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>> I am extremely honored to be here to have an association of any sort that particular this really exciting one with Georgia Tech with a legendary name and practice of John Portman I hope will do it justice. And I've already had. More interesting conversations with my future colleagues next semester in the past four hours than I've had in a really long time so things are looking really good and today I have a sprawling topic to discuss and one that sort of transcends scales ranging from the atomic to the global maybe even larger atmospheric you know really big swings but also big swings in time temporal scale swings so I hope you'll bear with me I'll try to run through and show some of our work as maybe illustrations impoverished illustrations of some of the ideas we're talking about because we're still trying to figure this stuff out.

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This is an art piece by a guy named James McNabb who's a cabinet maker sculptor. And Art had might have actually some things to tell us this is a bunch of scraps from his shop wood shop where he makes his sculptures and he took all the scrap and he built the cityscapes which is the series of sculptures which you should really look at James McNabb is a really interesting guy and I think that embodies what I'm trying to get at and I'll get to all of the issues of carbon sequestration all these kinds of things that we talk about a lot but really try to get down get down into the first if you'll indulge me.

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I make sure this is on there we go. There we go it's technological success if you'll indulge me I just want to tell a really quick story about a building so you may know about. This is the Veterans Memorial Coliseum built by Kevin Roshan John Dingell who a very well known firm in our town of New Haven and I'd like to tell the story well I mean some of the topics that I've been very interested in particularly I would say because of this building so this is looking across the harbor of New Haven and a haven as some of you may know is one of the oldest plants cities in the western hemisphere and it has a sort of center of nine squares you can see it rotated there around the public commons.

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And over the time of it's sort of four hundred years of developing new haven has grown in a lot of different ways and one particular juncture was urban renewal as many cities have experienced the sort of stripping out of the building fabric that existed from the one nine hundred centuries city and and replacing it with a new maybe more monumental kind of fabric maybe more abstract I mean this was the Oak Street section of New Haven in the turn of the one nineteenth the twentieth century it was pretty rough and tumble lots of shops lots of.

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I would say a kind of exchange economy people would exchange things like furniture and it was fairly normal. And it was a hell lot of beautiful building stock but the building stock became decayed as white flight from the from the cities happened during the fifty's after the Second World War.

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Ghettos developed associated with. What had been a really vibrant African-American middle class which was now sequestered in crumbling poorly managed buildings. And so when we see decay we try to because we're architects and planners we want to clean it up and so we tore down all the buildings and we decided to develop a whole new.

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Building area around the Oak Street Oak Street connector. And essentially it was it was one of the products of urban renewal it was a link to the federal highway system that all the money is coming that out of that and Richard Lee and Ed Logan Richard Lee was the mayor of during this major change in New Haven structure physical morphology and ad load who is the sort of Robert Moses of New Haven.

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And they have this idea that they bring all of those white people who fled to the suburbs back into New Haven to shop and they're becoming by car and if they could only make about ten thousand parking spaces the pure magnetic pull of those parking spaces would would transform the economy of New Haven which was suffering.

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That was by the way Paul Rudolph's parking garage on Temple Street which if we go to New Haven should check out it's pretty great. So John Diggler said OK we're charged with making twenty four hundred parking spaces in a in a sort of convention center building and if we were to do that and laid across would cover six blocks of New Haven so we have a better idea.

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We're going to put the parking up on top of the building. So four stories of parking lots of covering six acres. Over an arena that would hold twenty thousand people in a bunch of other kinds of programs I can talk about and so what was left was this sort of mega.

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Structure in the middle of New Haven tied into the arterial network of the federal highways Route ninety five with an arena score some exhibition spaces some commercial space on the ground floor and above it for tears again six acres each of parking twenty four hundred cars could be out of that parking garage cleared clear the parking garage in twenty minutes everything was so efficient and so the building was a rather tough statement of exactly what it was parking lots up above shallow water tables so they couldn't dig down too far.

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At shoulder was a Knights of Columbus tower a slip form concrete building of. Quite great repute and this was going to this was going to kind of revitalize a neighborhood that was falling on really hard times. And so were these final visions of a sort of on uncovered storefronts of replace the old historical buildings that have been there with the great American industrial machine ground into actual taconite mining to produce vast or feels to produce the steel it would be shipped from all over the country to places like New Haven Bethlehem Steel where it would be turned into structural steel gypsum mines that would be mined for Portland cement production pre-heater towers ready mix facilities this is how we build in America and we were building of a monument to that incredible capacity and so in one thousand nine hundred two we open the building there are a few things missing they ended up putting the storefronts in the ground floor they forgot to put in or value engineered out I should say the expansion joints in the concrete slabs and then they realize of course without expansion joints those are going to construction tech should know you have cracking and then they told the city that the builders told the city of don't store any salt and don't put any sand we saw in sand up there so the freezing roads don't store that in the parking lots and of course they'd stored piles of salt on the parking lot in the salt came down and corroded the rebar.

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And so this incredible monument. Went from its opening in one thousand nine hundred two hosting huge conferences and concerts and basketball hockey games and a hockey team. I even went to it a. There I won't tell you what the band was in one thousand and seventy nine because I would be really embarrassed.

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But it was really cool riding up and down the huge escalators that would take you down to the atrium level. In thirty years the building had decayed so thoroughly because of a lot of issues it decayed technologically materially because of the destruction of the concrete slabs a ten million dollars bond was floated a construction firm promise to replace all the slabs in the four parking decks they got halfway through and so they were out of money so the city then decided to just rent out half of the parking lot so you could actually drive up to ninety feet above the street and look down through the framing of the building to the street below.

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And they close the arena so there was no activity and then they just decided we can't deal with it we're going to close it and so in two thousand and two they haven Coliseum was an urban ruin hanging above all of our heads and have in effect we moved into our office about this time just a block away from the building and I really didn't like the building like this is that this is what's wrong with you know post urban renewal we're all American planning and then they announced it was going to be torn down and that's about the time that I and these crazy hockey fans decided that we really love the building and we need to save it and we went on this big campaign and I was not involved in climbing up into the upper rafters and hang that Sam sign up but but they did and and my response was to say we can actually use this building we can reprogram it with incredible activities we can use the resources that exist and we're going to you're going to kind of re vitalize the intent of the building as well and that will fund the revitalization of the physical body of the building and then we got people interested along with theater which is a very famous Repertory Theater in New Haven became interested in actually moving their theater into the building and they asked us to a feasibility study and we said OK we can make a black box theater in a big proceeding theater with a fly space and we can provide parking in all of your suburban mostly white viewers will be happy to come in safely because they cannot buy the building and it will read vitalize the neighborhood you know because the neighborhood still hadn't gotten us that's why we were able to move into our office to a four office.

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And so we made these proposals working with students and other architecture firms and we got together we said OK this is our proposal to reprogram this building and we presented it at a big presentation and the mayor showed up and he's like This is great John De Stefano stood up and said This is what makes our city great.

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But we're still turn the building out. And so as a last sort of like bid to this work that we've done we put the architectural model in the front storefront our office. And came in one day and found that someone had written this in lavender nail polish on our windows which is I was too good to be true we can make a story out of this so here I am telling you the story.

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And you know when you get feedback like that from the mayor and from the population the citizenry it kind of didn't realize that the game's over. And so we all gathered along everybody in the haven to the big event you from Atlanta you're familiar with us and we watched the great American capitalist industry industrial machine take down with they'd put up one hundred years.

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And it was shocking you know you've seen this. It's shocking to see a building of that scale to nine acres almost in total coming down. And you realize that that suddenly or I should say I realize suddenly that not only had we we were still paying off bonds for the building you know it's really really kind of a challenge to imagine it to see all this material come down but then we started thinking about what what was lost seventy six metric tons of concrete to landfill.

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Six thousand metric tons of steel shipped probably around the world at great expenditure of carbon dioxide and consumption of energy and I can go through these metrics with you but let's just say it's a lot of stuff and it doesn't even tail all the systems and supply materials that go into that.

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And then of course the city promised to rebuild immediately with ten years later we saw service parking lot which of by the way also has impacts. Three met three thousand metric tons of asphalt which is you know. Has a lot of fossil fuel in it and gravel which has some impact on landscape and we start to think like maybe we're thinking too narrowly about the buildings we design you know the site the city maybe it's not enough really to think about that especially at this particular moment in history and so we want to work.

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And our work is small and we don't get to build buildings that because they have calcium but we did have a little project in a former construction site which was strewn with material and the local wetlands agency said you can't leave that there you're too near a water course and you need to clean it up and so that the landscape contractor who own this particular piece of land asked us to make a list material storage barn had a lot of rich clients he was up in north western Connecticut and so he wanted something nice and he said he didn't want to spend a lot of money on a cape and so like all architects with a desire to kind of tidy things up we we organize it into a system of pallets that could the material in the system a pallet that can hang on the side of the building and it would be the building would be dimension by the machinery that would actually load unload the pallets and the stone and then the building the machine would live in the building and we raid it with a scope with a skylight of P.V..

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Semiconductor and we punch the geothermal heating system ground source heat pump into it and the building really functioned with. Net Zero operational energy and missions which is pretty cool it was made out of it was made out of a lot of stock off the shelf space for and trust parts we put it together in one day we hoisted into place on the on the pallet frames and then we see that in polycarbonate.

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Which was translucent thick panels of insulated polycarbonate two layers around the steel frame with special gaskets to prevent thermal coupling and the building to this day runs and actually pays money it gets money back from the power company because it's net energy positive. And one of these I didn't really realize was that you know a building like this which we thought of as a kind of a chilly shed could have another kind of life and it was exciting to us that we thought that actually tying things up you know is our job and we can get a lot of architecture out of it.

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But the question is really is it truly as we claim for many years a net zero building. I mean it's operationally net zero but what we were thinking about was that side of the equation. Of where all that material came from how much energy was consumed and how much carbon was emitted in the process of extracting the meal material processing it transporting it reprocessing it assembling it putting into place and then at the end of the life maybe it's only for thirty years like New Haven coliseum where does that material go and what kind of energy and emissions is consumed then so is it really a net zero building and the answer obviously is no.

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So this brings me to my topic to the carpet. A colleague of mine at the Yale Center for industrial ecology Tom Grail he's a kind of big daddy of lifecycle assessment he's actually a metallurgist who says that we use too much metal he likes to hold up his cell phone to his first year class and say every element in the periodic table other than the radioactive ones is in the cell phone and I thought that's really interesting because that means buildings have all that stuff in it too and it comes from someplace and this is not a new concept but it dawned on me that that we lose so much stuff into our buildings now especially to make them perform environmentally better thermally better in terms of moisture better in terms of vapor.

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Better making them airtight we load material in detail into this and so I can talk about all those materials more than the materials that are sort of the side of our material storage barn but I'm just going to talk about one kind of material carbon carbon exists all over the world right it exists in all these different kinds of pools or sinks we know it's in the atmosphere we're worried about that it exists in the oceans for and different algal forms and different kinds of.

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Flora exists obviously on land in. Forests and things like that the aquatic biosphere holds a fair amount of fossil fuel reserves that have been embedded deep in the lithosphere of our Earth hold a fair amount Kerrigan's which are actually the sort of chemicals that live in the sedimentary rock which will eventually become fossil hydrocarbons over a few more million years or tens of million years and then of course in the lithosphere itself in all forms of minerals but what makes carbon particularly important and why I use the term King carbon or many chemists do is that carbon forms a vast array of monomers at earth's temperatures and pressures and it is in fact what makes If you remember this from organic chemistry or chemistry that c makes you makes your chemistry organic chemistry it is either the stuff of life or the stuff that may be the means to end it and that's gets me to this particular monomer carbon dioxide.

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Which you all know is to us in atoms in one carbon atom. And I think and I should I'm talking a carbon dioxide. Not because it's the most toxic or deleterious of the greenhouse gases that are affecting our atmosphere right now but it's the most durable it's got the longest half life the more carbon dioxide we pump in there the more forcing So the more kind of things that we put into the pipeline will change our planet.

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And this is pretty easily illustrated by carbon concentrations the atmosphere for the last fifteen hundred years you know it kind of goes along for about fifteen eight hundred years until we hit the industrial revolution of it at a sustainable or call me a static degree and then suddenly it spikes meteoric Leigh and it's well beyond the four hundred parts per million that was considered too much three hundred fifty parts really is considered a balancing point.

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And we track human population against carbon emissions. Interesting. Correlation. One might even say a causality which is that we consume a lot of stuff and we made a lot of things and the more people there are the more we emit So the question is what happens as we approach ten or eleven billion people if we can't decouple carbon emissions from human consumption because I remember from high school biology that we form a very good strong carbohydrate called cellulose C six twelve o six from a process called photosynthesis in which carbon dioxide reacts with solar energy and water to produce oxygen or carbohydrate and then that carbohydrate plant matter can be consumed and combusted either for fuel or human fuel or industrial fuel to produce more carbon dioxide that's the carbon cycle.

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It's also really important to note that in the forests that's producing the bulk of this oxygen that we breathe every day or we consume for fuel about fifty percent of the carbon is store not in the above ground would matter but actually in that soil layer of the forest and that's what we want to protect want to protect forests and if you think about the forest is a carbon sink there are two scales to temporal scales at which this is operating one scale is basically how fast the bamboo shoot grows into a full column of bamboo or how fast a a Douglas fir tree grows until it reaches its maturity and that's about forty ten even ten in the case of bamboo two hundred one hundred fifty years that's a let's call the fast domain of carbon formation planetary carbon emission then we have the really slow domain.

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And this happens with the slow compression of plant matter would be matter below ground would matter into Kerridge ins and then finally into fossil hydrocarbons and that number that's like more like seven thousand to fifty million years so if you think that fossil hydrocarbons as a carbon based storage system are anything we can tap into I think you should think about it.

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It is very interesting that the history of building is associated with deeper and deeper excavation into the lithosphere we stripped away the surfaces of the forest and grassland. And we dug down to reach into these more homogeneous material systems or at least the oars and the minerals that we can produce glass.

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Concrete support and cement steel aluminum ferrous and non-ferrous metals and then into the energy systems that as crude produce bituminous materials like. Asphalt roofing or the energy systems that fuel the economy. Another interesting thing is in addition to the fact that those deeper excavations produce the greatest carbon emissions in the material classes that we're looking at and also happens that the relative carbon storage or emissions.

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Of the major primary structural classes are pretty significant significantly different it's often said that a metric ton of concrete in its production and it's about the same as a metric ton of timber which isn't exactly true but his time was a little better but there are emissions associated with their processing in extraction.

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But this is how far you get to spend with a metric tonne of concrete and that's how far you get to spend on the same load with a metric ton of timber and so when you think about not strength to weight ratio but span two emissions ratio timber start support for me really well.

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And then if you add in the fact that there's a ton and a half of carbon dioxide stored for every ton of timber you realize that we have a potential to have a net positive building material that's produced out of photosynthetic power not photo electric photovoltaic photosynthetic power fossil hydrocarbons and that was really interesting to us because now we can start to calculate using very sophisticated arithmetic.

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And really dumb data diagramming some really interesting possibilities. So what does this mean for us the fact that we can store carbon in a bean What does that mean. Well let's just say that carbon flows through the built environment human settlement through a myriad of pathways I've talked about how it's compressed into the lithosphere and and it we can extract it using different techniques like mining in which we release what's called Fugitive carbon carbon that's going to skate and add to the carbon that's already produced in the biosphere a carbon cycle and then we have energy systems from the upper right that are producing the energy to build and material systems from the lower right which are producing energy materials and energy material sorry materials to build with and each of those arrows represents about the percentage of material that we're using to build with and we produce our building and then we produce a lot of carbon emissions but that carbon gets in bed it is well and then ideally we dismantle the building and we maybe recycle it it's a significant energy costs or it goes into big landfills and there's a small degree to which we operate within a circular economic recycling and reuse system very small part of our building a comic but still something that's pretty promise.

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But ideally it would look more like this more of a closed circuit where we were drawing on reused materials coming out of our own waste stream as builders but also possibly consumer waste which we could reuse in building and so that may be the next project of the of this next generation of designers and citrus fund in Finland which is the expert in this topic of the circular con me thinks there's a ninety trillion dollar economy in in this rethinking in this transition how many people know what I.P.C.C. S R fifteen is.

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It's raise your hand for me. OK how many people know what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report raise your hand if you've read the recent report that came out a month ago. It's really long and dense you don't have to read it you just have to read about it basically what it says we have a carbon budget and we thought to maintain a two degree Celsius temperature rise we would have until about twenty fifty to transition our economy and then a few small island nations in the Pacific and the UN said no can we make it one point five degrees because it two degrees will be completely inundated with sea level rise and so they agreed to make one point five degrees and now they have much more sophisticated data sets of modeling capabilities and they've discovered that actually.

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We're we have a very small amount of carbon left before we have significant climate change and it looks like it's going to be about eighteen years before we have irreversible climate change effects I'm not trying to bum you out although some of the think about and the reason you should think about it is that we as a sector represent about fifty percent of anthropogenic emissions Another is the stuff that you specify.

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Represents half of everything that the planet. Generates we have to think about cars and all these kinds of things no other building sector is big time emitter and we can start to work with that we can gain that we have to understand it. So if at the beginning of the buildings the day the client walks in the door and opens it up we have spent one hundred percent of our energy emissions budget.

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That's of the building the building lifecycle is only a zero years old. Operational life cycle and we hundred percent of our emissions can be attributed to all the stuff that happened before the client open the door. Over its lifetime. You start to emit more carbon through the operation and in fact what you're doing with an efficient building is in a sense saving carbon emissions right but if you're building super efficient you may never pay off the initial carbon spike the initial initial emission of carbon that you made in building the building you build your passive house building and you may never catch up with that first carbon.

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And it's interesting that also happens that a typical twenty fifteen I B C code building energy code building will be paid it will pay off its initial carbon debt through a fission operational missions in Hey seventeen years so you can build a super efficient house right now as a as a means of trying to fight global climate change and you will have only created a huge carbon spike right to be an adult life cycle which is kind of a bummer if you think about it because we're trying so hard to be sustainable Here's another way of looking at it this building right now if we start measuring right now has admitted no carbon from the middle of that word over the course of its lifetime twenty thirty forty fifty years it will emit in its operational lights cooling heating.

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Replacement refer Bush meant it will emit carbon if we build this building right now brand new this is how much carbon we emit and this is how long it takes for us to pay off that to match the carbon efficiency of an existing building this is not to say that we should build buildings but this is what we have to wrestle with and we talk about carbon sequestration we want there's lots of industrial forms of carbon sequestration that really haven't been you know pumping carbon dioxide gas back into mines that hasn't been tested but it's getting funded pretty heavily.

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But that's just this looks like the same stuff that made that in the first place and in fact is and so we're not really catching up so do we do well. This is so you are timber. And for every ton of it you absorb a ton half of carbon dioxide and you store it as long as you protect that wood so to where we protect it forests fifty percent of the forests of the northern hemisphere was covered in forest before fifteen hundred and then now we've lost twenty percent of that force right now existing forests in the US sequester eleven percent of the emissions that we produce every year.

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But they have the capacity if treated properly which includes To some degree protection restoration but also harvesting we could sequester thirty percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions so we're getting there that helps. And for those of you guys out there who like me I'm worried about. Deforestation which is really a very complex thing Force losses caused by a lot of things agricultural conversion so that we can have lots of hamburgers at McDonalds.

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We deforest so that we can get to that really good rock underneath the forests. So Berman is ation the act of building with a stick frame construction techniques is that we actually De Forest. And then of course finally climate change is causing forest fires and and lots of nasty parasites and viruses which are hurting forests and making them unhealthy.

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But when you see want to see this clear cut in she commits community forest and British Columbia this is not deforestation this is harvest and we're already seeing the signs of all that D.N.A. that's in the forest soil start to go to work to produce carbon absorbing plants which will eventually through a series of successions become large trees over one hundred years and so this is truly a renewable resource if sustainably managed this is deforestation the soils will never be recovered the valuable biological material in the soils will never produce They're not they're not there and they would never be take a long time for them to produce anything and we're running out of these resources that we keep digging our ground we're running out of sand can you believe it I mean all those beaches and deserts and yet we're running out of sand which is the constituent part of concrete not to mention potable water and then we dump a lot of the stuff on top of the surface of the earth some of us call it waste some of it's called cities which actually take away the biomass potential of the earth's surface so here we are we're like The Handmaid's of climate change I'm getting like nervous that I'm even calling myself an architect and we have to contend with this problem which is in the next fifty years.

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If we build that with the morphology that we build with right now we're going to cover three times the land area that cities and suburbs suburbs do right now so the question is Is this a geo technology I don't mean like geo engineering like firing particulate matter into the atmosphere and hoping that the temperature drops I'm talking about trying to take advantage of existing biological systems of ecosystems to try to store and mitigate climate mitigate climate change.

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So here's where I get to do the little to aggression it's like markets talk about our work but it really isn't in the service I hope of. Sort of pressing my argument. As Scott mentioned I was trained as a cabinet maker and furniture maker and then I had middle class kill them at architecture school.

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This is one of my favorite joints it's known as the fox Hill wedge tenon or in Japanese woodworking I have to be working in Japan right now so I'm really into the. Subway which literally means in Japanese held jointer health connection because what happens is it's just a simple Morris intended joint and those of you guys who have worked in the wood shop are probably familiar with this where you know typically you would just push the tenon in but in this case you drive wedges into the edge of the tenon So as it goes into the Morris and hits the back of the mortis it expands and locks itself in.

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And so if you don't get it just right you can't break the joint a part of that destroying it you can't take it apart and test it make sure it's about total precision but it's also this kind of hermetic knowledge of the cabinet maker like they knew they nailed it and no one else will ever know and that's really kind of exciting to me because I think those kinds of like really minimal powerful statements of a craft sort of ability are pretty powerful but it also represents potentially a kind of solid system solid system a kind of like over inverted focus where we're working inside our workshop and we're not getting out thinking about what the broader system boundaries of the work we're doing entails.

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And so a lot of our practice is spent crafting things or in the case where we don't actually get to build them we try to get other people to graph them and try to figure out documentation methods and lots of site meetings and all the kinds of things that make it possible to.

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To make these these kinds of things but we've also tried to broaden our scope a little bit to think about the sites that we're working in and how we protect the resources of the site and how we lock our buildings into those sites and so in some senses I guess in my practice a kind of feel like I've been lucky enough to get the kinds of projects where I can treat a site like.

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Having it work. And that's good I think but I'm I'm aware that it's not enough it's all enough to just consider the tectonic implications of wood as planes and how you might be able to use the planes to cantilever So these are sort of play constructions that allow us to tear the buildings apart to bring light in it's wonderful wonderful for the people who live in those houses I mean I'm not saying the architecture is great all I'm saying is like.

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It's exciting to think that way about architecture that I love this one minute I want to think about these kinds of spaces and how they give way to the sites that we're also trying to craft and bring back a new kind of meaningful relationship with a built environment.

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And we try to scale that up to buildings where we work with communities in this case a Jesuit community where we built a chapel and housing for them and how we might use wood as a sort of marker on an otherwise fairly. Impoverished material palette to make to mark special entries and things like that or how we might take a a tree which has been destroyed by the facilities maintenance.

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Team at Fairfield because they stockpiled gravel on top of its root systems the seventy two inch beech tree champion tree how you might take it sort of a rotted carcass and instead of chipping it use it in a productive way to produce a screen of privacy screen or possibly the altar in the chapel.

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And to understand that these living things that we're trying to work with would cellulose plant material have properties or once considered defects but actually may be a means of salvation if I can be a little religious given that we're talking about it. Or how. Would performs. Milk molecularly if you Chara it using yucky soup you which is a technique of charring wood to preserve it you consume the oxygen that all the fungus.

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Different microorganisms love and they chew up in the wood you actually remove the outer layer of oxygen and you make it essentially inert or at least as long as it stays on and how those two systems of the burning in the charring in the micro combustion of a surface and its relationship to the interior which is can be protected because it's inside it's away from the water vapor and ultraviolet light.

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To produce a building and then again make that part of the experience of the site and in this house in particular as we stared off to the east in the Atlantic it's hard not to think about the relationship of all the. Effort and material and money and the investment that we make as human beings and in our buildings I don't live in a house like this but I care a lot about where I live and I want to I want to make it as nice as I can make it and that investment is something we have to protect because it gives us human spirit I really believe that as an architect but it also costs us and so those costs and those benefits are what we're way.

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We're just a material performance of simply something as simple as that a piece of paper that if you bend it you produce stiffness and we experiment of that with that with some simple plywood in for an acoustical shell in a performance space that we made in an old firehouse in the haven there was a recording studio and how we could make the diffuser out of cutting just simple operations of slicing plywood and then when we found that under certain kinds of stresses under the torquing that it would tear at the end of the curve we widen the curve to spread the stresses across a larger surface area those little experiments in wood and how we think about wood at the scale of cabinet making maybe at the scale of the site brought us to another idea what if we can use biomass structurally at all much larger scale it's not a new idea I mean the Europeans have been working on include land technologies for one hundred fifty years and Americans have been deploying it all over in San barns and salt barns and utility sheds and hockey ranks for for well over a century we know how to make glue and we know how to we don't know how to use round wood too well because it's pretty hard to manage cracks and moves around when I first saw all of our autos experiment with dowels gluing them together produce a chair leg or a table leg you know honey plaza of the famous historian author of talked about the romance of the tree in the woods in our Alto was returning to that romance romantic vision all I could think of us like wow how do they get the how do they get the dowel surface to glue to the next Dallas surface because they're tangential and there's not enough surface area and I was really nerdy out on it and I really I like the idea that it he's if I can glue together vast numbers of small sticks into really large structural sections or alternatively that you can micro brined So you LOS and turn it into an amazing product as they are at the University of Maine in Orinoco into nano cellulose which has incredible applications including transparent plastics bioplastics.

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We can modify we can game the cellular structure of wood you know which is just a bundle of straw it's right and it's hollow and we can game that to actually fill the lumens or the voids with different kinds of polymers that could protect it from rot to protect it from fire.

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We can use different machining techniques that are completely radical in the wood industry but not so much of a big deal in the metallurgy metallurgical in industry or we can game the fact that wood is hygroscopic its moisture loving it absorbs moisture that's how trees live and figure out how we might change architecture simply by the change of moisture content in the material what that means in this case at the Institute for competition design it should guard students are studying making apertures that open and close with different humidity levels.

[00:40:05]
But the one I like best are the ones I like best are this really age old thing you guys know it this is finger joining and it produces really strong joints if you take a long board and you make a finger joint like this as you know Lamb did for the Living Building Challenge and you tried to break it would probably break at that guy's thumb not at the joint.

[00:40:25]
And we could make a really big sections much bigger than this one joining small pieces of wood out of the forest together to produce massive sections and actually the glue lamb industry already knows how to distribute different grades of material throughout the beam they know that they want the really good stuff at the tension edge and so they put the highest grade material at the lamination and tension edge of the bottom in a simple pad and they load up the compression edge with a slightly lesser grade but still good and then they put the junk that they would otherwise throw away in the middle because they're not that many stresses and you know that from structures.

[00:40:59]
Or our friends in Europe are actually finding that they have a lot of European spruce but they have a ton of beach and so they made beach laminated veneer insets that they inlay into their their structural timbers and they make giant dowel joints out of beech laminated veneer so they don't have to use metal they don't have to steel connectors.

[00:41:21]
And so we went to work at this larger scale building houses with limbs taking advantage of the curvature that you can get out of laminate bending seeing these amazing barn structures of this one in Ontario and in willfully misinterpreting this with this frame this lying on the ground to produce larger structures this is a vehicular bridge that we built about twenty years ago which is still functioning just fine it's a ten ton actual bridge which we saw a thirty ton truck drive over and we watched the whole thing flax and then came back to life and it survived because wood has amazing elastic bending capacity which makes it good for seismic design.

[00:42:01]
Where this other bridge where we had to bring little pieces of wood together and glue them to both them together on site because we weren't allowed to actually put any foundations in this watershed. And then we tried it successfully but it was a big step for a construction company to build a suspension bridge and we had all the work done and you know land the same place to produce all this material for a living building across campus.

[00:42:28]
And then we got out on the field strong our wires and tried to make that thing the line up and work. But we learned a lot about working at large scale and in the end we had a building that use big pieces of timber placed in a remote situation sourced relatively locally.

[00:42:46]
And we transformed a river basin into a place that people could live and be and enjoy and we're really proud of it and we also understood that you know plywood functions is a bi directional structural system right it has come alternate layers replies which make it stiff and that's been translated up into scale to produce kind of plywood on steroids or of the material does your cross limited timber see ulti and we started playing with that as well and went to work with all the different kinds of potentials that might exist and we put tried to apply it not in.

[00:43:26]
Open landscapes but actually in cities and in Stamford Connecticut. And we built this frame out of hybrid steel and blue lamb construction and we had to design a couple of for above. The merry go round with these beautiful carved wooden animals we thought the should be carved too and so we modeled it to be made as a sort of topographic section and that we would install it into.

[00:43:50]
This roof above the merry go round. And so we went to work with structure fusion in Quebec and they had because we know American manufacturers could do it we had. We had a European manufacturer produce and ship it was cheaper than getting an American manufacturer to do it was absolutely broke my heart but we're getting there and we made this couple which is about forty feet in diameter and installed it in about three days in layers and components and now represents a sort of celebration of this great new carved merry go round that they put into the building.

[00:44:26]
And I always wondered whether the kids riding around in a merry go round with like get sick to their stomachs looking up at this thing but. Anyway it is a giant silty experiment and it's based on the tectonic systems of C L T It's a flat plate How do you make it work effectively how can you invent around it rather than just using it as decking.

[00:44:51]
And that brings me to the next scale up so we move from our little like cabin experiments in interiors and we're now we're talking about building a scale which addresses economies the bio economy it's amazing that those spruce seeds actually will produce with water and carbon dioxide or and a good soil medium over about eighty years a metric ton of building material that's a really good way to produce because it's a lot better than centering.

[00:45:23]
Minerals So we built a school which was supposed to be a model of environmental efficiency it was for a school the public school in New Haven that taught inner city kids about ecology and farming and so we thought we should build a building making the most efficient thing we can so it was loaded with lots of technological bells and whistles sustainable technologies like photovoltaic arrays and ground source heat pumps and lots of efficient reuse materials but we really focused on was that different kinds of tree species that we could load into the building through this method of standard industrial processing of material and build it into the structure of the building and as we did so take all that car that's carbon out of the forest as above ground would it matter leaving the bulk of the carbon in the soils allowing it to restore itself and basically put that carbon in the form of wood carbohydrate into a bank and the bank is going to be the building.

[00:46:22]
And so I went to work with by the way is super amenable to prefabrication techniques so all the guys working on in your fabrication labs will find and you already know that using wood is a relatively soft material it's really efficient and it's light so five carpenters can produce a fairly complex building in a matter of five weeks with one crane operator the building was enclosed.

[00:46:48]
And we tried to basically put as much material into it as possible and to also make hopefully really good spaces for the kids and the teachers there are two hundred kids in each of these high school classes but there are over fifteen thousand New Haven community members and they have a community who come through it for camps and things like that and the whole building is lined mostly with cross laminated timber as structure and finish in some cases there's some dry wall and they make a really large span.

[00:47:15]
Areas for half gymnasium they can only for half Jim but they use it for theatres and graduation and also some games. And the thing that the students talked about the most I was hoping they see like the daylight building is incredible you know or they come to me and say I love the shape it's so cool looks like a barn now they said this building smells were really good.

[00:47:41]
And I thought this would smells good and we know about Biophilia that we all need to have be around natural things so that we feel better but no actually there been studies. That students who study in classrooms language would have a lower hurt rate and lower cortisol levels than students who live in a more conventionally constructed building they actually behave better because they're biologically in better shape in these buildings and why is that because wood absorbs moisture and it deserves it so if you have a very high humidity level in a room the wood will absorb that and then as it dries out it will deserve it and it takes place across the little three eighth's inch thick layer of that surface where wood is actually buffering the humidity levels and in spaces you don't need mechanical systems to do that we can actually engineer that through the biology and in addition we found that there's this.

[00:48:35]
Condition called hydrothermal mass worse which is essentially acting like a phase change material it's absorbing heat or deserving heat when water vapor is absorbed turns into water in the cells of the wood and then remits that that heat so there's really incredible possibilities with just using this material but mostly we have an a building that is operationally really efficient it's a net zero for the first eleven years if you think about its operation.

[00:49:02]
And it's a good space that the people really like which I want to keep saying if I get to like a techie I want to remind you remind myself that this is really about people surviving on the planet but also people enjoying their lives in the living richly and so the school's been pretty successful but.

[00:49:22]
Here's a quick study of what happened in the school we did a life cycle assessment. This is called the carbon transect this line is basically above it is carbon emitted and below it is carbon absorbed or verse sequestered each component of the building was measured in its impact in terms of its embodied emissions and you can see that all of these parts and components emit carbon including would.

[00:49:49]
Then we study what would happen if we started measuring how much carbon was stored in the material. And what we found was furniture partition stud walls dividers roof framing and decking external decking facades frame and of course the site because we did a lot to protect the site soils that's where we get to store carbon.

[00:50:12]
Electrical elements guess what the biggest emitter is. Take a guess in all the electrical system P.V. The thing that's saving us energy cost us the most to make in terms of carbon emissions almost as much as concrete. So if we think about this system of material consumption we like to think of ourselves as makers but we're actually consumers or the agents of consumption we realize how much power we have and we just ran these guys through a really quick quick calculation and we calculate all the material that was in the building we realize that essentially there's four hundred fifty metric tons of carbon dioxide just stored in the building structure and finishes which is to come in about one hundred cars and missions.

[00:50:58]
And so given that we know how to build type for construction heavy timber construction and exists in the code and has for a hundred years and we know all the details to protect the metal connections from fire still needs to be connected protected from firewood which charges naturally and protect itself doesn't.

[00:51:16]
We were able to build buildings of six quite square real sophistication this is the firehouse where we did the recording studio and at one of our client the client that asked us to build a dormitory for his visiting musicians and so we built a closed off the street one morning just before Halloween three years ago and built the enclosure of this building in one day all prefabricated assembled one day on our roof with one crane to carpenters.

[00:51:41]
And we take people around to go like what would it be like to live in a wood lined building what do you think and some people go I wish we put some sheet rock over part of it you know but we just left it exposed because we knew that that was going to take away one more trade slowed slow down the process of the missions that we're trying to avoid and you know maybe the rooftops of an reinforced masonry buildings around cities like New Haven will become the new suburban lawns.

[00:52:07]
And so we carry that forward and we're starting to build larger and larger buildings using cross-legged temper and glue lamb in the city we're getting code modifications doing fire testing on some assemblies and I want to get into that too much because there's a larger scale at which we're considering this stuff and we're doing this in downtown New Haven we have the support not only of a new code that's going to come into play in two thousand and twenty one that will allow much taller mass timber buildings but also a really invested regulatory commune are building inspectors in our farm marshals are engaged in trying to solve the problem not just be in transit and difficult and I really appreciate that and so that brings us finally to this topic carbon omics and I say carbon omics because see how I'm doing here.

[00:52:51]
The question is how do we shift our economy from one that produces one landscape to this much denser more efficient one scape and we have we have the know how with wood we know how to do it we have produced Unfortunately this morphology sprawl using little sticks of wood to produce small houses that spread across landscapes and entail enormous infrastructures energy transmission roadways you know it right many of us live in these kinds of neighborhoods are ones model.

[00:53:23]
And so it's kind of funny that the most efficient building morphology. The middle rise to high rise building which shares partitions heat enclosures among many families is produced using the most deleterious extraction and processing methods. While this low rise morphology which is incredibly land intensive an infrastructure intensive is produced using a relatively low impact construction technology.

[00:53:55]
That suburban house that one suburban house has wood in it and it's a question is forty eight tons on a certain area but in that same area we can actually place a multi-story building and we can sequester six seven times as much carbon which is increasingly important if you consider that eighteen year time frame how do we load carbon into the built environment how do we make the buildings carbon sinks and as you scale up you start to see real possibility of not only storing carbon and moderating climate change but actually mitigating it more whole wholly and that became the subject of our work we started modeling urban districts comparing them and we started think about regional demand and supply chains and I can see I'm saying this to this group because this is New England you guys may be familiar with that and that's the entire northeastern woodshed which is the second largest wood shed to the Pacific Northwest and the third is the southeastern United States.

[00:54:52]
And so how do we take two landscape systems now at the scale of landscape I would take to regional systems one the extractive mineral based one which produces cities and the forest bio based system which produces suburbs break those relationships. We do it through regional regenerative by autonomic systems and we have all of the technologies ready and we don't invent anything we supply chains exist they're just a little bit weak.

[00:55:20]
This is the New York metropolitan area the Boston metropolitan or other smaller Metropolis is in New England this is the incredible amount of material that can come out I'm not talking about cutting down forests for good I'm talking about the trees that die every year of the mortality or flocks of forest systems could produce the demand for buildings mid rise buildings that we need to build for the growing and urbanizing population just take Maine which is the sort of big daddy of forests all those pulp paper forests that are no longer being cut and are weakening.

[00:55:54]
They can actually build all of these systems the university man is already experimenting with smart lamb from Montana is opening a plant in in Maine to produce northeastern systems to produce assemblies for multi rise multi-story buildings in the city's. And we can only talk about primary structure we can get into insulation systems rigid cellulose insulation plywood sheathing exterior and interior finishes even bio based paper barriers.

[00:56:22]
And we can key them to the forests that we know how to cut We have a history of cutting them up and down the eastern seaboard we know how to move that material Well I'm not advocating that we fill our rivers with logs don't get me wrong we have really small and effective foresters phonetic cut materials and so given that we thought OK we're going to call New Haven Timber City Why not haven it's on the shoreline there is no woods because we have a really great forestry school and we have a good pretty good architecture school and we can get together with them and we work with engineering public health and we can model New Haven is a place that will absorb carbon become a carbon sink.

[00:57:00]
And so in that same neighborhood where we built the Acme hotel and the fire house we started to model a seven story building using a series of techniques we modeled different uses of office use two cores for egress obviously and we actually structural engineer and housing in different kinds of configurations using nail laminated timber blue lamb and also across limited summer and then we the seven story building which would hold about forty families tested for gravity and wind load so it was a legitimately sized and we started counting up simply by weighing our models weighing the material takeoffs how much carbon was sequestered and then we took that basic system and we multiplied it so that we could respond to different site conditions and and bulk zoning requirements and we produced this template of buildings and then we took an equivalent area of main forest land a cut this is commercial forest it's being logged anyway and we took one section of it fifteen hundred acres and we modeled it as a region which was essentially sixty parcels that could be cut over sixty years one parcel a year.

[00:58:08]
Three hundred seventy five continuous acres one quarter we left in reserve for a large mammal population migration I can talk about that later and then basically what we did was we game to the way forests grow they start with you know a disturbance sawing cutting they start to initiate and then they eventually start to produce meaningful forests and forests with really broad biodiversity in their in their cultures and we store a lot of carbon in the soil and we store a lot of it in the reserve force we left and we store a lot of it in the tonnage of carbon that we cut and we save that by moving it into the one square which by the way.

[00:58:54]
Is this much debt in carbon emissions and it's being built and so we modeled it and we ran that model and over essentially forty five years we cut small parcels of forests and calculated whether they could build these buildings seven eight story buildings that filled up what are essentially surface layer surface parking lots in the hay and over that time we were able to store a huge amount of carbon in the city carbon that was preserved in the forest and forest soils carbon that was reabsorbed a C O two through photosynthesis is the forestry who carbon that was stored in the buildings in this new kind of urban carbon sink and then finally all the carbon emissions we avoided by not using materials that required a lot of energy and a lot of intensive technologies and just to put that in perspective that's worth sixty five thousand cars annual emissions if you put a dollar value on it carbon right now is running at about thirty bucks a tonne that's its value but with this new I.P.C.C. report and William Nordhaus who just won the.

[01:00:05]
Nobel Prize in Economics his estimate is that at one hundred fifty dollars a tonne by twenty thirty this is how much that carbon storage is worth in the city. And it goes upward to the point that Nordhaus and his colleagues estimate that by twenty one hundred carbon emissions and others to waste carbon to expend it into the atmosphere will cost you twenty nine thousand dollars a tonne.

[01:00:31]
So if you're an industrial polluter you're in trouble but if you're someone who's building cities and you build them out of biogenic materials you have a gold mine waiting for you you know tell your kids to invest in the timber industry of course it's going to entail a lot of a lot of work and so just to really recap this and wrap this up.

[01:00:53]
There's a cyclical system in which force live and die and every time the trees get cut down or knocked down by wind or burned there's a little loss of forest carbon for the forest soil carbon but it replenishes over time we just wondered what would happen in addition to this natural mortality of forests we move that material is of letting a rot and Reem it it's carbon dioxide because of fungal decay we brought it into the fore into the city and we know that with suburbs we get some storage capacity per land area but with a really big assemblies in the kind of dense assemblies required to build tall buildings we get a lot of carbon storage so suddenly to two landscapes which were considered in conflict with one another are now synergistically linked through material production and if you carry it out to the global scale and you look at that carbon sector carbon transect below is carbon stored above as carbon emitted this is our current business as usual track that carries us well above the danger threshold two degrees Celsius or one point five three Celsius.

[01:02:05]
Just as a thought experiment if we were to build all the housing required with based on population growth in five to ten story buildings. Out of mass timber over the next fifty years that's how much carbon nearly six gigatons of carbon we can store in the built environment in the things that we build not forests.

[01:02:26]
And that's what it does to that business as usual curve it pulls it down below the guardrail that the I.P.C.C. has set another is we have prevented catastrophic climate change now that economic transition is really unlikely to take place it's going to be really hard to do but it's incumbent upon all of us to really start to assess the broad broaden system boundaries of our design analysis why we specify a particular material.

[01:02:57]
How far we have to move it and what happens at the end of that building life time where does the material go that's what will be designing buildings that are responsive to the ecology that they disturb it take advantage of the vast way streams that we produce in a capitalist society in a healthy capital society.

[01:03:17]
And they also consider the end of the buildings life or the end of its current life and where that material might go that becomes your design project that's an exciting design project for us. And so I'll close with this quick story a global story we were asked by the United Nations to produce a micro house they called us up in May and they said hey can you can you build a micro house for July ninth a VAT were like great July ninth twenty nineteen and they said another twenty eight.

[01:03:48]
And we said no way can't do it and then of course I got connected I talked to Lisa my partner she's like you know we really should do it and like we can't it's six weeks away how can we build a building in six weeks the Army designed it and we worse off we got connected with our my colleague and a Dyson who runs a center for eco systems architecture and is a collaborator with me and it was the worst combination of people possibly to put together in a room because we decided that we could do it.

[01:04:14]
This is what the U.N. faces that troubled land area an informal city invading what we try to design because people need housing and we make it better and they asked us if we could produce a wholly sustainable building that would meet their the bulk of their UN sustainability goals S D G's.

[01:04:34]
And we said no problem then they said OK you have to put it on the UN plaza we already knew it was a short time frame and you can't use a crane because it's a building and it's a roof of a building and if any of you guys are going to the U.N. is probably the most public place you could be other than Times Square and somehow we said yes so I went to work on a building that would be completely can self contained because we're trying to build for these Perry urban conditions where people have risk of you know safety and security water security food security thermal comfort the other so many issues around waste treatment we can't build those infrastructures fast enough can we think of really low impact technologies that will allow us to make buildings wholly self-sufficient and to aggregate them into larger urban conditions so run through this basically this design process to it was a rapid design for a process that took place over three and a half weeks.

[01:05:29]
With two teams one working at the new labs in New York in our team working in New Haven our shop and our students assemble this building literally in two weeks made of cross laminated timber using all kinds of passive ventilation system stack effect and things it actually sleeps for people their bunks that are built into it it has a kitchenette and a toilet and a shower of composting toilet it's built entirely out of regional material it was assembled and disassembled one day we drove it overnight showed up at five in the morning on a Saturday at the UN with five trucks and two forklifts which were all that allowed and we put the thing up in three days and that's the team all of us out there having just finished it having been a yell that all day about OSHA violations and I'm wearing my harness as one of my fall protection.

[01:06:26]
Get OSHA certified. It had a green wall that grew plants for it we modeled it's we sense we had sensors throughout it to check air quality in the middle of the UN Plaza under the burning sun we had indoor plants systems to function is that elation and air purification in case that some poor user had to hide in their building and lock it down and not have open openings.

[01:06:51]
And this incredible rock which included water vapor condensation atmospheric water come condensation to produce potable water. But a heap air to air heat pump for for radiant heating and cooling reservoirs for rainwater harvesting a P.V. array system which included this amazing integrated concentrated solar panel system which functions as a skylight but also uses about one two hundred the amount of semiconductor to gain the same amount of power for that area.

[01:07:27]
And a green wall which would produce. In the New York area about sixty five percent of the vegetables that a family would need over the course of the year which still blows my mind I was not involved in that calculation and I still keep asking about it but it was it was a fairly robust system and the the thing that I liked most was that people went into it thousands of people went into it and suddenly they could understand it because we as a group have the power to demonstrate these ideas through our work that's what we should be doing how to create a kind of zero truly zero building in a really quick time over little to produce livable spaces even though they're small I mean go into a fella sometime and see where people are living you realise that this I'm not saying this is a solution but the way that we can think about small housing with lower impact this is the director of the Kenya UN environmental program he actually took a nap here one day we weren't even supposed to be inside it corny UN security people really liked and then here's the secretary general of the UN.

[01:08:35]
Human Environment Program who ate some of our vegetables. So we live in a time which is challenging because we don't even have consensus that this is happening to us I mean let's put let's be honest physicists biologists and chemists have a consensus but no one in these political debates seems to bring physicists biologists or chemists to the debate but we do have a condition that you can observe is changing and the question is how do we handle it do we adapt to climate change simply by barricading ourselves against all the sort of this is vicissitudes that it will create we like building software architects.

[01:09:20]
We think breakwaters of huge amounts of concrete I like to do a lifecycle assessment on this thing you know but the question is is that really where will be most effective in responding to the shock of Anthropocene climate change. Or can we engage something better so it really comes down to.

[01:09:38]
How we consume what we consume and what we choose to design and how broadly we choose to think about design. It is what you build maybe but it might be what you build with. Thank you. For you. Sure. You. Were looking at you. I had to rush through that I know because I don't want to lose everybody so I thank you guys for the time but there was a lot of information there and I'm happy to talk to you individually or answer any questions you have now so.

[01:10:38]
Sorry. I. Have a quick question about building sites. Free. Telus it's very difficult to. Run a building off of the zero I know we're talking about formants and not. Destruction. That's more than four storeys high so how do you see that affecting the way you design buildings play urban environments great question so there are two questions in that I'll answer but one I the last one which is really important.

[01:11:26]
One of the things about thinking about buildings as systems is that a building is not a system a building is part of a much larger thermodynamic system land use system but in particular thermodynamic Let's talk about thermodynamics and energy production I think it's a fool's errand to try to make one building do what we try to do at the U.N..

[01:11:49]
It's throwing too much hardware and technology at one building when we can use more shared communal resources district heating for example district heating and cooling where you're using more land area appropriate land area for energy generation and you're basically it can be biomass incineration it could be wind farming it could be any number of things P.V. arrays that serve a lot more people we don't need to build national energy grids but we do need to think where buildings are most effective in being surfaces for energy generation and when they're not don't put them on just so you can get your lead check point.

[01:12:32]
There's a second part of your question which asked about height and you were talking with the efficiency of. Of energy generation for P.V. and basically a needle obviously the top of the needle isn't going to give you much surface area that's relatively in the right angle and the what the surface of the wall might be shaded by physical structures around it whatever.

[01:12:51]
And there's also a question about how tall should we be building and one of my slides showed the Burj Khalifa relative to the excavation you know many think about building the Burj Khalifa where they were actually pumping concrete over one hundred stories with ice water jacketed pump lines to prevent the concrete from curing in the pump lines.

[01:13:16]
I think in a desert environment. I think we have to really really really evaluate our Still way we think about what is good in architectural expression and what is the right thing to build I think we do have to have an ethical position about it but I do think it derives from some technical parameters that can be evaluated and we can optimize the way all of these systems work and we can start to play the built environment like a really beautiful ecological machine which airs different surfaces different soil systems different habitats to optimize everybody's experience so that's super utopian but I do think that's the direction that we're going to need to go we may not close that circular economic circuit where only we only use post consumer waste with building waste but we've got to get toward it and then we got to find all these different ways to store this vast amount of carbon that we pumped into the atmosphere so your question is really really important because it would be an skin stress this enough one building and going to do it this is a big sector wide operation that we have to take into account and we have the data sets and the computational capacity to really analyze it which is what's the made most amazing opportunity good design applied with really good data and really powerful computation will help us get there but it's going to take a lot of creativity.

[01:14:45]
That's a really long answer to a great question sorry about that. OK so the last part of that got me kind of curious because I've been thinking about something as you've been talking about a lot of this stuff and I don't know if you've gotten that far yet that's kind of big picture but what about a lot of the social engineering and everything that would have to go on to get people to accept this I mean that we're kind of in one of the poster child cities for like urban sprawl Yeah you know so where you kind of.

[01:15:20]
Well you know the economists I'm not really not an economist so I'm treading on really super thin ice the kind of ice we have nowadays because of climate change in the northeast. So this economic Trish transition entails social transition consumer transition. Demand Side transitions it's really complex and I I think.

[01:15:49]
You know the bipartisan at least America bipartisan group of policymakers and thinkers who have proposed a carbon tax who have basically incentivize behavior through monitor a monetary device. Probably have the crudest but maybe most effective way of basically. Taking what economists call externalities the things outside of the what we think about you know yeah I really I really like M.

[01:16:17]
and M's or whatever it might be but I didn't think about the cocoa plantations that whatever right those are externalities carbon emissions today is an economic externality there is no penalty for taking vast control of what is a commons a shared resource but we brief right. So. I would advocate and I'm stepping into politics I would advocate that we have to fight somehow not penalize but incentivize behaviors that reduce carbon emissions and so.

[01:16:55]
So if like we did too I mean we're not we don't just build in wooden amounts saying we're angels we use all of these material systems. But if all of us could start to wean ourselves off of this instructor experiment this is like the golden age of architecture again just like the twentieth century was a Golden Age of Steel in the late twentieth century concrete and this is the an age where bio material could become an incredible opportunity for everyone demand and supply side public help environmental help upstream and downstream but again I think we're going to have to take some really cold looks at all the devices at our disposal to try to change that and social engineering is a dangerous term for me because I wouldn't suggest that we have to change people because that seems like I don't want to be the agent of changing any of you.

[01:17:49]
Because I know I behave poorly I drive a six cylinder car internal combustion engine car so I you know I got to change we all have to change but how do you do that I'm not sure but I don't think we should be protecting people who are producing the most deleterious effects the most.

[01:18:07]
Conducting themselves in the more most predatory ways in terms of global resources and so I think we have to really consider that there's another side to this question and I'm sort of go on but are you guys from there with the Nets curve it's basically it's the connection between wealth of a society and the amount of it emits or the waste it produces right so as you get richer and richer you produce more and more waste in order to get rich and then we're supposedly in the US because we're the richest company were the biggest emitters per capita now we're tailing off emissions because we can afford to do that and someone in a developing economy might say we're in advancing economy might say hey we want to get rich too we want to have a better standard of living too and we need to do so we need to use basic oxygen furnace instead of electric arc furnace is for US Steel and we need to build with concrete because it's right here we can dig it.

[01:18:55]
The ground into the jungles of Cambodia to produce housing in China and India. You know I mean there are huge global problems with this I don't really know how to answer I'm the wrong guy to ask but I know that in our room we have we have instruments of action that we can take and use and that's what I just ask all of you guys to really look at and look hard at it don't look at the labels like really go back and you you have it's it's really dumb quantification you can do YOU CAN YOU can you can make a crude estimation of the impacts are going to have by the decisions you make you don't have to be perfect you just have to be in the ballpark so that you can get you can game the system.

[01:19:51]
Thank you. Yeah thank you so much for really such a informative and beautiful inspiring lecture. Part of what my question is. How much as. Yours at the city scale the work was very typological which makes perfect sense. At the building design scale your work was highly customized beautiful high design.

[01:20:26]
But also. Very. Particular site particular client you know all of those kinds of things. Given the the big scale and Brett that which the big picture that you are thinking of and long duration. Do you think we should be designing. Buildings that are. Super customized to a particular client at a particular time or buildings that are.

[01:21:00]
In it just adaptable super adaptable over time to changing uses and client and occupants and and I'm wondering sort of what role how does that play out kind of in the building. In thinking about the role intice of painting how renovations occurred at so that these people just as long as they need to they really sequestering it as long as we need them yeah.

[01:21:32]
This is an amazing question and why I am so reluctant at first I really did much of our own design work well thank you but it is you know I guess I guess I would say. Part of this is a mere corporate for being a mature guy who like me.

[01:21:49]
King stuff I'm like the guy who likes joints and connections and then I got to think of a bigger scale and so the arc that I described is really an arc that my partner Elise and I and the people who would mazing people we work with and the clients are able to get that truth we followed that trajectory which was sort of like a kind of opening our eyes and going my God we're actually not just cabinet makers we actually have an effect on bigger systems and we're engaging bigger systems so I thank you for the really nice things you say about the work I look at it and I think exactly is this like this is not a model for how you move forward because you know if you study circular economic theory for example what we're really trying to do is make extremely durable buildings that are reflexive and responsive and adaptable so that we don't have to tear them down every time we stop needing them.

[01:22:38]
That someone and we know this exists organically in human culture we inhabit places that people have disputed. Discarded. So I would say that it will always be hard for architects not to design something special I have not met an architect in my life who didn't give a damn about the quality of the spaces of the materials and all the things that they were putting together and I would guess that among everyone here with literally an architect or an architecture student or you're someone who just happens to love architecture and be interested in it.

[01:23:09]
You care about that moment that you can actually where you have agency and so we will inevitably try to make beautiful things that we make us happy and make our clients happy but I do think we need to change the way we think so that we can think about those adaptability S.

[01:23:24]
that make the things we make have a longer durable it which means that we doing less work on them they function better just technically but also socially programatic Lee. Whatever you can and you can apply to as a demand on architecture. I think that I think that. The.

[01:23:49]
Lation ship between what you love to do as a maker of things and what you consume and what and what you waste you admit I think that. The thing that connects those two potentially conflicting desires is awareness. I would say that you should go ahead if you happen to have a client who wants a merry go round that's a beautiful thing that little kids in the city can celebrate they were so behind that they're willing to take the time that it took and find the people who could build it we should be doing that because we want to make convivial beautiful spaces for people living always to do is think as as we tried to do like my God we're cutting Polish forests we're shipping them to a plant to build C L T in Austria them or shipping it across the Alps to a port in France and then it's getting shipped to the United States and then it's being trucked up to Stamford Connecticut from a jersey you know you're going to like this is a terrible idea and yet in the currency of dollars it was the cheapest thing we could do given the thing that they wanted and we come up with and so that's the other issue what's our currency in all these calculations What's the unit that worked and I just think we have to play broadly with all of that and it's a pretty lame answer to a great question but.

[01:25:04]
I wouldn't use the spectacular. The the moderately interesting stuff that I may have shown you here but the spectacular models that we look at in architecture which are just formally amazing in and incredibly complex to build. It interest me less that it's formally exciting than it is that someone figured out a really smart system for the manufacture of that difficult thing and that's the concept that you guys are doing right here you know you're saying Yeah I can make any chacha with a great shape but now I start to put some apply some pressure to it and start to say I can make it but can I make it more efficiently can I contribute less to a waste stream that will never be diverted from a school of architecture model shops you know how can I do those things don't stop being creative just broaden the system boundary of your analysis.

[01:25:59]
Thank you. For the I have a question you compared. The forest and sprawl to. The more buildings in the neighborhood did you continue research and compare that model to more intense. Taller buildings in New York and is there. A point in which those buildings start to make sense because they have a higher density on a smaller site and you can get more people to leave in a smaller.

[01:26:41]
Yeah so your question all kinds of metrics that we can apply to that one might be can I don't know urban conviviality you know what's a convivial city some people say eight stories in a Toronto experiment of hyper density and they're like well too much New York Manhattan is a very particular place it's resource deprived in the sense of it's land there it's not resource deprived in a lot of other means and so we build tall we have good foundation material you know there's a lot of things about each particular place personally when I look at the demographics globally what I've seen from the research that we've been doing where I can be building twenty stories buildings for people the bulk of building and it will probably be close to ninety five percent if not more of the buildings that we build in the next thirty years for a burgeoning population and urban and urbanizing population will be five to ten stories because once you top above that you actually start demanding new kinds of technologies you know construction technologies operational technologies you may even start being less efficient in terms of surface area this.

[01:27:48]
You know we learned that one story building with a giant footprint is less efficient terms of surface area than the multistory more cubic building wells the same thing expended perfectly it's a problem. Why we build tall buildings is it really because of density or is it because we're trying to produce a signboard for some.

[01:28:06]
Marketing purpose I don't know Hubris is a questions I ask myself but when it comes to wood where a lot of really smart people are spending a lot of time trying to build a forty story tower out of wood I say it's a distraction it's a waste of time and you know I was on the jury for the twenty four team told would prize was awarded to twelve story buildings which not neither of which were built.

[01:28:32]
Meanwhile Gerald Hines said we're going to be a seven and a half story office building in Minneapolis and and we don't want the prize money because. We we want to keep our secrets and he he built it so the one project that was an award by the tall timber competition was built because it was modest and was achievable and it will become the exemplar for another generation or a decade of building because it was what can we do with the resources we have that meets code or at least falls closely enough within code that we can do it and that's the question again that goes back to the question that US which is.

[01:29:11]
Where do we apply the horsepower to the problem and what is the purpose of it if the program is to show off and build one hundred twenty story building in the desert then we all have to decide where they want to be involved in that or whether we should and I think politically as a body politic have to also say OK you get to do that that's cool but it has a cost for you not just money cost it has another kind of cost.

[01:29:37]
So. We assumed based on the demographic data that we are working with that we are looking at the sweet spot of mass temper too short for concrete or steel to be a particularly viable economic alternative which is why you notice there are a lot of five story stick frame buildings on top of noncombustible podiums going up all over New Haven in Atlanta and.

[01:29:59]
New York's eggs are observed in outer rings and then jumps up to twelve thirteen fourteen stories where we get into systems where concrete and steel a pre pre for double mast him or falls right in that sweet spot and the code is just about to be passed by the it's by the I.C.C. The Code Commission to allow nine story completely unprotected buildings eighteen story encapsulated timber I mean we can build now in a matter of couple of years a lot of material with wood and so I have to say the question then is who's protecting the demand side who's looking at forests Who's making sure that we don't just extract but the same mentality the take make and dump mentality that we've used with all the other material classes that we've ever worked with I mean we deforested New England it was fifteen percent forest cover one hundred years ago now it's seventy eighty again so it's survived but not all do and so.

[01:30:59]
This story again kind of ranging around but these are just really complex questions but I would say that everything I've told you guys today is stuff that you either could intuit or already knew and what we've been doing is trying to put it all together these what seem like really dumb ideas systematically and that's really what I mean that's what I would say to my students and do say to my students don't you know going to solve the problem but if you at least start to address it you open up a whole new world of opportunity and as an architect you can work on one building hopefully a nice one as a citizen you can vote for policymakers who care about these issues and may make your life better by thinking wanted to.

[01:31:49]
Occasion sheet that came with this building. We represent the demand side and so we can actually change but what we specify and ask for and put into our buildings we can change the manufacturing culture we can move them that way. For a service Stewardship Council is an example of that lead for all its flaws is an example of that the Living Building Challenge is a great example of it's a demand side impact and so.

[01:32:19]
You know talk to your client yes you have that agency there too but we can work and demonstrate principles where we are most expert and we just need to know about the other stuff so that we can really start to account for it it's just an economics want to one kind of thing accounting.

[01:32:42]
So. Thank you Alan I was a wonderful lecturer. Really. Eyeopening for some of us who haven't spent a lot of time in that realm. Parlaying for some of these other questions I was a similar question but slightly different. I'm curious about how you see the agency of your practice helping make some of these larger transformation changes in their relationship with you haven government.

[01:33:17]
Your graphics were quite convincing the rhetoric was. Really powerful and I'm wondering how you how you see your role in making a larger chains' beyond just the projects. I honestly don't think our projects will make a change but really clear about those that. Well I feel really lucky that I've got to teach at a bunch of schools like this one with really amazing colleagues and.

[01:33:49]
Students and. We once made a map of all the schools in the U.S. that focused on wood design and engineering and then we made a comparative map of all of Europe. Europe has I think something like forty programs with specialized. Bio based engineering building scale by based engineering design degree programs.

[01:34:17]
In the U.S. And I think even Canada at that time a couple years ago had zero C. of material science forestry Yes but no one was studying actually the synthetic side of that which is design so I feel like working with my colleagues and teaching like the people who would be the leaders in our sector in a few years I mean it's a hell of a flick things go really fast it's kind of amazing that feels like the stuff I'm doing right here that you allowed me to come and talk to you have feels like a moment where we can all really coalesce around an idea you'll change it and alter it in really positive ways I was just up in northern Maine at the University of Maine where they're doing amazing research on the bio economy because they have that resource in the paper industries or you know not using those forests and I was surrounded by a bunch of people in the harvest who would project and stream these are the guys who make plywood women a veneer lumber particle board and.

[01:35:18]
I would say they're probably if I can take liberties here they're not aligned with the sort of liberal environmentalist agenda they're like We need jobs our economy sucks in terrible shape. We have no access to markets what are we going to do and I think there is in this enormous opportunity that's economic and that's something we can talk to everybody about and so that's of interest to me and then finally.

[01:35:47]
Scaling up was something that I hope. To do maybe one really good six story building out of this stuff in my lifetime that's that's my goal and if people look at it great but I'm hoping that by this time I would sure enough enough practice in my brain power is court well enough co-ordinated a lot of you have already done.

[01:36:08]
What I want to do by the end of my career and I think that's because right now we exist on the kind of you know in the in the trench war for the first world war we talked about the bleeding edge Those were the guys who went out of the trenches first and basically all died and then the next group that flooded the enemy trenches were safer because they'd basically been shot at less were the bleeding edge right now guys like Michael Green Andrew why I don't even put myself among them but guys who actually made a career out of trying to build these buildings a number of people in Europe they have kind of sacrifice themselves on an economic and an economically unjustifiable proposition which is you can build the same buildings as conventional systems out of these new materials of course they're not going to be able to do that they can't prove it out.

[01:37:03]
But what we have done is now opened five New Cross limits who are blaming the plants in the U.S. right now just down the road three and half hours from both in Alabama they're opening international beam is opening across a limited summer plant with the support of an Austrian manufacturer because they have really good forest fiber and they figure out the glue that bonds that particularly in the right way and the drying all the properties and they had invested thirty million dollars to build this plant and they're building it now.

[01:37:30]
So suddenly you the southeast is seeing a new scale economic scale to work with so I think like. It's this you know sort of little moments of awareness that are being built and same thing happen to me you know I didn't think up this I just happened to look at twenty years of technology is going to Europe and.

[01:37:49]
Well we have forests. I. Read Yes. This is. Yes that is a fabulous question and so the first answer to that is the most the more you process the fiber the more you chop it up into little bits the more it he's If you need and therefore the higher percentage of it he's of you use now these are non formaldehyde they're not off gassing they're they have to be they can be volatile compounds because they're structural they have to last so there's not toxicity involved in the final product there's some toxicity involved in the processing of it so the high strength your thing glues and poxy resource and all the other all the sensor structural glues that are stable and inert and off gassing but they are based in fossil hydrocarbon technologies and so they do have impacts.

[01:38:55]
As you move into the systems where you use larger and larger pieces you know one end of the continuum is a solid timber out of a big tree that is just using its natural lignin to hold all these fibers together you have a very low toxicity and environmental impact from Blue processing as you move toward oriented strand boards and particle boards and things like that you have higher higher amounts of glue and more emissions so it's a pretty simple equation and thing that interests me about lamination technology is that you're using your optimizing the entire breadth of the forests that you cut you can use mix potentially use mix species to lay up in different with different properties to lay up into the system you can use less glue because the glue joints are incredibly small there are you know.

[01:39:44]
One hundredth of a millimeter in some cases when properly glued you reduce the amount of glue with the real. The hope is technology that's happening right now research is happening to produce bio clues which use lignin which is a national natural glue in trees and when we can make a structural glue we can make a structural clue and we can industrially produced a structural glue that's using.

[01:40:07]
Heavy cellulose and lemons then it's untouchable but yeah there are there are impacts to making a glue but that. NET point four seven tons of carbon dioxide emitted four. Metric ton of timber. If you compare it to mineral based technologies and we need steel and we need skunk three I'm not sure and there will be hybrid systems that will solve amazing problems with the timber and concrete I could've gotten into that.

[01:40:38]
You just can't compare And if we don't use these biomaterials we'll use those materials and then we're not even in the discussion so it's always again part of this careful measurement. Of more everybody out of here thank you got to.