Big Easy Redux building strategies
carbon mass timber alternatives crises
james moses
In 2020, the journal Nature reported that, driven by accelerated urbanisation, consumption and the abiding tabula rasa approach of modern development, man-made mass had surpassed biomass for the first time in human history. The weight of plastic alone was greater than that of all land and marine animals combined. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropogenic mass has doubled every 20 years. Today, buildings account for about 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions; building materials are about 11% of that. In 2017, the planet had 2.5 trillion square feet of constructed space, with projections doubling that amount by 2060: the equivalent of building Paris every five days. The amount of carbon we can emit over the next 27 years under the Paris Agreement is 420 gigatons, and we are currently spending 53 gigatons per year. We will hit 1325 GT by 2050. To reduce this, we must reduce carbon that is emitted now . Our interconnected ecological, economic, geopolitical, and social crises are based on decisions made years ago. How, if our understanding of reality had been more sophisticated and there had been the political will, might we have recalibrated. 1
a case study: design of the Merryl and Sam Israel Environmental Science Building This project began in 1997 with Wilson Architects in Boston. The firm was new, founded in 1995 by a number of architects from Payette Associates, which had been awarded the Environmental Science Building commission and which generously allowed the fledgling firm to continue with it as a means to becoming established in its own right. At the time, it was a given that science buildings were ‘energy hogs’ in their operational consumption, driven primarily by the demands of lab exhaust ventilation and electricity required for operating equipment. Energy was relatively inexpensive and energy efficiency was not yet a salient part of design conversations. Lessons that might have been drawn from the era of the oil embargos of the 1970s were distant memories. There was little or no understanding of what Lloyd Alter has since coined ‘upfront carbon’: carbon emitted during material extraction, manufacturing, transportation to the construction site and assembly. 2 Discussions about climate change were just starting. The United States Green Building Council, founded in 1993, was in its infancy and its LEED rating system did not yet exist. The Kyoto Protocol was signed late in 1997. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.
The Merryl and Sam Israel Environmental Science Building , Tulane University, New Orleans, Louiiana. 1997 Wilson Architects, Boston, Massachusetts
South elevation
Wilson Architects
2 Alter, Lloyd. ‘Lloyd Alter On Upfront Emissions’. Green Building Advisor, 2023. https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/ article/lloyd-alter-on-upfront-carbon-emissions. Accessed 1/26/2026
1 Given NASA climatologist James Hansen’s warning to the US Congress in 1988, were the 1990s the moment to take global action to dramatically reduce emissions?
20 on site review 48 :: building materials
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