There’s a quiet tension that often comes from getting a bunch of candidates together for a site meeting during a Request for Proposals. Competing architects, project managers, technologists, proposal editors, all suddenly spend an afternoon together, wandering through an existing building, a built-up urban lot, or maybe some empty field. People arrive, form a little […]
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is the only novel that I ever tossed into the recycling after reading the last page. I still remember the THUNK of paperback against the side of the bin. I had read it out of a sense of professional obligation, having worked with and around architects for a long time. For […]
Why We Need Embodied Carbon Benchmarks and Targets in Building Standards and Policies: An Open Letter
Why We Need Embodied Carbon Benchmarks and Targets in Building Standards and Policies: An Open Letter
Architect Kelly Alvarez Doran led a master s studio on what it would take to cut the embodied carbon of Toronto s MURBs in half. Here s what they found.
By
To Canadian Municipalities and Associations of Architects, Engineers, and Planners:
Canada, as well as a growing number of its jurisdictions, has set necessarily ambitious carbon reduction targets as part of an increasingly urgent global bid to achieve climate stability. While the spotlight often falls on the transportation and energy production sectors, 40 percent of global carbon emissions comes from the construction and operation of buildings. We are becoming increasingly aware that a big part of the issue 11 percent of global emissions comes from the embodied carbon of the materials that go into the new buildings constru