 Good afternoon folks. It's a pleasure to be here with such a great group of experts in many different facets of our topic today And I come With the declaration up front that you've heard from some previous presenters that embodied energy is not a field that I Have much experience with and so I'm learning a lot today But also hoping that I can contribute a little bit to thinking about what I have called provisionally And wrestled a little bit with energy time Which is a way of describing Maybe three different things one is the temporality of different types of energy This is one big part of embodied energy analysis is to help us recognize how many different types of energy are at stake in a building And embodied energy extends that temporality to Extremely long intervals. We've talked a lot about building lifespan But we've also alluded to materials life cycle and ultimately the temporal framing of embodied energy is geological and cosmic Which is sometimes hard to fathom And energy time might also be a way of describing the Anthropocene the era in which humans have become geological agents Transforming the planet's atmosphere oceans and climate chiefly through our use of fossil fuel energy And I think more colloquially that energy time is as good a name as any for this particular moment in architecture Beginning I would say in the 1930s with roots deeper into the enlightenment, but really I would say cresting in the 70s in one way and then again today and perhaps in the future A time when energy comes to the fore in our thinking about architecture and society And so in that sense we're all living in a kind of time of energy As a human preoccupation and basis for practice for practice And I like embodied energy what little I know of it Because it's deeply historical and as someone working in the history and theory of architecture I appreciate the way the long duration of embodied energy Is an opening on to multidimensional Historical inquiry that we can think the history of materials processes and energies In dialogue with the other kinds of historical and theoretical inquiry that we maybe are more familiar with in this discipline And that might include the duration of long-dure a historiography of trying to think about large-scale changes in populations and economies and Modes of production, but also material economic social cultural and and political histories I haven't done enough work in this area to demonstrate this as a fully fleshed out model this kind of interweaving of multiple different Ways of thinking energy historically But I'll draw on my research to maybe open some questions about especially the political economies of energy that I feel like I recognize when we talk about this topic and I have a little kind of Profitory section on system boundaries and then two other parts to to my remarks today So the first thing that really strikes me about embodied energy is that it reframes the system boundaries through which we think about space as we've just been discussing Time as forest and I are turning to and I would say For me, it's especially interesting the question of knowledge And and I think of this partly as an architectural educator asking frequently What knowledge do architects need in order to practice today and tomorrow to practice? We might say in the Anthropocene That's one of the overarching questions shaping today's conference, which is a mini curriculum of sorts Outlining many Several key forms of expertise that David and others recognize we and our students and our successors in practice need to Be aware of embodied energy prompts us to think at these very large temporal scales Focusing us on Not only the this expanded Temporal chronology as I suggested but also expanding the system boundaries of architectural knowledge I thought about this last year when I was asked to review a book called sustainable urban metabolism by paulo furrow and john Fernandez a book that draws on industrial ecology ecological economics and urban metabolism to to model a strategy for cybernetic urban management According to the authors. We need to simulate metabolic processes at large scale in order to understand and control Four fundamental flows or cycles that shape urban metabolism water materials nutrients and of course energy Urban metabolism modeling Quantifies and analyzes these flows and simulates them in the hope of supporting political decision-making that will increase their efficiency And promote urban sustainability understood as the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the earth forever The book is full of equations like these the first one describes greenhouse gas emissions for a process The second one describes the material composition of a product and the third describes the material intensity of an economic activity I have approximately zero ability to make such calculations In writing my review. I couldn't even type them. I don't even know. I don't even know how you write that I had to get the type setters to do it. Um at the journal Because it went way beyond my expertise And that I found fascinating, you know challenging frustrating and also inspiring to think that My discipline is being pushed in ways that maybe were happening before but I could could comfortably ignore um and that uh This was a manifestation to me of some of the new kinds of knowledge of that That are important for architectural education and practice And that's just those equations are just the tip of my ignorance iceberg I soon encountered a whole bunch of acronyms that I never had heard heard of before That that are part of this simulation and modeling practice and that some folks in the room are I think expert at working with But reading the book also highlighted for me the extent to which historical and theoretical expertise Are essential to deciding the meaning and the implications of energy analysis and urban metabolism And especially in in helping us understand how particular approaches to modeling and managing energy and other resources How they are You know politically motivated toward particular visions of what it means for humans and non-humans to flourish So consider what ferrao and fernandez would have us do with these analytics They say we should plug them into this dps ir framework another another great acronym In which drivers of change exert pressures on the environment changing its state which impacts ecosystems and human populations Triggering responses that feedback into the system in other words a cybernetic We can recognize this as a cybernetic feedback loop Inspired by those developed in the 1950s and 60s when architects and planners mobilized Cybernetics and systems theory in pursuit of self-regulating home homeostatic buildings and cities And of course, this is also a theory of history. It's an explanation of how change happens according to a kind of systems model and It's it's uh embedded in it is also perhaps a theory of governance of of how we should govern ourselves It it it lends itself to a very technocratic approach one that foregrounds the agency of technical experts Using forms of knowledge inaccessible to broader publics. In other words, it could be a very regressive model for urban governance And so this reviewing this book helped me realize that in addition that we need the forms of technical analysis Described by ferrao and fernandez as well as by some of today's presenters We need systems thinking that operates at planetary scale and across geological time frames And at the same time we need the critical and historical analysis That comes from a kind of humanistic expertise in architecture so that we can describe the implications the political ecologies political economies social and cultural implications of different energy strategies And I and so I thought I would mention since this work happened largely here at columbia that one very nice model for thinking this way I've learned from is the the underdome guide to energy reform published last year by eric carver Hello, eric And by janette kim who co-directed the urban landscape lab here and who i'm very happy to to report is joining me at cca as a New faculty member in the fall And eric and janette in the underdome guide modeled different spaces of possibility For energy agendas in architecture and urbanism around four major categories each of which they modeled in a kind of um x y space so power Different approaches to power to territory to lifestyle and to risk and I I won't go into this work Which is probably familiar to many folks here at columbia, but just to say that this kind of uh Unpacking of the of the kind of social and political implications of different energy strategies energy agendas I think is a really valuable complement to Some of the innovations and and new analytical frameworks that are emerging So the second theme I wanted to hit is is this idea A lot of my research recently has been about sustainability as a government as a governance modality As a way a kind of politics and and way that we govern ourselves and are governed And i'm just going to touch briefly on four themes sumptuary regulation technocracy Ecomodernism and ecological modernization that are concepts that I find Coming up we currently so I like sumptuary regulation because it's a super arcane term for something that's I think generally familiar Which is the practice of regulating consumption of luxury goods It has a deep history in the western tradition and also in other world traditions think about things like the the restriction of purple as being a signal being reserved for the use of the emperor in in ancient rome or restrictions on who could wear Gold in renaissance italy on their person or or adorn their carriages and And costumes with gold as a mark of status or in in ancien regime france The the use of the classical orders was restricted to residences for the nobility. These are all examples of sumptuary regulation They can become quite arcane at different moments in society We have them today in many different forms including Including taxes and laws regulating alcohol consumption of alcohol tobacco Uh and energy with energy codes And so sumptuary regulation is a way of describing the laws and the cultural practices that That combine moral and economic logics to Regulate our consumption of things deemed Luxurious or uh in some other way Special and of course these regulations are over determined by anthropological and sociological factors Calculations of political economy and imperatives that reproduce or or challenge structures of class gender ethnicity sexuality not to mention hierarchies of knowledge and authority so Uh, I think of this this is a kind of theme that I feel like I have recognized in many approaches to designing energy and using energy I'm going to talk about buckminster fuller someone i've recognized as a kind of sumptuary designer if you will And fuller was very strongly shaped in Around 1930-32-33 By his friendship with leaders of the technocracy movement and this intellectual and political movement that started during world war one by engineers and peaked during the great depression Came out of scientific management experts from taylorist societies as well as progressive era social reforms Its advocates believed that new industrial methods had made possible levels of production sufficient to create an economy of universal abundance But that this potential was withheld by the selfishness of finance capitalists who maximized profit Rather than distributing the benefits of new technology and also by politicians who served the interest the vested interests of owners Before those of consumers This theory was amplified into a social program here at columbia by engineering professor walter rattan stroke And by his colleagues howard scott a technician and the journalist stewart chase among others These men sought to put engineers and other technical specialists at in charge of the economy in a kind of command economy system With the idea that they would rationalize economic production to maximize outputs and to balance Production and consumption for the kind of benefit of all They they believed that this Technocratic administration would obsolete existing economic and political systems that were based on scarcity Buckminster fuller was a friend of both chase and scott and scott in particular shaped fuller's practice For instance introducing him to the idea of energy and the practice of energy accounting and surveying That fuller adapted One more image of from technocracy Fuller adapted technocratic strategies of modeling the economy and projecting its future In these dimaxian charts of industrial progress that were the beginning of a lifelong process of Accounting and surveying and mapping Um and that led to things like fuller's world energy map the world resource inventory that Underwrote the world games that mason talked about And led to things like fuller's profile of the industrial revolution a way of describing technological progress and its geometrically accelerating rate as he always asserted and his goal quite explicitly was to accelerate the curve of energy efficiency and economic output to increase well-being for for all and that mode of thinking is Quite strong in contemporary eco modernist thought some of you may have seen this eco modernist Manifesto published a year ago that outlines a mode of That argues that if we're going to preserve nature and achieve sustainability we need to intensify Urbanization agricultural production and energy production and to decouple human well-being from its negative environmental impacts For instance by densifying and urbanizing at an even faster rate in order to preserve reduced human impacts on arable land and also on forest and wilderness And so they see the potential for a good Anthropocene Anthropocene era in which humans are more intentionally manipulative than ever of climate environment and ecology With specific social objectives in mind. It's a compelling idea But also one with very technocratic dimensions that raises a lot of open questions about political economy and justice And I would describe You know it tilts toward the goal of ecological modernization Which is a way of describing moments when the pursuit of sustainability or ecological restoration Becomes a form of economic development Motivated more by the goal of generating economic growth and and maintaining the kind of profit Ratios than by by extra economic non economic motivations And I really can't if I start going too deeply into buckminster fuller and norman foster I'll I'll never stop talking So let me just click through a couple of Things to describe two concepts that I've that I've written about in recent essays one is reflexive modernism The which is a way of describing buckminster fuller's attempt to to build Reflexivity a kind of self optimization into design and also to trigger societal reflection that will lead to Rationalization not by top-down technocratic command and control mechanisms But through voluntary adoption by consumers inspired by the beauty and and Efficiency of designs like his dimaxian house and the second is risk design, which is a way of describing architecture that that Works with our perception the ways we imagine and understand risk including climate risk to for generative purpose and Rather than walk through these Let me just note that in in if you want to pursue this further in articles on buckminster fuller and the dimaxian house I've I've shown that fuller's approach to design came out of an attempt to market Technocratic efficiencies through liberal mechanisms to make them Appealing to consumers so that people would voluntarily buy into a project that would converge toward the goal of systemic Rationalization that the technocrats propose to achieve through top-down mechanisms And that's one way of understanding a great deal of fuller's work some of which we've discussed today and That norman foster in projects like the gherkin foster and fuller collaborated Late in one man's career early in the others The gherkin reanimates some of the strategies and iconography of Fuller's work in pursuit of of managing the perception of risk of several different kinds terrorism risk In the city of london climate change risk through its much-vaunted Mixed mode ventilation strategy and supposed Energy efficiencies and above all economic risk as it helped defend the city of london's financial industry against competition from canary wharf frankfort paris and other centers of expertise and unleashed zoning change in the city of london that allowed the redevelopment of the city to to to Produce all of these tall towers and so risk design is a way of describing the process by which Concern about climate change gets gets interwoven with opportunistic agendas for redeveloping the city of london or in the dry line Lower Manhattan and in the name of pursuing resilience and sustainability We end up authorizing massive social and economic and urban restructuring and so for us they look forward to Hearing from you and discussing It is a great honor and a pleasure to be here and i'm looking forward to the conversation and to respond to all the Speakers who have prefaced their talks with their lack of expertise and embodied energy uh in the course i teach i taught embodied energy last week And all of you have demonstrated demonstrated yourselves to be Experts beyond any of the students that i have in my class, so I don't think any of you have anything to worry about and in fact I don't think i'm going to be able to be nearly as eloquent as you all have been In the discussion we've already started today and that i've enjoyed very much about embodied energy Now in a couple emails jonathan and i exchanged I eventually landed on this strange title with a very practical component Discussing useful life versus usefulness Sort of the context of some of my work and very practical aspects of my engineering background And then as we discussed this idea of energy and time I'm very interested in entropy and I came up with this concept of embodied entropy as relating to an architecture of moving parts Which is the part of architecture that I deal with most and kind of reflecting a lot on what michelle has discussed and hopefully Um, we'll have a good discussion later in the in this context of Systems and buildings, but first The class i the picture i presented last week in my class To discuss the fact that we all hate styrofoam And one of the you know core Values that i was instilled with as a child was that Styrofoam is going to be in the landfill forever and it's the most evil thing But when you start to do these calculations and use these tools of embodied energy You find that there's some nuances to this so if we add up all these numbers I'm not going to dwell on the on the table necessarily, but if we go specifically to foam at the bottom you can see that The mega joules per cup right is very is very small And then when we make a plot right of all these different types of of glasses And the main thing i want to point out is the difference between for example your reusable ceramic versus your styrofoam, which is evil The foam right if you say it only uses that much energy that the Point two mega joules per cup Then every time you use one you throw it away right, but if you've only used your glass cup Say a few times and your big cluts like me or you have four daughters that break your cups a lot It's not good when you're way up there at the top of the plot because that Cup took a lot of energy to make Now this is also an illustration of the sort of fundamental principle of embodied energy we talking about and we had a conversation At lunch about the challenge that mega joules Per cup is a very specific thing when refers specifically to energy alone And I think it's wonderful that we've had all these speakers that helped to elucidate the many nuances and other Directions and important components that are brought about through life cycle assessment many of these things that jonathan talked about um But styrofoam right is also one of the bands of my own personal existence in my projects at princeton So I bought 12 24 foot long pieces of styrofoam Because it was the only means to an end for the type of research that I'm interested in in terms of energy And heat transfer and thermodynamics. So again things that are active and moving And in order to create the form I wanted it just so happens that architects know a lot about hot wire cutting And so hanging out with with architects and telling them I really wanted this very specific form They said we'll make that for you on our big robot and I said that's great So I ended up cutting all this styrofoam into great pieces and the interesting thing though Is what I learned is this was the moment where I finally let go of my hate of styrofoam because all those off cuts You see on the sides All we had to do is send them back to the same company that supplied us those 24 foot long Pieces of styrofoam because it turns out when you buy a lot of styrofoam You have a source that knows a lot about recycling it And at the same time right we created this form that I wanted and we won't go into the details about what this thing Does here that's for another day when we can talk more about The physical aspects of energy not the embodied aspects But today in terms of the concept of how do you make this form reflect energy, right? So in the context of what michelle talked about and and also mason Reference to the the campfire. How do we make a cooling radiant campfire? You need a very specific geometry But in the end research has a certain duration at the end of the research I had to figure out what to do with this thing And luckily styrofoam is actually pretty light So you have a 20 foot wide dome and you can pick it up with a bunch of students And carry it up to one of their eating clubs and donate it to them and then it takes on another life And so this is sort of was my reconciliation with this idea of the styrofoam cup And understanding how uses right the useful life of something how many times you can actually take it and use it over and over again Um really plays a huge role in the sort of that denominator of what is the impact Of a material and I don't know how long this thing will sit in the eating club. Here's our friend From penn bill brong explaining the science of the no longer scientific experiment that now sits in the backyard as it's been Decapitated of its cooling system, but still provides this interesting story and an interesting additional life then But coming back to the reason why we move this is interesting because it has a direct relationship to The facilities that we need then to do these types of research process right a laboratory sitting next door Where buckminster fuller in the 1950s actually built some of his Large domes and structures and what we wanted to do is figure out a way to create a new laboratory Right with the minimal amount of energy and this is something then that uh david vengerman and his Um Firm the living have been working with us at Princeton to develop this new lab And one of the hardest parts of the process was to convince them that we should not put giant steel members But giant wood ones instead and I think he already alluded to this in his opening talk about the amount of energy in wood Being close in terms of the strength right but when it comes to steel the emissions really are where you have a bunch of excess And interestingly enough one thing that was a Counterintuitive aspect of wood versus steel that was discussed in the project is that wood actually is much more fire safe than steel So there are a lot of arguments about the contextualization of a material and sort of Beyond just the embodied energy, but it's it's lifespan, right? And if you want to talk about the embodied energy over a lifespan What are the things that this is at risk for in terms of how the end of life phase comes about? and in the context of how we think of Old buildings and wood, right? So how do we conceptualize this glulam technology right in terms of large beams in the context of this being an old warehouse? um Of a one of our collaborators that in Trenton Where these 50 feet long beams are solid pine and you can no longer ever ever buy one of those ever again There's this this product is not available on the in the wood market anymore And so There wasn't glulam historically so in another context sort of putting these new technologies that allow us to again Span using wood in ways that the the forestry industry no longer has access to this This size of material are really contextualizes how we think about that Long life that ability to perceive the future right and in sort of as we move forward in time So with useful life being one of the themes my favorite useful life Icon is the pantheon's right at the the parthenon the pantheon dome being this concrete structure that's was for Thousands of years the largest dome in in the world And made out of concrete which today is the only material we use more Which is only used less than water so we use Concrete more than anything else other than water in terms of materials on the planet and the the Thing that's the same between the concrete in the dome and the concrete that in the pantheon dome and that we use today Is that it's a pozzolanic reaction right that causes these molecules to stick together and And what we don't have though is in the terms of how long this is lasted right? There's not an energy savings, but now there's a lot of new ways that we can think about Concrete and insulation and foam and form Like expanding concrete and then all of a sudden you have to start thinking about well There is sort of an energy component here and and do we start to think about the embodied energy in the context of its return So the eroy thing that I threw up there really fast Has to do with what is the return on energy of putting this added effort into this material this added? material quality of insulation and I think this was alluded to already So i'll jump through this really fast But the idea being that in this piece of insulation if it's half a half a meter thick The last 10 centimeters of insulation does the same amount of energy savings as the first half centimeter, right? Because as I add more insulation, there's less and less heat loss to reduce So it's this hyperbolic function So it's important in the context of how much insulation do we want and we already addressed this question of How do we think about the materials that are appropriate in scale and and embodied energy Versus the the usefulness of them So how much insulation do we really need and this passive house story was perfect in sort of the context of Choosing a point in this curve where we're really getting the best bang for our buck and the same thing goes for solar panels Right, so you have these different types with different efficiencies here monocrystalline or polycrystalline versus amorphous But amorphous panels you can make basically the same way as plastic and the the crystalline ones require huge energy inputs So almost double the the payback period yet when we talk about what we actually install Right, so this is the size of central park On the right you see the size of central park pasted over the largest solar plant we have in the us And what we installed there was the expensive panels, right? We could have installed the amorphous panels and just use that more area because if we're in central park You would want silicone panel the most efficient to use the area as efficiently as possible because the area is super valuable But we don't necessarily always think about the opportunities in terms of space and land use the desert, you know Maybe we should have considered what the embodied energy and the payback over the period of that panel is And really one of my biggest conundrums is always thinking could we ever really build a solar panel factory that just ran on solar panels And in that context, how do we think of time moving forward? Can we really change this material or manufacturing environment where those materials we're producing that have specific embodied energies Are actually contributing to the production cycle and that we're not bringing in these external negative impacts Of fossil fuel and carbon emissions that are really the things that are driving our motivation to improve or the reason we're here today discussing embodied energy, so Entropy, right? This is the thing that frustrates all of us that As we move forward in time things will always tend to disperse and dissolve and come to sort of Equilibriums and so in this simple diagram I'm just illustrating that if you have a box and all the particles are on one side It could be anything you imagine my bad breath up here. It's diffusing into the air. There's no way I'm going to spontaneously make it come back and prevent it from getting to you But If I wanted to do that I'd have to have some energy input So this this dispersion that happens through time as we move forward Is something that fundamentally happens to materials and is fundamentally part of heat transfer in the environment And so entropy is fundamentally linked to the forward direction of time and embodied energy is fundamentally linked to this view backwards But both those things arrive together at the present, right? And there's an irreversibility In both the way that the products have been created and the way that we Currently use our products in terms of moving forward in time So we go back to concrete very quickly And think about how it moves forward in time There's one property that is very very standard and that is the Diffusion rate of oxygen through concrete. It diffuses at a certain speed And it's dependent on the factors, mainly the humidity of the air in around the concrete will determine how fast oxygen gets to that rebar Now the pantheon did not have any rebar, but all of the structures we build today Like the famous ruin porn of the Packard plant Contained steel. This was one of the first reinforced concrete structures And over the period of about 100 to 200 years no matter what we do There will be this diffusion of oxygen through our concrete that is reinforced Which will eventually cause the steel to rust and it's something we have to address And the fact that as we move forward, right and and have the Dissolution of our structures. They also sort of cause A shift in the mindset of what is the value now of this infrastructure Is there and I wish Jorge was here to have the conversation about the preservation of these types of places And why people put hot tubs in front of them. I was there a week ago in the snow and This this structure now is being purchased by a I think it's a Peruvian investor a Chilean investor and they're going to redevelop it But to what extent right has this material process that that was developed by con By julius con and then implemented by albert con in this structure How much has it self limited it by the materiality by this diffusion this sort of entropy Of the of the material embodiment itself eventually The steel will rust and how we address that is is a big question That is fundamentally related to that embodied energy or the embodied physics of that material But to really understand it Is a challenge because the whole analysis process of life cycle assessment and embodied energy It I think everybody's addressed the fact that you can go on forever You can talk about you know the the wearing of the soles of my shoes as I bought the styrofoam cup that all these indirect You know relationships as you get out in sort of time in the design process. It's really difficult to be sure that you Use these as effectively as as possible So that you can create the knowledge that you that is useful, but not at the same time constraining yourself So this last Part that I kind of were rushing to get to is more I think hopefully relating to also Something that michelle was discussing in terms of how energy is embodied and located In time now in our context of duration that we'll be discussing And the idea that in the context of time things are moving and for me I'm interested in dynamics and moving systems And buildings like the seagram building that have a lot of energy moving through them But how do we embody where those moving parts go? And if we look again also here at the the lever house and look at the stripes So what do the stripes really represent? What do they embody in terms of the physical structure? And for me this was an interesting moment in sort of discovery where in space in a building There's a bunch of embodied space now in the physical infrastructure And it's not just about the fact that we make these ducts out of steel But it's about they impact the design process and there's an opportunity for us to to interface and to address Issues of embodied energy in the context of volumes directly not necessarily just quantities Right because I can integrate these two systems together such that the concrete Is optimized and that we void the center of the slab where the mass isn't needed and maintains its strength And then I use that same void to move the air around the building and in that regard I've created less Material to create the same service whereas if I just do a material analysis I would say okay the steel is still bad and the concrete is still bad And and you really have to talk about it from the structural engineering side of of the Analysis and the mechanical engineering side who may be working in different parts But I think with tools like like stephanie's there may be opportunities to start to really combine these more holistic perspectives and understand Where this efficient space really happens right in this building that dirk and I have worked in in singapore There's this huge excess of space two meters just to supply mechanical systems And and you can save a lot of embodied energy in the reduction of the materials just through a design step by itself And so lastly I want to come back to wood very quickly Because something David and I have been talking about a lot lately and also I think michelle will be able to give me a lot of advice on so David introduced me to this process that you can sandblast wood and it looks really really fantastic And depending on the the grain you can remove that soft grain in the middle And I was really fascinated about the idea that in the picture you saw in michelle's slides of this boundary layer That all that the the surface condition is another part of the equation of that heat loss right and it's called the roughness And the roughness changes the rate at which heat transfer happens and all these so By playing around with the surface roughness you could in fact play around with the heat transfer through a material So completely independent of this u-value and the thermal conductivity of said wood We can now play with fine grain or wide grain wood and look at how if we push air across it that roughness may change Where these separations happen and there's these two kinds of turbulence That are influenced by the viscous forces and their inertial forces that cause big and small eddies and some that will go inside These little crevices and and it's been fascinating, but it's really hard I mean the the result is that we don't really know how this shape is affected And and we need to do a lot more analysis to figure out whether If and when we put it on the side of this building What are the kind of sensors and ways that we can try and quantify that so that that material can also have The opportunity to have its performance embodied in a variable that isn't necessarily part of the standard analysis So with that I'll close just by saying that today at Princeton We're doing the big earth day and I think we haven't said happy earth day enough to each other today And I was asked for earth day to make a solar picnic table For the students and I went online. Well, I was actually I said help them buy one and I went and I found all of them And I decided that I didn't really like any of them and I Sheila hadn't shown me the soft rocker many times and it's fantastic So we took inspiration that wood is important and in terms of embodied energy What I wanted to point out is now these solar panels Cost a dollar a watt and forever that was like the threshold We're going to get there Everybody's going to buy solar panels But all the infrastructure that supports them the this aluminum profile It causes a huge amount now of of the embodied energy that these panels use and this panel Right was just a piece of plastic behind it and we could bend it and it only weighed Four pounds these ones weighed 35 pounds each And so this one we can just slide on a simple wooden track that we we glue lamb together Ourself manually to make the arch which is the sun path which then results in the laptops always being shaded And all a student has to do is come Analogly move the panel to where the shadow hits the table and then it will be inherently in the position perpendicular to the sun And so the students can finally learn how sun tracking works, which is something I've been trying to teach them forever And in this regard I sort of end by saying I hope that embodied energy can also be something that becomes part of pedagogy And that we sort of all develop a relationship with energy that goes beyond just equations But rather also extends out into Sort of our physical design intuitions and how we come up with ideas for making things in a way that are more Sustainable in the future time while also being understanding of the past time it took to make the materials. Thank you So I was going to ask a question first in the terms of this Luxury consumption the sumtree sumtree consumption And I was hoping you could help me convince everybody that air conditioning itself is sumtree consumption What do you think? Uh, I think it's been very interesting to me how we Air conditioning is pretty fascinating and it's one of the one thing that we haven't talked a lot about today is the is the changing our parameters of comfort or Investing in low tech kind of permaculture strategies. We generally the conversation today has focused on the high tech We're going to innovate our way out. We're going to you know, the kind of Design and technological innovation will let us do more with less Perpetually the kind of which was Fuller's proposition as well But there's a whole conversation of course around air conditioning. That's about changing our standards of comfort and becoming Revisiting ashray standards and and some of the other parameters that guide decision making And learning from of very diverse Ranges of comfort. There's also a really interesting thing. Sheila brought up the The idea of vibrant matter and a little bit to the the agency of matter And I can find no better example to help me understand that concept than chlorofluorocarbons something that we Began to manipulate to provide certain environmental control and thermal comfort standards And which then unbeknownst to us started changing the planet It's a it's a that that's a beautiful nexus for us to I think learn from But I don't I don't know that air conditioning is is really regulated in In a way that treats it as luxury yet. Exactly. I think it's the standards. That was the answer That I was you got it. I mean, I'm super interested in ashray 55 and how it Defines what we think is comfortable and michelle murphy's book on sick building syndrome Yeah I is a beautiful example methodologically for me of how you can study energy and technology In a way that thinks also about gender and race and the changing character of labor and all these things embedded in in one another So sick her building sick building syndrome and the her book sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty is I think Exemplary of knitting together many of these different strands of analysis I have other questions What are you all thinking? Yeah fascinated by the pictures you are showing book on three and As it wears out, it's as it wears out. It's not so usable Is there any thinking of how to think about materials that are more perhaps recyclable or Yeah, I think you're hitting on the the Problem of composites. I think I don't think anybody's addressed that directly today But it's one of the fundamental challenges in any life cycle End-use stage, right? So when you have carbon fiber, for example, which is very popular and I love my carbon fiber racing bike But if I wanted to give that to someone to reuse it The epoxy and the carbon fibers are totally, you know interwoven and you're not going to get them apart again to make a new Carbon fiber structure whereas, you know materials like steel are pretty recyclable. So if you look at the embodied Energy right up the building wood versus steel if you have recycled steel A glulam versus steel the glulams. I think only like 30 or 40 percent, but it's still better But recycled steel is not terrible So these composites though, whether it be that or rebar in concrete, which is another big challenge You can still bust it up and use the rock as aggregate That's the most common reuse for concrete is you put it in new cement to make new concrete with that aggregate the steel though Can then be melted down and recycled But the separation is very energy intensive and you have to include that in the end-use phase of any analysis of that material So yeah composites are a challenge And do you you alluded in one of our exchanges to the the impending end of reinforced concrete? Yeah, I but I need to talk to more scientists That do research on this diffusion rate, but if you read wikipedia The it has an it has a lifespan of of reinforced concrete that says 100 to 120 years And so I just thought that was fascinating because it was invented about 100 years ago So I don't know whether everything's going to fall down or whether we've really figured out how to fix it But that's why I wanted more preservationists around to tell me whether they think there's a way Because I'm not I don't know how to fix stuff. It's breaking Jonathan this question is for you. I found the The narrative that you were telling about about modeling really really evocative and it seemed like you were really setting up we put out this proposition that systems modeling and A technocratic approach. Let's say ought to be balanced by humanism Right, and I think you really emphasized in the telling of that story Modeling as an inaccessible and top-down mechanism Which I think it often is but then there's talent No, no, no, that's no that's not where I'm going No, I but I'm curious actually about if you're familiar with or what your thoughts are about There's another brand of systems dynamics modeling That's actually very very similar But has been used for the last 15 years to build to do consensus-based modeling The hallmark in the classic examples being fishery management Some types of wildlife management It's not a story that's I hear architects talking about very much I don't know if you're familiar with that form of modeling, but whether you are or not. I'm curious if Do you see Technical modeling is being inherently top-down Do you think there's a richer story there or was that Kind of a binary that you're trying to place or just a specific example with buggy I I don't know about the models you're describing and they're they're very intriguing So I'm coming partly from my close analysis of the gherkin Where the widespread belief that that building models strategies for reducing operational energy Is fallacious and it's based on simulations that promised a certain scenario But which didn't correspond to practice. So the the the building Management system Was never as far as I could tell empirically validated the simulations were not Tested and within two years of the building opening. They stopped using the mixed Mode ventilation anyway because tenant complaints Liability concerns because one of the windows broke and fell to the pavement and could have killed somebody And tenants started walling off the spiraling atrium and stipulating in their leases That the building could not open the windows in their segment of the building. So It's a fiction and I think we can recognize that with such a low net to gross ratio That building has massive embodied energy per usable square foot. So It seemed to me that you know, we the the the modeling Maybe not intentionally but not either incidentally sort of Let us to believe that by redeveloping the city of london We could somehow address climate change Which but but the world game is a is a good example of maybe a middle ground that sounds Maybe a lot like the models you're describing In the sense that it was intended as a tool of governance And as a way of bringing broad constituencies into reflection and deliberation about strategies for making the world work better for everybody In some of the instances that I've looked at I mean the problem with fuller is that he really believed in one best way He believed That there was an optimal solution and he was trying to get people to come around to it And I I think in the end was not I mean obviously was not very open to Real deliberation every studio he taught somehow ended up with a dome as the optimal solution Even though they're manifestly bad at many things So I think these more open deliberative I think though they sound like A mode of simulation that would be very wonderful The bottom-up is really hard to be honest about the extent of the assumptions we make in order to Create these building models or the or the commissioning of the buildings sort of they all are inherently Built upon a large set of assumptions and the sensitivity of the outputs those assumptions is very rarely honestly delivered So for us, I was really interested in the way you positioned embodied energy and operating energy in a kind of temporal Context and I guess the question I'm going to ask is to pull this idea of space and time together with a question of air conditioning Ascentuary As sumptuous oh right by virtue of that so um I would argue that Most of the well the discourse around embodied energy for sure, but the whole discourse of technological process Has privileged Tangible assets as the basis of the economy And one of the difficulties I think that we have is architects is that we would like to insist on that and we see The question of sustainability as one that is always about tangibility And the idea of a service economy as being antithetical to that What's interesting to me is the idea that the intangible economy is absolutely necessary to our being able to afford to Upgrade our world to the point that we need it and also to convince in a geopolitical context people that this is important So this is where air conditioning comes in I've seen uh Research that indicates the extent to which the introduction of air conditioning in singapore per se Increased GNP by orders of magnitude So if we think about this very delicate balance between embodied energy Operating energy and intangible assets Where essentially does that leave us with a sort of first of all antitechnological discourse and a kind of anti-liberal discourse Oh, man I have a lot of places to go with this Can you answer that in like three three minutes? So I'll start by say I'll start by reiterating What michelle said about perception and sort of the idea from a physiological standpoint and what we maybe haven't talked about today is the Embodied energy of our bodies and that sort of along the lines of the the technology side of ac Whether the fact that we kind of think that the thermostat Which is way back there and on the wall is the only thing in this room That's telling the room whether it's the right temperature. We like and that also assumes that the only thing we feel is air temperature, which is like Absolutely false even ranger bannum knew that even though he missed a few other things, too So then coming to the the problem of the singapore context, right and Lee kuanyu stating to the people that we need 22 22 degrees celsius in order for us to be a productive economy And then having the data that also shows that that works And so folding that back in now with the idea of how does the human body perceive comfort? The fact is the human body does have an optimal functioning rate. So the human body Operates just like an engine. We have a metabolism that is processing energy inputs In the form of carbohydrates those have heat outputs and the rate that our body loses heat Is the that flow of heat through the system is leveraged to run all ourselves run all our thinking And and it can be shown that you're thinking and your cells and your work do work better At these certain temperatures at any certain rates of heat loss now physically and again technologically I can change The way your body loses heat without playing with just air temperature. So there's like six factors Right, I should take my jacket off, but I feel pressured by architects to wear jackets all the time But that's just one my metabolic rate. I just ate lunch that changes how fast I should be losing more heat So I should take my jacket off again because of my metabolic rate And then there's rated heat transfer with all the surfaces and the space There's the amount of air flow that is flowing across me that can be changed and then there's the air temperature And so I think air conditioning right is kind of this The reason that sort of the sumptuary thing is that And I didn't get very angry at the seagrim building, but usually I do Because sort of the and the lever house like the idea that when those buildings were built It was in an era when we could just put whatever brute force system we wanted And the easiest way to make people comfortable was to make the air the right temperature and humidity And we've just been doing it that way ever since then because these really big companies are really really good at making those machines and do that But right now I think the interesting moment would be like if you know the Lee Kuan Yew's son or whoever takes over the singapore right recognizes maybe there's another technological avenue To make people's bodies function as efficiently economically and you know politically without having to Go through the uh conditioning of just air to 22 degrees. So sorry, that was as short as I can do it