Volker Hartkopf is Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been involved in a variety of research and action projects designed to improve the efficiency and inhabitability of a built environment, and in efforts to reduce the negative environmental impact of such construction. Professor Hartkopf received his Dr. Ing., (Ph.D.) from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1989, and has been at Carnegie Mellon for 31 years.
Vivian Loftness is Professor of Architecture and former Head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research deals with the performance of a range of building types (from museums to high-tech offices), and the innovative building delivery processes necessary for improving quality in building performance. Professor Loftness received her Masters degree in Architecture from M.I.T. in 1975, and has been at Carnegie Mellon for 22 years. |
Chapter 13, selection: Architecture, the Workplace,
and Environmental Policy Carnegie Mellon University's architecture program, created
in 1912, is one of America's oldest. Yet it has remained innovative in
its curriculum and outreach, integrating new technologies, seeking applications
for its know-how, and fostering new ways of collaborating with industry.
Part of its success over the decades can be attributed to the semi-autonomous
centers and consortiums it has created, each with its own budget and fund-raising
strategies. No centers have been more successful than those designed to
foster collaboration with the building industry. The goal of such collaboration
is to make the workplace more healthy, comfortable, productive, and energy-efficient.
To achieve this, we have been pursuing a long-term plan to re-shape current
practice through a focus on basic and applied studies in building performance
and diagnostics. We believe that this effort by architects at Carnegie
Mellon will contribute significantly to producing a more sustainable environmentand
environmental policyfor America. As the world's environmental ministers met recently to
debate the Kyoto agreement, America argued that reducing carbon dioxide
emissions would reduce the quality of life. We would argue that just the
opposite is true. The built environment is a major factor in global environmental
quality. The building sector consumes almost 40% of all US energy used
to heat, cool, light, and ventilate buildings; it consumes as much as
40% of the wood harvested, 25% of raw material used, and 40% of our landfill.
The built environmentfrom material manufacturing to land-use policyis
also the major factor in greenhouse gas production and outdoor air quality,
producing 4050% of SO2, NO2 and CO2. Inasmuch as buildings are such
a significant factor in the health and productivity of Americans, why,
we ask, is there almost no federal or industrial research on the built
environment? Carnegie Mellon's National Science Foundation (NSF) Center
for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD) and an industry-university-government
consortium, ABSIC, have been addressing these issues now for two decades.
We have joined a number of leading institutions here and abroad in demonstrating
the technical, economic, and social feasibility of creating buildings
that use as little as one-tenth the resources of U.S. average practices,
while substantially improving the quality of life in those buildings.
In our view, these studies and collaborative opportunities offer a way
to make a major U.S. contribution to meeting the Kyoto agreement targets
by improving the quality of our own built environment and developing a
worldwide market for the building industry. |
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