The Harvard
Center for Green Building and Cities
(CBGC) held its inaugural Challenge Conference on Friday, bringing together
leaders from industry and academia to discuss pressing questions for the fields
of sustainability and design, ranging from why holistic mapping tools could
help developers think on a more regional scale, to how to implement promising
new solar technology. The conference helped delineate a wide-reaching research
agenda for the new center, setting forth what professor of architectural
technology Ali Malkawi,
its founding director, called its “very ambitious” mission: to “rethink conventions
of design practice and fundamentally shift the ways humans use energy in the
long term.”
The day began with an
acknowledgment of the enormity of the problems at hand. In his opening remarks,
Williams professor of urban planning and design Jerold Kayden called climate
change “the central issue—the existential issue—of our time.” Those who think
about and create buildings and cities play a large role in these questions, because
constructing, heating, cooling, and lighting the built environment consume huge
portions of the world’s energy output. By bringing together interdisciplinary
teams of engineers, designers, business leaders, and other potential
stakeholders, CGBC can “show people how to make buildings and cities
sustainable while spending less,” Malkawi said. “I believe that what is
possible today is limited not by economics, politics, culture, costs, or
material, but our imagining of what might be possible.”
The University announced the creation of CGBC last December as one of three initiatives supported by Evergrande Group, one of the largest real-estate developers in China.
Members of Evergrande’s management team, including founder and chairman Hui Ka Yan, were present for Friday’s
festivities, helping to officially inaugurate the center after 11 months of preparatory work. University president Drew Faust opened the conference by
reiterating her commitment to tackling climate change through intensive
research (a call she has made repeatedly in campus debates over divestment from companies that produce fossil fuels). “Universities,”
she said, “have a special obligation and accountability to the future, to the
long view needed to anticipate and alter the trajectory of climate change.”
The center has set up more
than a dozen long-term research projects in four areas: developing modeling
techniques to better simulate and evaluate how buildings interact with their
environment; creating high-performance construction materials and methods to
eliminate waste; improving the economic incentives that influence the adoption
of sustainable techniques; and studying what models and regulations could
encourage sustainable planning on a regional and global scale. CGBC researchers
also spent much of the summer conducting tests on the wood-frame house on
Sumner Road that serves as the center’s offices. The center plans to use the building
as a “living lab,” turning it into a net-positive energy producer while
identifying some of the major obstacles to widespread adoption of retrofitting
techniques. The team, Malkawi said in an interview before the event, has already
identified major bottlenecks in the ability of existing models to optimize the
small adjustments that can drastically reduce the energy consumption of an
older structure.
Beyond this research, the
pressing nature of climate change has pushed Malkawi and other leaders at the Graduate
School of Design (GSD) to find ways to more immediately influence what’s
happening in practice. Having looked to the field of public health as a model
for closer ties between academia and the wider world, they brought outside practitioners,
including four architects, in for Friday’s conference to help clarify which challenges
in their own field they believe research at Harvard could help solve.
A major theme throughout the
presentations was the need to debunk the idea that sustainability is separate
from—and an added expense in—architecture and planning. “If [sustainability] is
done properly and you consider it as an integral process, there is no
additional expense for having a highly sustainable building,” explained Gordon Gill, M.Arch ’93, a
founding partner of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. As evidence, he
offered the 50-story office building his firm designed for the Federation of
Korean Industries, which featured a unique exterior skin that integrated
photovoltaic panels and helped reduce heating and cooling loads yet cost a
third of what the client had originally projected. Architects, Gill said, are “now
in a position to broaden our sphere of influence as designers” by integrating
such sustainable solutions into their plans.
Friday’s presentations spoke
to the breadth of the center’s design-driven mission. The two speakers from
outside the design field focused on the technological and social challenges of
sustainability in the developing world. Rockwood professor of energy Daniel Nocera presented his research on the “artificial leaf,” an inexpensive and
lightweight photovoltaic material intended to store the energy of sunlight and
turn individual houses into their own “power and gas stations.” Moving beyond
the scope of the individual solar cell or house, Alejandro Murat—the CEO of
Infonavit, the Mexican federal institute for workers’ housing and the country’s
largest mortgage lender—spoke of the larger-scale planning challenges in the
developing word. As the country faced a shortage in housing in the past
decades, new homes were built with little regard to public resources like
transportation, Murat said. Planners forgot that “houses aren’t islands,” ignoring
the fact that dense and connected cities are key in improving sustainability
and fighting inequality. “We need to have policies,” he said, “that are not
efficient but are effective.”
Such efforts will require
better tools to measure just how “effective” a given policy or technology will
be. Several presenters spoke of the need for more sophisticated and consistent
metrics, a major item on CGBC’s research agenda. In order to highlight the
importance of networks and density in understanding the relationship between urbanism
and sustainability, Joshua Prince-Ramus, M.Arch. ’96, a principal with the
architecture firm REX,
presented color-coded maps of Helsinki that showed how residents of different neighborhoods may be
able to reach very different numbers of fellow citizens depending on transit
access and local density. Like Murat, he offered
something of a mea culpa for the shortsightedness of buildings and planners.
“We as architects and planners and urban designers are myopically focused on
energy conservation: the energy uses of buildings as well as their carbon
footprint,” he said. “To my surprise, that’s only about a third of what we are
responsible for.”
But even as CGBC broadens
the tent of the design disciplines, presenters throughout the day reminded
attendees that the traditional, humanistic concerns of architecture will remain
an important part of creating dense and sustainable cities that people will
actually want to live in. James Carpenter, the founder of James Carpenter Design Associates, spoke of his firm’s
work with light and glass. Daylight, he explained, is a public resource, and
one that will become ever more scarce as cities grow up. “Connection to nature
will be more important as we build more densely,” he said.
The demand for the center’s
titular green buildings and cities exists and is growing, explained Phil Harrison ’86, M.Arch. ’93, CEO of
Perkins+Will, co-chair of the GSD’s capital campaign, and the final speaker of
the day. Finding ways to measure impact, create new technologies, and think of
architecture as deeply enmeshed in dense cities and regions will be key
challenges for the new center. “The reason why we’re here today, and the reason
why Evergrande is supporting the center, is because the demand for green
buildings exceeds our ability to deliver green buildings,” he said. “What we
have before us is extremely big and difficult.”