchie
Published by Little, Brown Spark (2024)
review — can we decouple the relationship between prosperity and environmental degradation? — is to understand the data and embrace an optimism that allows productive work. In the context of the prevailing media and other pressures to the contrary, Ritchie’s new book is an honest, refreshing, and insightful exploration of a better approach to pursuing sustainability. Not the End of the World is a necessary read for anyone who is concerned about the future of the planet but sometimes overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge — and shouldn’t that be everyone?
Todd Woodward, AIA, is a Principal of SMP Architects, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-chair of the Context Editorial Board.
BUILDING AND CARBON
THE STARK NECESSITY OF DECARBONIZING THE GLOBAL BUILDING INDUSTRY
BY ALAN ORGANSCHI
Even as scientists continue to debate the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene — the historic moment of its inception and the very legitimacy of the concept itself — humanity teeters at an existential precipice of its own making. We have blanketed the planet’s surface, suffused its atmosphere, and penetrated its lithosphere with the chemical and physical signatures of our industrial and commercial activity. Across a range of scales, from paperclips to skyscrapers, the artifacts of our technological ingenuity — whether functional or obsolete — are the vestiges of our species’ unprecedented ability to create environmental problems through the processes
of technical problem-solving. It is through this facility that we have endangered our own future, along with that of the other species who also inhabit the planet. As of the second decade of this current century, we’ve passed a critical and daunting threshold: Anthropogenic (human-made) material now outweighs the Earth’s biomass.
Perhaps the most sublime — and certainly the heaviest — artifacts we have created are our cities. The steady aggregation of the buildings that form them and the infrastructural systems that enable their function continue to expand. Consider that Tokyo, the world’s most populous, continuous megalopolis, is also the
1 REFORMING THE ANTHROPOCENE
largest stockpile of industrial material (according to industrial ecologists, the practitioners of a discipline that studies the flows of material and energy through the life cycle of manufactured products.) Extend that material stockpile to encompass all global metropoles such as Mexico City, Shanghai, Lagos, Quito, and Los Angeles, but also the discontinuous mat of suburban sprawl, and the smaller and denser conurbations arrayed around the planet’s currently habitable landscapes, and we begin to truly understand “human footprint” as fact as well as metaphor.
As a final step in this thought exercise, picture the material consumption that will
be required to house and otherwise shelter the activities of the 2.3 billion urban dwellers who demographers estimate will be added to the planet in the next quarter century. Even without the confirmation provided by the precise measurement of that anticipated demand, we can contend with the scale of our challenge, begin to assess our professional responsibility as the specifiers of that vast quantity of building material, and hopefully seize our potential agency — using the very process of dense urbanization as its fulcrum — in leveraging our practice to mitigate and even possibly reverse climate change and its correlated environmental impacts.
Which brings us to the topic of carbon, of late and for good reason, the most attention grabbing element in the chemical periodic table. As many of us remember from high school science class, carbon serves as the molecular building block of organic chemistry and therefore life on Earth. Bonded with two oxygen atoms, it forms carbon dioxide (CO2), a critical reagent in the complementary biochemical reactions of plant photosynthesis and, at radically different scales, both metabolic and industrial combustion. Despite its essential role in the once relatively balanced global exchange between atmospheric oxygen and carbon, we now recognize that CO2 has become the most dangerous form of human-generated waste. Compounding its overwhelming and steadily increasing atmospheric proliferation caused by fossil fuel combustion is carbon dioxide’s long half-life (compared to
2 CARBON FLOWS IN BUILDINGS
other perhaps more powerful greenhouse gases such as methane (CH4)). This means that the carbon dioxide we emit today will stay in the atmosphere, doing its work of trapping heat and raising global temperatures, for a long, long time.
Our species’ relationship with carbon began nearly 400 million years ago, when, as precursors of contemporary forests, tree-like vascular plants arose from the lichens and mosses of the middle Devonian period. In those proto-forests, terrestrial life began to take shape. So did the revolutionary capacity of plants to photosynthesize an excess of atmospheric CO2 into life-sustaining oxygen and a dense carbohydrate that served as both structure for the plants themselves and fuel source for evolving insect and animal metabolisms.
The subsequent Carboniferous period saw the rapid growth and expansion of early forests, but lacking oxygenated soil and the kinds of aerobic organisms that cause the decay of dead plant matter in our modern forest biomes, that carbon-rich, plant sediment slowly compacted. Through hundreds of millions of repeated cycles of forest plant life and mortality, under enormous geologic pressures and temperatures, those organic layers were transformed into the lithospheric deposits of fossil hydrocarbon — coal, oil, and gas — that humankind would burn to fuel an industrial revolution. In the somewhat narrower historic context of global construction, those temporarily abundant and cheap energy-dense fuels
would in turn facilitate new means and methods of raw material extraction, manufacturing, and transport. This allowed for the smelting, sintering, and synthesis of whole new classes of energy- and emissions-intensive building materials such as cement and concrete, steel, glass, and plastics.
The “carbon cycle,” the myriad bio- and geo-chemical pathways along which carbon moves through air, water, soil, rock, and the organisms that comprise life on our planet, was first described by Joseph Priestly and Antoine Lavoisier at the end of the 18th century.
A little more than a century later, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested a link between fossil fuel combustion and atmospheric warming, a finding confirmed in an official scientific report to the American President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, early recognition that the homeostatic balance of the carbon cycle was being dangerously distorted.
Despite efforts to suppress that vital information by the coal, oil, and gas industries and its automotive and petrochemical subsidiaries, environmentally conscientious architects and builders have sought over recent decades to counteract the climate impacts of their design and construction activities, attacking what they understood to be the main source of global warming that fell under their remit: the operational inefficiency of buildings.
Mountains of fiberglass and mineral wool batting, oceans of plastic foam, acres of chemically synthesized, airtight but vapor-permeable membranes, vast expanses
of tempered and laminated glass layered and insulated by inert gas fills, high-performance air-tempering and handling systems that evolved into costly edifices in and of themselves, new technologies of renewable energy generation and storage that would require difficult-to-attain rare earth metals and advanced, high-energy manufacturing techniques — all these were to become the material and technological bulwark against excess fossil fuel consumption.
Air tightness, thermal insulation, and increasingly complex but refined mechanical means to temper interior environments and improve air quality in the operation of our buildings have been necessary measures in our sector’s battle against climate change. In the aggregate, however, it seems that reductions in operational carbon alone haven’t really moved the needle on building sustainability. So, we have arrived at what may be the key to reducing our impact: “embodied carbon.” This is all the greenhouse gas emitted during all the manufacturing and building activities that bracket a building’s operational service life and it is now a critical subject for building designers. According to recent assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global building sector accounts for upwards of
40 percent of annual anthropogenic emissions when measured across the full extent of the building life cycle: the extraction of raw material; its transport, processing, and manufacture into building products and components; its assembly into buildings themselves, their operation, maintenance, repair, and, ultimately, their demolition and disposal. Due to an impending global building boom, by 2050 nearly half of building sector emissions will be embodied, generated by new building, the destruction of existing structures that we no longer value, and renovation of those we choose not to tear down.
For our purposes then, as actors within a system we might loosely describe as the global building sector and, perhaps more grandly, as the form-givers of human settlement, it is critical that we recognize and acknowledge that carbon insinuates itself into every decision we make. Building designers, which is to say architects, but also structural and mechanical engineers, builders and contractors, real-estate developers, land-use and urban policymakers, must each carefully consider their role in directing the flow of carbon through the building life cycle and all along the chains of supply that feed our demand for the houses, offices, server farms, roads, bridges, telephone poles, etc., that comprise the constructed environments we envision.
3 BUILDING THE CARBON POSITIVE CITY
In light of this insidious implication of carbon emissions into all aspects of the building lifecycle, we must ask how best to approach the systemic decarbonization of our work and our discipline. This includes not only the building design and product specification process, but the way we choose to educate the next generation of professionals, the depth, rigor, and transparency of our impact assessments, and our advocacy for responsible material sourcing and tracing, accessible and reliable product data, fair but effective regulation, and accountability by our product manufacturers and suppliers. The list of design decisions that arise within our daily practice is seemingly infinite and their potential to mitigate impact is often hard to quantify. But each one, carefully weighed, will help us transcend business-as-usual sustainability.
The tools of decarbonization lie ready at hand and we must commit to continually and critically evaluating their effectiveness. Building life cycle assessment, impact datasets, and third-party environmental declarations are essential to the complex measurement of carbon flows in building, but we should recognize their limits and understand the science that underpins them. Circular economic techniques that substitute different forms of consumer, industrial, or agricultural waste for virgin raw
4 BIOGENIC CARBON TRANSFER
material will allow us to answer construction material demand in a resource-scarce future, but they should never encourage unsustainable practices by their source industries. We’ll need to understand the material stocks and flows, and their political economies to avoid that. Designing new buildings for future disassembly will extend the service life of their materials, components, and systems but the approach can’t serve as justification for the reflexive and indiscriminate demolition of existing building stocks and the sacrifice of their embodied carbon. Engineered, bio-based products such as mass timber, applied in dense urban configurations, offer the exciting possibility that buildings and cities could serve as massive carbon storage banks of biogenic carbon, but tracing that flow of wood fiber from regeneratively managed forests with strong safeguards is essential to ensure that the mass timber revolution doesn’t devolve into yet another extractive industrial practice. There is no singular solution without attendant cost, no magic bullet technology or methodology that should consume our focus, time, energy, or money at the expense of system thinking and systemic action. We know from practice that every building program, site, culture, regulatory climate zone, and po-
litical, social, and economic context is different, with various environmentally beneficial opportunities as well as burdensome constraints. Every ecosystem or resource pool from which we choose to draw material, whether it be a working forest or an industrial waste flow, has different limits, vulnerabilities, and knock-on effects. Each innovation in building will provide both replicable lessons and limited one-off solutions. We must be willing to assess and broadcast both our failures and our successes with transparency and vigor. The barriers to new practices and methods are painfully familiar and can seem insurmountable — the high initial cost of novel techniques and technologies, the rigid path dependencies of regulators, developers, builders, and our colleagues in the design professions, are impediments to invention and disincentives to environmental responsibility. Even our own concerns about the risk of unintended consequences can make it difficult to distinguish between what is circumstantially difficult and what is intrinsically (and measurably) beneficial.
Seeking to solve the global carbon crisis will demand of our profession and our sector the kind of inventive problem-solving that has been the legacy of our architectural and building history. It will demand that we seek
out and orchestrate trans-disciplinary collaborators from a range of relevant fields that have as yet played only marginal roles in our conventional design and building processes. Material scientists and foresters, complex system physicists and wildlife biologists, industrial ecologists and farmers may offer us critical, climate-restorative, and ecosystem-regenerative criteria for our decisions and choices. We are, after all, a profession of skilled orchestrators, adept at managing convoluted processes, taking advantage of a range of resources, and engaging often obscure knowledge networks to implement even the simplest of plans. We should embrace the complexity of the challenges we face as inspiration for a whole new kind of regenerative architecture and climate-positive building.
DIAGRAM ATTRIBUTIONS
1., 2. Reforming the Anthropocene from CARBON: A Field Manual for Building Designers (Kuittinen, Organschi, Ruff; Wiley) https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Carbon%3A+A+Field+Manual+for+Building+Designers-p-9781119720768 3., 4. Wood Urbanism (Ibañez, Hutton, Moe, eds; Actar)
Alan Organschi is principal and partner at the design, construction, and research firm GOA. He also serves on the faculty at the Yale School of Architecture and as Director of Global Labs at Bauhaus Earth in Berlin, Germany.
ABSORPTION IN THE LANDSCAPE
BUILDING BIODIVERSITY AND CONNECTIVITY IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
BY TIM KERNER, AIA
Atmospheric carbon has swelled and ebbed over geological time. Photosynthesis, respiration, decomposition and emissions all play a role in the earth’s fluctuating carbon cycle. Over the past two hundred years, humans have made great efforts to destabilize this system. We extracted carbon from the ground that took millions of years to accumulate and combusted it into the atmosphere, we stripped away forests and wetlands that are essential carbon absorbers, and we created settlement patterns and lifestyles that depend on vast expenditures of fossil fuels.
Now we need to think differently. In addition to reducing the carbon emissions associated with building construction and operation, architects need to look beyond their structures and consider the carbon absorption possibilities of the surroundings. Our landscapes offer an array of opportunities to make the places we live, work, and learn essential allies in the fight to reduce atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Ecosystem biodiversity and connectivity are at the root of this strategy.
Civilization emits more carbon dioxide each year than can be absorbed by all the plants and oceans of the world. Levels of atmospheric carbon are now 40 percent higher than at the start of the industrial
revolution.1 And despite international agreements, human generated emissions continue to rise. Over the past 40 years, annual global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 67 percent.2 We are now witnessing the ecological impacts of excessive atmospheric carbon and geological records tell us that our planet’s life forms will take a devastating hit.3
Ecologically minded architects are attempting to reduce the carbon emitted by the building industry. Construction processes, product manufacturing and transportation, building operations, and demolition account for nearly 40 percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activity.4 As building material specifiers, architects have an obligation to mitigate the environmental impacts of construction activities. This necessity will only increase as the structures we build over the next 40 years will double the world’s current building stock.5
On the other side of the carbon equation is absorption and sequestration. One of the benefits of trees is that they pull carbon out of the air as they grow and, when used in construction, their wood keeps that carbon captured within (at least until the building is demolished). Other carbon absorption possibilities lie within our planted landscapes. The design of veg-
CARBON EXCHANGE View from the roof of CSL with carbon absorbers in the foreground and carbon emitters in the background (left)
etation, landforms, and water features are opportunities for nature-based carbon absorption. How might designers facilitate this process?
Landscape architect José Almiñana, principal of Andropogon, has been thinking about the relationship between carbon and the landscape for some time. His first answer to this question is Biodiversity. “We must avoid monoculture planting and design the most complex and diverse systems,” he explains. “The more complex the community, the greater the capacity to absorb carbon.” Hundreds of scientific studies confirm this idea: More diverse plant assemblages support higher biomass production and increased carbon sequestration.6
As an example of a constructed, biodiverse landscape, Almiñana points to the Center for Sustainable Landscapes (CSL) on the campus of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh [site plan, below]. Andropogon worked with the conservatory to transform a steeply sloped brownfield that had suffered decades of environmental devastation into a sustainable landscape that captures and reuses all water on site.
Phipps conducted multiple cross-discipline charrettes which included Andropogon, Design Alliance Architects, engineers, energy consultants, academics, and Phipps staff members. This collaboration facilitated the integration of landscape, building and infrastructural systems, including a large solar array, fourteen geothermal wells, underground reservoirs, and a wastewater treatment process consisting of settling tanks, constructed wetlands, sand, UV filters, and pumps that bring the water back up the hill for use in the restrooms.
The planting plan includes over 150 varieties of trees and shrubs native to the Western Allegheny Plateau, all sourced from within 250 miles of the project. Designed communities of plants grow along the sloped site from the wildflower meadow on the roof to the lagoon below. As visitors descend through the changing topography, they experience the diverse plant systems of woodlands, lowland slopes, and wetlands.
According to Richard Piacentin, president of Phipps Conservatory, “CSL serves to increase awareness of the interconnection between people, nature, and the built environment, and to promote sustainable systems thinking… Visitors can learn about the beauty and benefits of native plant communities, green infrastructure and its role in improving local water quality, while also seeing the wildlife, both terrestrial and aquatic.7"
The varied landscape serves as a habitat for a vast range of butterflies and moths, and the lagoon is home to an aquatic ecosystem consisting of cattails, rushes, crayfish, perch, largemouth bass, and turtles. To diminish construction-related carbon emissions, landscaping materials were chosen for their reduced embodied carbon, including pavers cut from recycled concrete, locally sourced oak decking, and repurposed cobblestones.
A decade after opening, the project has ma-
tured into a landscape that feels natural but is, in fact, a series of integrated ecological and constructed systems. CSL is a working environment that includes biodiverse habitats, a net-zero building, and serves as an active carbon sink. The success of the professional collaboration can be measured by the seamlessness of each discipline’s efforts.
Connectivity is another concept relevant to the design of naturebased carbon absorption, according to Tavis Dockwiller, founder of Viridian Landscape Studio. Dockwiller objects to treating landscapes like “potted plants.” Vegetation needs to interconnect across a site and reach beyond its boundaries to compound the many benefits of plants, including carbon absorption. “Designers should focus on the big picture, rather than individual parts, and avoid fractured landscapes,” she says. “Our intent is to design working ecosystems which include the ground plane, shrub plane and tree canopy.”
Viridian’s work at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Hackensack, N.J., is a case study in the benefits of designing with connectivity. The campus was built on drained wetlands and lies on two sides of the Hackensack River, which was degraded by decades of industrialization. University buildings were constructed without an apparent relationship to each other or their surroundings. The campus lacked a perceivable identity and any form of engagement with the environment. There was no sense of collective culture as few students were compelled to linger at the school.
SITE PLAN Phipps Conservatory and the Center for Sustainable Landscapes in Pittsburgh (below)
The University hired Viridian to help transform its metro campus into a sustainable and ecological landscape [site plan below].
Viridian’s master plan brought stewardship of the river into the university’s academic mission. Their design work began with a pollinator-attracting green roof and continued with a planting plan for the full campus. Native plants were utilized to increase natural beauty, create identity, affirm boundaries, and reduce maintenance. Soils, vegetation, and stormwater management were all designed in a coordinated manner. Over time, the multiple landscape projects successfully tied the campus together and contributed to the creation of what the school now considers an “eco-campus.”
The largest and most impactful project at FDU is the Spirit Footbridge, which connects the two sides of campus across the river. The bridge utilizes tiered, hanging planters along its shifting sides to green
TIERED ECOSYSTEMS A descending landscape of biodiversity at Phipps Conservatory (left)
its pathway. Native plants were selected for their suitability to the waterfront microclimate and their ability to contribute to the restoration of the riverine ecosystem by attracting insects and birds. They include creek sedge and other ground covers, colorful shrubs such as bush honeysuckle, and small trees.
The bridge supports increased pedestrian activity and expands the riverfront ecosystem. Across the campus, native plants fill the spaces between the formerly disconnected buildings to establish a vibrant sense of place. People now engage with the campus and the river in new ways.
“Viridian’s landscape is celebrated by students, faculty, and staff,” says Heidi Fichtenbaum, senior project manager for the university. “It knits the campus together in ways that encourage academic research and community engagement.” The vegetated connectivity promoted by the campus plan contributes to schoolwide social interaction and increased carbon absorption.
A third landscape concept described by both Almiñana and Dockwiller is the importance of planning for change over time. Ecoregional plant communities evolve and mature, and expectations at project delivery need to account for growth. It takes at least three years of dedicated maintenance for new landscapes to reach establishment and budgeting is necessary to support this effort.
SITE PLAN Fairleigh Dickinson University in Hackensack (below)
PHOTO: PAUL G. WIEGMAN; DIAGRAM:
NATURAL BRIDGE A new span at Fairleigh Dickinson University encourages pedestrian activity and connects the community to the river (right)
GREEN CONNECTORS Innovative landscape design creates an interconnected ecocampus (below, right)
Additionally, designers need to plan for disassembly to allow future maintenance and modifications without generating the heavy emissions required by demolition and reconstruction.
Rob Kuper, professor of landscape architecture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, agrees with the principles demonstrated by these case studies but offers a less sanguine view on the carbon absorption potentials of new landscapes: “We can’t plant our way out of the environmental crisis. Plants simply cannot sequester carbon at a sufficient rate to counter our emissions,” he explains.
Instead, Kuper focuses his attention on the emissions side of landscape construction. Diesel powered earthwork is a huge generator of CO2. If a new landscape project takes a hundred years to absorb the emissions required to build it, then the project is contributing to the problem, not solving it. He also studies the embodied carbon in landscape materials: “We should use less concrete, which has an enormous carbon footprint, and use more natural materials such as wood, stone and earth.”
Air travel is a serious concern for Kuper. If a landscape architect takes a round-trip flight between Philadelphia and Los Angeles to visit a project site, they are responsible for the emission of nearly 3,000 pounds of carbon.8 In comparison, a sugar maple can sequester about 53 pounds of carbon per year. It would require the absorption efforts of 56 newly planted, 3-inch caliper maple trees to offset one trip to the west coast (disregarding the emissions required to bring the trees from the nursery). How can a design process be considered sustainable if carbon offsets are required before construction even begins?
“The most important thing we can do to help with absorption rates,” says Kuper, “is to stop deforestation and allow secondary forests to expand.” Generally, we need to build less and reuse more, which in landscape architecture, translates into ecosystem restoration. In architecture, it underscores the importance of historic preservation and adaptive reuse.
The logic of the carbon cycle tells us that in most cases, it is better to restore landscapes and buildings than to demolish them. When an existing building is re-used, a replacement building is not built, and the associated carbon emissions are not released. Additionally, the carbon sequestered in existing building materials remains in place rather than being emitted into the atmosphere through combustion or decomposition.
Too often, new buildings are designed without sufficient regard for their surroundings, and landscape design is left as a disconnected afterthought. The projects at Phipps and FDU demonstrate a different paradigm — one that prioritizes integration of structures and landscape. Design concepts such as habitat connectivity and biodiversity expansion are embodied within these verdant
landscapes, contributing to natural beauty, serving social needs, and absorbing atmospheric carbon.
We have arrived at the current climate crisis by disregarding the consequences of our actions. Our patterns of settlement, manners of occupation, and methods of design and construction all require reevaluation and transformation to avert the worst consequences of climate change. As the built environment inevitably expands, building professionals must amplify the societal and climatic benefits of their efforts with multidisciplinary collaboration that addresses both the emissions and absorption sides of the carbon cycle.
Tim Kerner, AIA is principal of Terra Studio, adjunct professor of architecture at Temple University, and co-chair of the Context Editorial Board.
CITATIONS
1. Holli Riebeek, “The Carbon Cycle,” NASA Earth Observatory, (2011) https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle
2 . Vaclav Smil, “Beyond Magical Thinking: Time to Get Real on Climate Change,” Yale Environment 360, (2022). https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinkingtime-to-get-real-about-climate-change
3. Caroline Lear, et al. “Geological Society of London Scientific Statement: What the Geological Record Tells Us About Our Present and Future Climate.” Journal of the Geological Society, (2021) https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/jgs2020-239#:~:text=The%20geological%20record%20shows%20changes,concentrations%20of%20 atmospheric%20CO2.
4. Mathew Adams, et al. World Green Building Council, “Bringing Embodied Carbon Upfront.” (2019). https://worldgbc.org/advancing-net-zero/embodied-carbon/
5. AIA Blueprint for Better, “Architecture’s Carbon Problem,” https://blueprintforbetter. org/articles/architectures-carbon-problem/
6. Isabell Weiskopf, et al. “Biodiversity Loss Reduces Global Terrestrial Carbon Storage.” Nature Communications 15, (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47872-7
7. Richard V. Piacentini, “Center for Sustainable Landscape Achieves Leed Platinum,” The Field, (2019) https://thefield.asla.org/2019/04/30/center-for-sustainable-landscapes-sitesplatinum-certification/ 8. https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
BIOGENICS AND LESS
WE CAN’T JUST BUILD WITH BETTER MATERIALS, WE NEED TO ACCOMPLISH MORE WITH LESS
BY TIMOTHY LOCK, AIA
With realities of climate change bearing down on humanity, all disciplines and human practices have been forced to face their individual impacts. This is often done through exhaustive assessment of data, number crunching, and then ultimately comparison to conventional ways of doing things, in an effort to prioritize positive climate action. There is nothing wrong or inaccurate in this approach. However, what are we to do when any essential generalization would yield a very basic result across all human activities? We simply need to use less stuff.
In the last decade of building design and construction, great strides have been made in understanding and assessing the direct impacts on climate change. The revolution in carbon dioxide emissions reduction in buildings grew out of a movement several decades old that promoted sustainable and “green” design, coalescing first around energy use reduction and energy modeling. At that time, the shared understanding of global warming’s impact — within the discipline of building design and construction, and within the public at large — was tied directly to fossil fuel combustion for energy use. A focus on miles per gallon in automobiles, which somehow outweighed total miles driven, begat a general understanding of methods to reduce energy use in buildings in a similar, efficiency focused, design approach. This focus made sense as deliberate analysis of global warming's impact yielded data illustrating that approximately 80 percent of emissions (over the lifespan of a building) result from building operations.
This first step into climate-data driven design was, generally, highly successful. In the last decade, there has been a significant reduction in energy use on average in buildings. Architecture 2030, citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, has cited a reduction in operational carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of nearly 30 percent across all buildings in use; meanwhile, the amount of total building stock has increased by just over 22 percent. Add to that a rapidly decarbonizing energy grid, buildings transitioning away from using direct combustion of fossil fuels for onsite energy, and overall increases in efficiency, and the success is compounded. This progress has produced a new focus on that
other 20 percent: what has traditionally been called “embodied energy” or “embodied carbon.”
This shift opened up a new criteria for building assessment, dubbed Life Cycle Assessment, or “LCA.” LCA protocols allow for the designer (or their consultant) to attempt to account for all of the potential global warming impact of a chosen design. Typically completed in concert with a Building Information Model (BIM), an LCA tabulation allows the designer to see the impact of specific materials and assemblies, potentially tweaking the design by modifying selections to lower the global warming potential. This is very similar to the ways in which energy modeling software allowed a designer to be responsive to energy use.
Perhaps the most hotly debated category of materials that perform well in whole building Life Cycle Assessments are “biogenic” materials. Biogenic materials are plant based, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while alive, and store it as solid carbon in their material structure. The traditional breakdown of an LCA groups impacts from various life stages of materials, or “modules,” from extraction of raw resources all the way through demolition of the building and potential reuse of the material in another life cycle. Given the sheer quantity of solid carbon stored in biogenic materials and the relative ease of extracting the resources, biogenic materials can yield a negative global warming potential within the resource extraction and product manufacturing module of an LCA, effectively offsetting emissions at a greater than one-to-one rate. To much fanfare, biogenic materials such as cross-laminated timber, wood fiber insulation, hempcrete and hemp insulation, and straw insulation have become extremely popular. Unfortunately, an overly myopic approach ignores the underlying objective to simply use less of everything.
After reading this far, you might assume that I am not an advocate for carbon storing and biogenic products within the built environment. This could not be further from the truth. At my practice, OPAL, where I am management partner and director of building ecology, we have been early adopters of many biogenic materials. In concert with Executive Partner Matthew O’Malia, and Design
PHOTO
MATERIAL CONCERNS Biogenic buildings in Maine (below) and wood fiber insulation (lower right)
Partner Riley Pratt, we designed one of the first all-cross-laminated timber buildings in the country, our “Little House on the Ferry” project in Maine, all the way back in 2014 [above]. Further, O’Malia co-founded a sibling company, TimberHP, which produces wood fiber insulation (currently the only domestic producer) from lumber industry residuals. Since that initial “all-wood” project, we have gone on to design and build many fully-biogenic assemblies. So why am I skeptical of the role of biogenic materials in overall carbon emissions reduction in buildings?
The primary reason is quite simple: It’s math. Our practice has had to crunch a lot of numbers internally to feel comfortable with proposing new products and assemblies, particularly wood-based products in buildings conventionally constructed with concrete and steel. We were early adopters of advanced energy efficient design strategies, longterm
proponents of Passive House design, and very comfortable allowing data modeling to dictate a design approach for a desired ecological outcome. We have consistently executed projects with over 80 percent reduction in energy use, and have become confident in the numbers. This data-driven approach informs the design process directly and starts in the initial conceptual phase. It helps question pre-conceived design intentions. While it can seem like a process of designing to a number, the goal, ultimately, is to allow the design and data to inform each other in an iterative process. To build our confidence when broadening the scope to whole building Life Cycle Assessment, we were exhaustive and curious.
We quickly realized that while many biogenic material providers would claim negative emissions, they were only measuring the production of the material and storage of solid carbon in the material [see diagram on page 25]. This is simply not comprehensive, even within the material itself, let alone the entire building. The approach fails to account for the rest of the life of the material itself: transportation to the site, maintenance over time, and poten-
tial replacement over the life of the building. It fails to account for portions of the source material left to decompose in place. There is also the important fact that, upon demolition, the majority of the stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide as the material decomposes.
But some will say, rightly, that biogenic materials require far less energy to produce and are thus still a lower carbon alternative. This is currently true, but the returns are diminishing. Think of all the emissions from a building as slices of a pie. If we know that over the entire life of a building, operational emissions account for around 80 percent, then embodied emissions are already only 20 percent of the total. The reduction applied specifically to the selection of biogenic materials is a smaller subset of that 20 percent, since there are many components of a building which have no way of using bio-based materials at this time (most significantly, concrete foundations).
In a recently completed project, the College of the Atlantic Collins House, a student dormitory, we can see an excellent test case for these assumptions. Having completed a previous project with the College, one with an aggressively low energy use goal, we conceived of a more in-depth approach to building ecology. The building is nearly all wood. The superstructure is a mass timber frame of glue laminated beams and columns, and CLT floor decks and (stair and elevator) shafts. The wall framing is wood lumber and all of the insulation, with the exception of the roof and foundation insulation, is derived from wood fiber (much of it locally produced by TimberHP). The building was designed to Passive House-levels of energy use efficiency, utilizing high performance triple-glazing throughout, robust insulation thicknesses, continuous air-sealing, and the highest efficiency ventilation and heating systems. The design was an attempt to be the lowest emitting building possible. So how did it fare?
Not surprisingly, getting to a very low overall whole life emissions was a cumulative process. Having this test case project allowed us to run comparisons with conventional versions of the same design, which was critical to the development of these ideas in our office. We conducted Whole Life Cycle Assessment at a 60year life span on both the constructed design and a conventional “average” version of the same design. The “average” version assumed non-biogenic assemblies and merely code-compliant levels of energy use. We then categorized the reductions from the con-
LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT
A new dormitory building at the College of the Atlantic designed to Passive House energy standards is put to the test (left)
PHOTOS:
ventional version to assess what percentage of the overall reduction pie each was responsible for. Given the cumulative nature of compounding energy use over time, energy use reduction, that old initial approach to “building performance,” combined with onsite energy production from solar panels, accounted for over 82 percent of the overall reduction. Next in line, surprisingly, was not the reduction attributable to biogenic materials, but rather a unique design to limit refrigerant volume, and thus emissions from refrigerant leakage, at 7 percent.
The reduction for use of biogenic materials was third at a mere 2.5 percent [see diagram above]. This may seem extremely low given the amount of wood used in the project, but it makes sense when one considers the overall whole that is being assessed. That said, the use of biogenic materials here is critical.
I have had the pleasure of leading a small national working group on establishing targets for overall building emissions with the Biden-Harris Administration Climate Policy Office. Our goal is to encourage the building industry to do its part in staying below overall global warming thresholds. It is clear to us that, similar to our example project, ALL possible levers must be pulled in order to reduce emissions while the overall energy industry transitions away from fossil fuels. In that very same project, the use of mass timber and wood fiber insulation reduced the traditional category of “embodied emissions” by over 20 percent. This is quite significant, because we are currently limited in the number of tools we can use as designers to reduce overall emissions. While a 2.5 percent reduction of the total whole life emissions may seem irrelevant, it was still the absolute best that could be done for that category of emissions. Until we have a plethora of low
CATEGORICAL
RELIEF Ranking the contributing factors of carbon reduction
or zero emissions material options to choose from, particularly for massive elements like building superstructure, leaning into biogenics is our best bet, but meeting overall standards, literally takes everything we can do, including using far less.
I believe that too intense a focus on biogenic materials ignores the lesson of why promotion of lower energy use in buildings was so successful. Using less energy had a direct social comparison — fuel efficiency in cars — that the public intuitively grasped. Further, we understood that using less energy, a.k.a. being more efficient, equated to lower costs (and still does). The same cannot be said for the mental model around biogenic materials, or even whole life emissions reductions more broadly. Always go back to the initial premise: We need to simply use less stuff. Less of everything. We need to “drive fewer miles,” not only reduce the impact of miles driven. So if the ultimate goal is as low an impact building as possible that still serves our communities, let’s design to that goal. Suddenly, under this mental model, “efficiency” is once again at the forefront, a word everyone can appreciate. Be it coal-produced electricity or the greenest natural carbon storing products, these are all resources we draw from our ecosystem. We can and should always strive to use less of them.
Timothy Lock, AIA is the Management Partner of OPAL, an architectural practice in Belfast, ME. He serves on the AIA National Strategic Council, the AIA Maine Board of Directors, and is co-chair of Maine AIA COTE.
EXPRESSION
The Carboniferous Period, approximately 360-300 million years ago, was a time of carbon sequestration, when vast swampy forests covered much of the land with thick deposits of organic matter that became coal. The phase was followed by a global calamity called “The Great Dying.” By contrast, the New Carboniferous Age, our time, is marked by carbon release through the profligate burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and the onset of a new period of global environmental peril.
The work of artist Andrea Krupp is featured in The New Carboniferous Age: Creative perspectives on coal, culture, and calamity, on exhibit at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, until December 9th. This show imagines a new geological era, characterized by three carbon-rich materials: Pennsylvania anthracite coal, Calamites fossils, and plastic objects made from petro-carbon. Handcarved anthracite sculptures leverage material and aesthetic ambiguity. Graphic works on paper, stamped and stenciled with black carbon derived from anthracite coal, explore themes of deep-time, energy culture, consumer culture, and human/ nature entanglement. The art and objects on display bridge the geological past, present-day realities, and a future, post-fossil fuel world.
Transforming pieces of anthracite coal into art objects opens new perspectives on a significant material that is not often visible in culture. The New Carboniferous Age aims to provide a deeper imaginative con-
text for how we understand our time, and how we relate to energy and nature, to shape a new narrative of a sustainable, just, and calamity-free future.
Krupp is a visual artist whose practice traces ongoing experiential, emotional, and intellectual engagement with earth and nature, both as a framework for how we experience reality and as the material source of human knowledge. Her works employ simple materials, graphic language, and layered semiotics to spark curiosity and wonder; transmit ideas about perception and reality; and contribute to forming a new cultural imaginary of the future.
Krupp’s position as a rare book conservator and her expertise in material culture bring historical grounding to her creative practice.
In 2017, she was awarded the Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. In 2018 she was a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellow in Ireland and an Arctic Circle Residency participant. Her works have been exhibited around the world and have been acquired by the Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art, Woodmere Art Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and private collections.
PHOTOS: JOHN CARLANO
Section through the Girardville coal deposits from the Sixth Annual Report of the Directors of City Trusts, 1875.
SOLEBURY SCHOOL HOPE HALL GIRLS' DORMITORY
Located on 140 acres in scenic Bucks County, Solebury School needed to expand its capacity for boarding students. The school’s vision was to create a dormitory — their first new residence building in decades — that authentically mirrored the essence of their high school students. The design team’s challenge was to reflect the school’s culture of mutual respect, freedom of expression, and the outdoors. The resulting three-story, 20-unit dormitory follows Passive House principles and is the first dormitory in the United States to receive full Phius certification. The exterior is inspired by a simple barn typology to align with passive design conventions and
fit in with the campus aesthetic. The interior recalls the experience of being in a treehouse through large window seats, a choice inspired by an extensive community engagement process wherein students identified a “treehouse” as a place they’d most like to hang out on campus. The windows act as a warm invitation to students returning home during cold winter months and further connect the space to the landscape. The final design prioritizes spaces for living and socializing, including communal areas for cooking dinner, playing music, and watching movies, while also providing smaller breakaway spots for studying and quiet conversation.
DESIGN PROFILE GREEN BUILDING
PROJECT: Solebury School, Hope Hall Girls’ Dormitory
LOCATION: New Hope, PA
CLIENT: Solebury School
PROJECT SIZE: 14,898 square feet
PROJECT TEAM:
Metcalfe (Architecture Planning)
Gilmore & Associates, Inc. (Civil Engineer)
Hunt Engineering Company (Structural Engineer)
Castle & Associates, LLC (Owners Representative)
Barton Associates, Inc. (Mechanical Systems Designer)
Re:Vision Architecture (Certified Passive House Consultant and Project Verifier)
Quarry View Building Group (General Contractor)
DESIGN PROFILE GREEN BUILDING
HISTORIC PINE STREET PASSIVE HOUSE RETROFIT
BluPath Design
Located in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse-Fitler Historic District, 1722 Pine Street was originally built around 1845. In the 1920s, it was converted into a multi-family building with a ground-floor professional office, a three-story rear addition and new internal stairs. A century later, the building underwent another transformation. Under the guidance of the owner/architect team, Passive-House renovations gut-rehabbed the first floor while basement excavation and underpinning created a bi-level owner’s apartment and BluPath’s professional office. Upper apartments were reconfigured with new kitchens and bathrooms. A shared garden roof deck is capped with a solar PV-ready canopy. Extensive research drove the envelope design, including masonry moisture testing, and hygrothermal and Passive House energy modeling. The walls and roof are super-insulated using cellulose and mineral wool with “smart” air barrier membranes. Gas service was removed, and an all-electric building with LED lighting and Energy Star appliances was established. The technology-savvy and aesthetically sensitive design pays homage to its historical context, preserving the original façade design. Interior elements blend craftsmanship with artistic flare. Traditional millwork recalls the building’s history, while accent colors catch sunlight on the ground floor, animating the modern interior finishes and furnishings to bring the owners’ art collection and personalities to life.
PROJECT: Historic Pine St. Passive House Retrofit
LOCATION: Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia
CLIENT: Private Homeowner
PROJECT SIZE: 6,500 square feet
PROJECT TEAM:
BluPath Design (Architect, Passive House Consulting)
Kent Lessly Consulting (Passive House Consulting)
Rivera Structural (Structural Engineer)
Building Science Corporation (Consulting)
Dragon Construction/Hivemind Construction (General Contractors)
Arch Street Lighting (Lighting Supplier)
DESIGN PROFILE GREEN BUILDING
NORTHERN LIBERTIES PASSIVE ROWHOUSE
Lauren Thomsen Design
Uniquely positioned on a tiny 36-feet deep by 19-feet-wide lot on the north side of Orkney Park in Northern Liberties, this innovative new construction, single-family residence is where ambitious, craft-driven design intersects with high performance. Given the site’s urban context, the team set out to construct a residence that added to the existing fabric of the neighborhood. A portion of the interior is set back from the property line, allowing for glazing on the southern exposure, a visual connection to the park, and a terrace off of the main living space. This also creates an opportunity for a change in materiality — resilient corrugated metal is paired with rich, Pennsylvania-sourced thermally modified tongue and groove oak siding. Three bedrooms and three bathrooms fit gracefully into 1,675 square feet of living space. The project received PHIUS+ 2018 Passive House certification and includes onsite battery storage. The home also features an electric car charger, smart energy panel and home energy automation systems. The design and craftsmanship of the home were not sacrificed for performance efficiencies but rather strengthened by them. The home aspires to be a model for individual commitment to energy resilience in the 21st century.
PROJECT: Northern Liberties Passive Rowhouse
LOCATION: Northern Liberties, Philadelphia
CLIENT: Private Homeowner
PROJECT SIZE: 1,675 square feet
PROJECT TEAM:
Lauren Thomsen Design (Architecture and Interiors)
Poulson & Associates (Geotechnical and Civil Engineering)
Larsen & Landis (Structural Engineer)
Mt. Weather Engineering (Engineering)
Scribe Design Build (General Contractor)
DESIGN PROFILE
GREEN BUILDING
MUHLENBERG
COLLEGE FAHY COMMONS
Re:Vision Architecture
The first new building constructed on the Muhlenberg College campus since 2006, The Fahy Commons is an embodiment of the institution’s deep commitment to sustainability. In addition to achieving LEED Platinum certification and PHIUS +2021, the multi-purpose 20,000-squarefoot building is the first project in the world to achieve Core Living Building Challenge Certification. Carbon is a core value of this certification and The Fahy Commons addresses this through three primary levers. First, the building has limited its embodied carbon by reducing its overall size 20 percent through multi-program overlap of spaces and a logical design optimizing space allocations. The building superstructure, which is typically more than half of a building’s embodied carbon, has
been constructed utilizing low-carbon concrete and steel. Foam has been eliminated from wall and subslab insulation in favor of mineral wool and foam glass aggregate. In addition, the interior of the building limits extraneous materials and favors natural materials such as wood. Secondly, the building has reduced its operational carbon through the creation of an ultra energy-efficient Passive House building enclosure that allows for an HVAC system 1/3 smaller than industry standards that provides 100 percent outside air ventilation. Combined with a 73 kW photovoltaic array, the building has reduced its annual energy use 90 percent over baseline. Finally, the project is actively sequestering living carbon via a half hectare of habitat restoration.
PROJECT: Muhlenberg College Fahy Commons
LOCATION: Allentown, PA
CLIENT: Muhlenberg College
PROJECT SIZE: 21,000 square feet
PROJECT TEAM:
Re:Vision Architect (Architect and Sustainability Consultant)
ThinkGreen (L andscape Architect)
Keystone Consulting Engineers (Civil Engineering)
O'Donnel Naccarato (Structural Engineer)
BSEG (Systems Engineer)
Cloud Gehshan (Signage and Graphics)
Whiting Turner (Construction Manager)
Feather Friendly (Bird-Safe Glazing)
Consulting Retrofit and New Construction Design Supply Install
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