In a recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, Research Director Billie Faircloth asks a simple question: How is knowledge of the environment acquired?  

Excerpt from "Pardon Me, May I Borrow Your Umbrella?"

Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 67, Issue 2, 2013 

The fully considered response to "How is knowledge of the environment acquired?" is not one solely based on synthesis of data collected by a device—a weather station, temperature sensor, or suite of sensors. Nor is it one solely based on a methodology which compresses many years of weather data into one "typical" annual data set. The answer to this question requires us to engage the pursuit of a more thorough epistemic interrogation as it may be hypothesized that for some of us numerical values collected from the environment—irradiance, sky cover, temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and wind direction—are a proxy for our lived-out bodily experiences of the environment. We hypothesize that the more we get to know the metrics of a particular micro or macro climate, the more we may advantageously inhabit it with our bodies and buildings. And this is precisely the hypothesis that should leave us wondering, "What if?"

 
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Many Philadelphians remember reform-minded mayor Richardson Dilworth, the namesake of Dilworth Plaza to the west of City Hall. But the layers of history that underlie this site begin much farther back, with the planning of the city by William Penn in 1683. Since then, it has been a public space under continual transformation—as a public park, a race course, a military campground, the locale of the nation's first urban water works, and starting in the late nineteenth century, the site of City Hall.  
 
William Penn's Plan for Philadelphia (1683) included a centrally located square, called Centre Square, for public buildings. The plan was crafted with surveyor Thomas Holme and used to advertise the city to prospective immigrants in Europe.

Environmental researchers Stephanie Carlisle and Max Piana recently presented green roof research findings at the 11th annual Cities Alive Conference in San Francisco, attended by international green roof professionals, designers, and researchers. The theme of this year's conference was resilience, with presentations and research exploring the many ways in which green roofs and walls contribute to social, environmental, and economic resiliency within our cities. The role of green roofs in urban water management and the potential for agriculturally-based green roofs were topics of particular interest.  

Growing Resilience: Long Term Plant Dynamics and Green Roof Performance

Focusing on studies of two mature green roofs, one intensive and the other extensive, Stephanie and Max discussed changes in green roof vegetation, challenging the audience to consider the long-term dynamics and transformations of these living systems. Questions under consideration included:  

• How does green roof vegetation change over time?
• How does vegetation performance relate to building and site context?
• How do the growth trajectories of an extensive and intensive green roof compare?

The new US embassy in London broke ground today in a ceremony that included Ambassador Matthew Barzun, Director of Overseas Building Operations Lydia Muniz, and Leader of Wandsworth Council Ravi Govindia. The embassy, which will stand on a 4.9-acre site in the Nine Elms neighborhood on the South Bank of the Thames, is expected to be completed in 2017. Its design reflects values of transparency, openness, and equality as well as leading-edge measures of environmental responsibility, including an energy-gathering envelope and on-site water management system.

Tally™ empowers architects to conduct Life Cycle Assessments directly in a Revit Model. 

Philadelphia, PA -- KieranTimberlake announced today the release of Tally™, a new software application that allows designers to measure the environmental impact of building materials directly in a Revit model. The application provides Life Cycle Assessment on demand, backed by the rigor and credibility of GaBi data from PE INTERNATIONAL, a global leader in life cycle information and sustainability consulting. Autodesk, the maker of Revit modeling software, supported development and testing for the application.

In the early morning hours of July 11, a major concrete pour raised progress on the Dilworth Plaza renovation to a new level—quite literally. Previously, work on the plaza at Philadelphia's City Hall had been restricted to the transit concourse below ground. Now, with the addition of a roof over the north concourse, the floor of the plaza has been formed, and work can continue on the two levels simultaneously.

Harvard University's residential housing system includes twelve residential houses, each endowed with its own character and culture that provide undergraduate students with a smaller community within the university as a whole. Following their freshman year in one of the dormitories in Harvard Yard, students transfer to a residential house, where they remain for the rest of their college careers. As part of a larger House Renewal project at Harvard, we recently completed a full renovation of Stone Hall (formerly Old Quincy Hall), a project which improved the living spaces within the building and added social spaces and a smart classroom in the previously underutilized basement.  
 
The building is five stories, each of which includes two historic fireplaces—used for heating in the past but now decorative. Early in the design process, a desire emerged for a graphic treatment representing the history of the house to be placed above the mantles of these eight fireplaces. Through a brainstorming process involving members of both Harvard University and KieranTimberlake, we developed the idea to create sculptural wall panels using thousands of old room keys used by former residents.

KieranTimberlake researcher Ryan Welch presented a paper on BIM-integrated environmental impact assessment at the 29th annual PLEA (Passive and Low Energy Architecture) Conference in Munich. PLEA 2013 brought together architects, engineers, and academic researchers from over 50 countries to present research around the theme of Energiewende (German for "energy transition"), which considers the shift to a low- or zero-carbon economy. Research topics explored a range of scales, from the human body to the urban environment, and examined sustainability through both cultural and technological lenses.  
 
"Quantifying the Embodied Environmental Impact of Building Materials During Design," coauthored by Roderick Bates, Stephanie Carlisle, Billie Faircloth, and Ryan Welch, examines the potential for architects to consider embodied environmental impacts as an integral part of their design process. The paper lays out a methodology for resolving the discrepancy between the abstract representation of materials in BIM and the higher resolution of materials required for Life Cycle Assessment. When combined with life cycle inventory data, this information allows architects to understand and refine their designs through the lens of environmental impact. 
 
While approaches to reducing operational energy are well established within the discipline of architecture, methods for quantifying embodied environmental impacts of building materials have yet to gain traction within the architectural, engineering, construction community due to the difficulty in quantifying building materials and the high cost and limited availability of pertinent life cycle inventory data. Our presentation served as a prescient counterpoint to the operational energy discourse of the conference—and in his closing remarks, Douglas Mulhall posed the quantification of building materials and their impacts as the paramount challenge for next year's PLEA conference.