Carbon-Smart Buildings & Material

Course description

Carbon-Smart Buildings and Materials helps architects rethink carbon and buildings, shifting from goals for reduction to altogether new opportunities. By examining the full lifecycle of materials, participants will understand how climate change reflects a design failure in the natural carbon cycle—and how architects can restore balance. The course explores why materials matter: their role as scarce natural resources, their high production energy, and their contribution to global waste (50% worldwide). Participants will learn about embodied versus operational carbon, and understanding why embodied carbon—locked in from day one—will represent 57% of a new building's emissions by 2040. The course offers practical strategies for identifying and replacing high-impact materials, reading EPDs, designing for component lifespans, and exploring next-generation solutions like plant-based materials, carbon sequestering technologies, material reuse, and biomaterials that remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Learning Objectives

• Apply carbon-smart design principles to real-world projects: design with flexibility, prioritizing component-specific strategies, and selecting materials that work with—rather than against—the natural carbon cycle.

• Identify high-impact building materials that should be prioritized for carbon reduction in design projects and assess emerging biomaterials and agricultural waste products that can function as replacements.

• Evaluate building components based on their expected lifespans (furnishings, interiors, services, skin, and structure) to prioritize carbon reduction strategies.

• Explain how the building industry disrupts the natural carbon cycle through material extraction, manufacturing, and disposal, and how this disruption contributes to climate change.