As the power grid becomes cleaner and buildings more energy efficient, operational emissions decrease, becoming a negligible proportion of a building’s life cycle emissions. At the same time, upfront and end-of-life (demolition and disposal) emissions grow as a share of total life cycle emissions and rightfully draw increased scrutiny. Even as the grid becomes cleaner, building construction occurs downstream of extractive and industrial processes and transportation. Until those sectors are carbon free, buildings will not be. I want to focus on the two building systems that contain 50- 75% of a building’s upfront carbon: the structure and envelope, and reconsider decisions made in the late 1990s without concern for those emissions. Properly designed and constructed, these systems should also be the longest lasting among the so-called shearing layers of a building - an idea developed by British architect Frank Duffy. 3
Carbon Leadership Forum, the Time Value of Carbon, Foundations, structure and exterior envelope are responsible for the majority of a building’s upfront carbon emissions.
How might the architectural drivers of the decisions made in 1997 be addressed in the same building today?
The Environmental Science Building was designed for a long life. If the idea of the hundred-year building was not explicitly discussed, the Vitruvian triad was certainly in the minds of the design team. Laboratory design lends itself to a repetitive structural module, generous floor-to-floor heights, and optimised daylighting. The building re-configures one end of an historic quadrangle (right) , masking an existing, relatively mute 1970s era pre-cast concrete clad science building. It was believed that durability, usefulness, and beauty would lead to a long-lived building.
Shearing layers of change: because of different rates of change of the components, a building is always tearing itself apart.
The Environmental Science Building (orange) re-configures Tulane’s Academic Quad, while creating a narrow, shaded courtyard running east to west between itself and the existing Stern Hall
3 Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn . Viking, 1994, pp.12-13.
22 on site review 48 :: building materials
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