We enjoyed an invigorating few days experiencing Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) for the first time at ETH Zürich’s Hoenggerberg campus.
Prof. Demi Fang presented preliminary work on bottom-up estimates of the gross floor area in the United States building stock (paper info here).
The conference was an outstanding opportunity to connect with familiar and new colleagues across the fields of reuse, embodied carbon, social dimensions of sustainability, and building stock modeling.
In the opening keynote, Prof. Daniel Barber of TU Eindhoven urged us to consider the global inequity of thermal comfort, in line with his team’s “Terms and Conditions” exhibit at the Venice Biennale:
“While we’ve been conditioning buildings, we have been conditioning ourselves.”
Those of us struggling to sleep without air conditioning the previous night during one of the hottest nights in Zurich were especially quickly humbled.
In another panel moderated by Dr. Niko Heeren on science-society cooperation through science communications, filmmaker Lars Jessen reminded the room full of academics that stories can be “fear machines” just as much as they are “dream factories”, evoking bell hooks:
“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”
A site tour of Müllerstrasse by Ilmer Thies offered a local glimpse into a conscientious and innovative renovation of a 1980s office building, including a structural reconfiguration that introduced tension ties to support slab edges, and windows with liquid crystals that could be activated to adjust solar shading.
Structural Futures Lab 