 I'm Steve White. It's everybody from the ghost of school here knows, and I know most of you all. I just asked Nate if I could butt in. He was probably going to say something about Trumpco, but I would like to, for those of you who have been here a little while, may have heard me talk a little bit about Trumpco before some of our lectures, but I would like to do it again. Trumpco Roofing and Building Maintenance is an international but mostly North American company doing roofing and sealants. And I know this because when I was 20 and I started working in California for an architecture firm and everything was new to me, one of the things that our office put in all of our specifications relative to roofing was everything had to be Trumpco or equal. And Trumpco was the industry standard then. And they are or certainly are working on it now and advancing all the time. But one of the ways when we first started talking with Trumpco about six years ago now about having a sponsored series, I certainly liked that because I always had worked in an environment where Trumpco or equal is what everybody was supposed to do. And so I love saying that. I hope you are OK with me hearing me say that or saying it again if you've heard me say that before. And Trumpco has been very innovative. And prior to coming to collaborate with Roger Williams, they worked with the University of Toronto Daniels School of Architecture to create a grit lab, a green roof innovation technology lab along with other corporate sponsors. And so what a great thing when they approached or somehow we found each other to talk about something related to sustainability as they had already done at Toronto. And some other things that we've tried to do because we believe in all of this is however good it is for us, we tried to share Trumpco with other places. So we introduced them to some other institutions. Via Leo Ui, we introduced them to the University of Oregon. Via some other colleagues, we introduced them to Clemson and schools around the country in strategic locations with different environments and different roofing needs. Thinking that a collaboration with Trumpco would be a great idea for architecture and for the betterment of innovation in sustainable technologies. So that's what we've been doing. And I appreciate all that air for Trumpco. I really appreciate them in general and also specifically what they've done for the school. Haven't done anything to us. And maybe after the lecture, I can talk a little bit about one of our alums who now works with Trumpco that you'll meet. It all came out of starting with our partnership. So thank you for Trumpco. And thanks for being here. Steve Hughes is here in the front row. And Christian Scungio, who is an alum who now works with Trumpco, take it away, Nate Fash. And thanks for putting up with me. Still imagining Dean White in his 20s. Oh, it's not very hard. OK, so my turn to welcome you all to our final public lecture this semester by our guest tonight, Dr. Holly Samuelson, who I first got to know back in graduate school. Yeah. So just to build on what Steve said, as you may know, this lecture is sponsored by our generous partners at Trumpco who've been inspiring us to welcome some of the most exciting lectures in the area of sustainable practice. And our guest tonight is really a superb addition to what's become, I would say, an illustrious list of past guest lecturers. So before I go on, thank you again to Trumpco for continued support. So Dr. Samuelson is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she teaches architectural technology courses, specializing in energy and environmental performance of buildings, as well as occupant health. Her research focuses on issues of building design as it impacts occupant health and building environmental performance in changing climates, which I'm sure we'll hear plenty about in tonight's talk. Her courses at Harvard include environmental systems in architecture, which is a required course, energy simulation, daylighting, and one called environment, economics, and enterprise. I don't know if that's totally current. Among her authored and co-authored papers, she's contributed articles to building an environment, energy in buildings, building a simulation, and the Journal of Building Performance Simulation. She's presented at multiple conferences, including the International Building Performance Simulation Association, where her work was awarded the Arab Best Prize for Simulation and Design. She's given invited public lectures at Harvard, MIT, and other places. And in 2014, she was named Outstanding Young Contributor by IPBSA USA. She serves on the National Board of Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design. She's been awarded research grants from Harvard Climate Change Solutions Fund, ASHRAE, the International Facilities Management Association, and others. And prior to joining Harvard, she practiced full time as an architect and sustainable design consultant. She earned her bachelor's of architecture with honors from Carnegie Mellon, where she was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal, and went on to earn a doctor of design and masters of design with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was also awarded the Gerald McHugh Medal for highest overall academic record at the GSD. So with that, please join me in welcoming Holly Stinson. I'm a little embarrassed by the introduction. But very honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I know this seems like a very formal kind of setup here. But to the extent, I would like to make this a little less formal if we can. So I want to try to get a read on which of these hodgepodge of projects are interesting to you and which are boring. So feel free to ask questions or make faces or whatever you can do. I'd be really interested to answer your questions as we go along. Again, my practice, I've worked on everything from tiny projects into your fit-outs, all the way up to 100-acre master plan of the Fort Point Channel area in Boston. But as an architect, most of my work focused on large-scale buildings. I was sort of an in-house, sustainable design consultant. And then I decided to make the tree hugging full time. So I went on to do sustainable design consulting for a little while, worked on some projects like the Isabella Sturt Gardner Museum briefly before heading back to academia. And then I joke around that I'm kind of like a mold that they can't get rid of because I've just been in Gund Hall in one capacity or another since 2007. So I guess I fell in love with academia. I've just stayed on there, now focusing on research and teaching. Well, I'm really heartened right now, because this is a view from the recent youth climate march in Boston. And even in my brief period of teaching, I can see a difference in the incoming students in terms of their passion and their incoming knowledge about environmental topics. So that is really heartening and good news for somebody like me who likes to focus on this kind of material. But I've been to architecture school, too. And I know that there's a lot thrown at you and a lot that you have to do. So I'm trying to make the case for why are we doing this? Why thinking about sustainability and climate change, et cetera. This used to be my intro slides. It's come some sort of generic, coral bleaching, desertification, ice melting. And then somewhere around 2017, I updated my slides because these were all images from the US or nearby in that year. The sad thing is that I've been using this slide for a while, and I actually forgot when these slides were from. I should have labeled them, because now I can't tell which California wildfires were those. Which Houston flood was that? I don't even know anymore. I know which three hurricanes these were, because they're labeled, Katya, Irma, and Jose. And by the way, my heart goes out to anyone named Katya, Irma, or Jose. It's horrible to come back and have a storm named after you. But if it's any consolation, I do have a friend named Isis. So it could be worse. So no one can point to any one weather event and say, ah, that's climate change in the works, because that's not the way that weather works. But we do know that these kind of situations are happening more frequently, and the scientists tell us that they're going to become more extreme and more frequent as time goes on. So we can talk about all of those consequences of climate change, whether it's loss of biodiversity, loss of arable land, et cetera. But I think at the end of the day, climate change is a social problem. And that's why I'm interested in this topic. And that's why a lot of you are interested in this topic. And that's why there were so many people marching in that photo in front of Boston City Hall. For example, there are some historians who will say that there isn't a conflict in human history that can't be somehow, in some way, traced back to resource scarcity. So here's an example of something that keeps a lot of people up at night. It's the Indus River. It is the primary and almost exclusive source of water for the country of Pakistan. Is anyone here from Pakistan? And where does that water come from? It comes from the Himalayas, from ice melt. And so scientists are really concerned because those glaciers are receding, the ice melt is lessening. And so there's some fear that the Indus might reduce in volume by up to 50%. And if you know anything about the international treaties, the Indus starts in the Himalayas, runs through India, and then goes into Pakistan. Since the 1960s, they've had a water treaty between the two countries. And India is allowed to pull out a certain volume of water before it reaches Pakistan. It's not a percentage of water. It's a volume because no one when they made that treaty thought that the river might reduce in volume by 50% sometime during my or life. So these are two countries that have nuclear weapons pointing at each other. And one of the countries might be facing a very serious water shortage. And this is just one of those examples of why climate change is a social issue and also a security issue. We've also heard a lot lately about how climate change might be reaching a tipping point very soon, very fast. And at some point, it's too late to stop pushing. It's because of those feedback loops, right? So we've heard about glaciers receding. So why is that a big deal, that ice is melting? Well, because ice is very reflective, it's got a high albedo. So when the solar radiation hits, reflects back to space a lot more than when it hits the dark colored ground or water, that would be the thing that's replaced when that ice melts. With permafrost melting, things like methane, organic matter that has been in peak bogs, trapped in the ground, is starting to be released. So this is a picture actually of a scientist who drilled a hole in the ice and then just lit a match. Because there's so much methane that was trapped in there. And so as it's melting, this is another feedback loop, because we know that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Again, talking about the ice, here's the Antarctic ice melting, not only affecting the albedo effect. But there's a researcher at Harvard called Jerry Metrovich. I hope I'm saying his last name right. He just won the MacArthur Genius Prize. And his work has to do with sea level rise. And one of the things he had been focusing on is the gravitational pull of the masses. And so it's good news for us, living in the east coast of North America, that Antarctica has a pretty large mass and a pretty big gravitational pull on the water. Because as it recedes, not only are we adding water to the oceans from that melting ice, but we're losing mass in Antarctica, unless that's gravitational pull. So these are just some of the scary, scary feedback loops. So that's the end of my depressing part of my lecture. But the good news is that those of us in the room are uniquely positioned to do something about this. I'm so sick of this graph. I tell all of my students that they cannot show this. They cannot start their thesis with this graph. But I'm going to show it to you anyway. Buildings we know use 40% of energy in this country. So right there, we know that there's a big opportunity with buildings. But it's way bigger than that. Our opportunity is way bigger than that. So this was a study by McKinsey and Company, the business consultants. They did a massive study worldwide looking at abating carbon. And what is the potential in all these different industries to abate carbon? And so what you're seeing here on the y-axis is really important because this is the cost to abate greenhouse gases in euros per ton. The really cool thing about buildings is that it's so low on the y-axis. In fact, it's negative. So what this means is if we wanted to remake our power industry, our power infrastructure, that would cost us money to do. But if we want to abate a whole lot of carbon in buildings, we can make money doing it. And by far, you can see it is the most cost-effective of all of these industries and ways of doing it. So I actually, as a grad student, part of a consortium is called the Harvard Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environments. And I got to work with a lot of other students. They're mostly scientists and engineers, et cetera. And I would listen to what their dissertation topics were. Someone was trying to come up with some way of super cooling materials that would have something to do with someday, years down the road, maybe helping us to make better batteries for energy. And then someone else was working on these crazy complex political arrangements so that a business in the UK could pay a farmer in Brazil not to cut down their rainforest. And I thought, all of this is so complicated. I'm so excited and happy to be working in buildings. We know how to do this. We know how to do this, and we can make money at this. So I felt really honored to be in the building industry. And to put more of a point on this, our former energy secretary, that's been our energy secretary at a Nobel Prize in Physics, said energy efficiency isn't just low-hanging fruit. It's fruit lying on the ground. Another study might be Kinsey just looking at the US and our energy efficiency potential. And this is kind of funny because this was done in 2009. So this is through the year 2020. Well, guess what? That's in a month. We haven't done this yet. But they were looking at what is the energy efficiency potential of everything, everything we could do in the US. And they said that buildings between commercial buildings and residential buildings offer 25% and 35% of all of energy efficiency potential in our economy. And that would be 0.5 trillion kilowatt hours of energy savings all with investments that have had a positive net present value, meaning that these were good investments that would create returns. So I think it was very clear, why should we be caring about energy efficiency and energy in buildings, et cetera? But I think for those of you who are grad students, when you're working on your dissertation and get this moment of despair of you've been at this so long and you kind of have to think, why am I doing this? I kind of think it's just this moment that every student goes through when you've concentrated on one problem for so long. And so for me, I had to stop and think, OK, why am I doing this research? And I actually had to encourage myself. I actually had to stop and think how I had ever gotten to that point and to write it out for myself. So I just want to actually read for you my dissertation forward that I wrote to myself when I was kind of in the pits of despair, thinking, why am I in particular doing this, especially because I was an architect. And at that, I was sort of on the design-y design side of architecture and then somehow dove into this world where I felt like I was surrounded by engineers. And I said, I did not choose this research because I felt particularly qualified for the subject, nor because I particularly enjoyed the day-to-day tasks involved. Someone with a different background may have found it easier or the different temperament more fun. I simply thought it useful. I believe the biggest challenge facing my generation is the energy crisis and buildings, the biggest opportunity for impact. And at that time, I was working on existing buildings. So I said, existing buildings represent the biggest slice of that pie, building systems, the biggest slice of that slice, and building simulation and opportunity to eat away at that slice. I suppose I did not bite off what I knew I could chew, but a morsel that seemed to me most worth digesting. My only hope is that in the pages that follow lies something useful. And some days when I get pretty bogged down, I have to reread this and remind myself of why I'm doing this. So I encourage you to, so you remind yourself as you're getting bogged down in the work and it seems too much, just to remind yourself, what is your goal and what are you doing? And by the way, I want to mention that climate change is one problem. There are a lot of big problems out there to solve. So go for it. Whatever it is, it doesn't have to be this one. We have serious problems. We need serious people working on all of them. We need architects, preservationists working on a lot of serious problems. This just happened to be the one that I was choosing. But don't let anyone ask you why. I mean, to be clear, Rome is burning. And just don't let anyone ask you why you're not fiddling. Don't let anyone pressure you to be working on something that doesn't feel important to you. I've had a pretty well-known, well-respected designer tell me climate responsive and low energy design leads to cookie cutter architecture. I would like to challenge that for a minute. So probably in your classes here, you might have been exposed to psychometric charts. And here, this is a plot of hours of the year. So basically, the lighter the color blue, the more hours are falling in one area or another. And it's calling the temperature and the humidity, et cetera. The point is, these are three very different climates. Here was architecture in each of those three climates before the advent of mechanical systems and cheap fossil fuels. Here's how architects responded to those climates. And here are buildings being built today in those three different climates. So I would say these are monuments to HVAC engineers, by the way. These couldn't exist without honking massive HVAC systems. And this is where we're relying on by designing architecture like this in all of these different climates. So I would say, hmm, architecture is doing a pretty good job of creating cookie cutter design by ignoring climate and energy. I think that we can do better. So when should we consider these issues? You might have seen this. Boyd Paulson, famously, economist, said that in any project, as time goes on, the cost and the difficulty of changes goes up. So it's good news that where architects were involved in projects, right from the beginning, new buildings. So I talked about existing buildings before. But I think new buildings is a great time to be thinking about all this because we have the opportunity to make all these changes and to do this as early as possible. However, I don't want to forget about existing buildings either. And I am very excited. Well, for one thing, there are 4.9 million commercial buildings in the US with about 170,000 more being built every year. So this is kind of the scale of new versus existing. And for a while, we've been kind of ignoring our existing buildings. And I think that architects are going to do that at their own peril going forward. I'm pretty interested in two of these new laws that were recently passed. I don't know if you've heard about the new laws that were passed in DC and more kind of a bigger deal in New York City. I think it's called local law 97 now. That if you have an energy hog of a building, you can no longer sit by and do nothing. By 2030, you will be fined. And the fine is large. It will be on the order of the expenses that it would take to retrofit that building. This is going to be some people have estimated up to a $30 billion increase in renovations for New York City buildings. So this is, by the way, New York has a history of setting precedent that other cities then follow. For example, energy disclosure laws, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a chance that other cities are going to follow suit. And we're not going to be able to sit by and let existing terrible buildings just go on to continue sucking energy. So I think this is great news for anyone in the building industry. I think we're going to start to have a lot more action. So that was my intro for my motivation to get into some of my research. And now I thought I would just rapid fire and go through a few different projects that I've worked on. I have to warn you though, I'm a bit of more of a Bert than an Ernie. So I'm a building science person that you teach building science. So bear with me. But in defense of this going deep and focusing on some of these little things, I think that my research is putting little bricks in the wall. And it might not seem super exciting at first, but I feel like someday all these bricks will amount to something. But I encourage you to check out this graduation speech. I love it. In 2018, he was our graduate commencement speaker, Pete Davis. And the title of his speech was, What Netflix Taught Me About Life. And the thing that he said was that he thought was the defining activity of his generation was sitting down to finally relax in front of Netflix and then spending all night flipping through the choices and never making a choice until finally you were too tired and just went to bed. And he said, don't do that with life. Don't keep flipping through. He said the way that we're going to make a difference with anything is to go deep on something and just to start and keep working and keep dedicating ourselves to something. So I'm not doing his speech justice. You should check it out. It is really entertaining. But I'd like to think that that's what I'm doing, putting little bricks in the wall that keep trying. So one of the things that concerned me was what are some of these barriers to energy efficiency? So we talked about it. OK, energy efficiency is low hanging fruit. It's not even low hanging fruit. It's fruit hanging on the ground. Well, we've all been trying to do it. We've all worked on projects where we tried to do things that we can't quite get through. So what are those barriers? Well, there have been people who've studied that McKinsey again did a study of this. And one of the major ones is uncertainty regarding the ability to capture benefits of specific investments. And so I thought, aha, we have the technology now. So we're done this. So I wanted to dive into building performance simulation and saying, why aren't we more convincing? If we know that there's money to be made by investing in energy upgrades in new or existing buildings, then why aren't banks beating down our doors to invest in this? Why can I put my 401k in the stock market to earn X return on investment when I can be putting it into buildings and getting an even higher return? Why aren't we doing this? Well, I think because it's one thing to say that saving energy in buildings makes money, but it's another thing to say that you are certain to save 10% of energy in this building by upgrading those windows. But we should be able to do that. So I was working on building simulation, how we can make that more useful, more accurate, and also how can we offer better design phase energy guidance? So let me start with that. Okay, you're an architect. You're designing a building. This is pretty much the guidance that you're given if you're thinking about what should you do in the envelope? How big should your windows be? What should the solar heating coefficient be? How much insulation should you have? You either follow these really generic energy codes which are broken down by climate zone to the point that you could be designing a hospital in downtown San Francisco, which would be given the same envelope regulations as an office building in rural Baltimore. So that's one level. Or you hire an energy modeler, which can be somewhat expensive to do these ultra specific custom simulations of your building, giving you one answer at a time. It says, okay, you've designed this. Ah-ha, it's gonna use 80,000 kilowatt hours per year. You're gonna do this other design? Three weeks later, get the model. Ah, it's gonna use 828,000 kilowatt hours, et cetera. So I was just thinking that with today's computing power, couldn't we offer some guidance that's somewhere in between the two? So I've been looking at a number of things along those lines, but here's one example. Can we find a way to include urban context? We know that buildings shade each other. We know instinctively that maybe you wouldn't wanna have the same window characteristics on this building as you would on this building, which is totally shaded by its neighbor. But yet, if we're following the building code, it's telling us to do not just this, but it's pretending that the building was in a field. This is how the building codes run the simulations to get their guidance. So what we said was, well, we don't know where your building's gonna be, but is there something that we could know? And so using publicly available data that's easy to get, like floor area ratio and building height, we said, okay, well, what if there were a different building code for three different levels of urban density? How would we do that? So as it turns out that in over 90,000 simulations, the estimated context had a large error reduction and changed optimal design decisions. So what we ended up doing was running a bunch of different simulations. With a bunch of different parameters and then doing a bunch of random urban contexts and then figured out that yes, by doing this random context scenario, we do get better results. And in fact, it would change the optimal design decisions. So if you don't do it this way, if you do it this way, right now the building codes are telling us, for example, to pick the wrong windows. They're telling us to pick the wrong, for example, solar heat gain coefficient for this scenario. Thank you for your patience. Okay, so another idea, what's wrong with real world energy models? Like I said, trying to become more, how can we be more accurate so that we can get more investment into good design decisions? One thing is looking at a series of energy models. We know we're familiar with LEED, leadership in energy and environmental design, to get one of those rating systems or to meet building code. If you wanna do something that's not quite code compliant, you commission an energy model of your building, doing the design phase. Once the building is done, these expensive models kind of figuratively sit on the shelf and collect dust. No one never does anything with them. So one thing I went to do was to look at a group of buildings that we had a lot of submetering. So we knew how much energy the lights were using and the plug loads were using, the heating and cooling, et cetera, and see how good did we do in these first generation of LEED energy models. So you can see here's the predicted energy versus the measured energy. And if we were great at predicting all the stuff, all of the dots would lie on the line. And you can kind of see that this was the white triangle was the thing that we started with and we kind of moved around as I did different things. For one thing we don't know ahead of time what the weather's gonna be in a future building. So we use this thing called typical weather. It's one of the things that's kind of a scapegoat for why energy models don't match reality. It's like, oh, the weather was different. And in this case of these buildings, that wasn't really a big deal, even if I picked the hottest or the coldest year. And I tried a bunch of other things, et cetera, et cetera. And really it came down to the thing that we were getting wrong was the occupant related inputs. It's just really hard to know when people are gonna come in and out of buildings, what are the appliances that they're gonna bring with them. And that's the thing that we were really getting wrong. So you can see here's where the model started with and a lot of them when we put in the real plug loads it changed by something like a median of 15% of energy. So, okay, that got me really interested in, well, one thing is energy models. The other thing is occupant behavior. So one idea was can we reuse design phase energy models to find operational problems in buildings? So, okay, let's say that we have this energy model. It starts off, it's not very accurate. Maybe with whatever information we have, we can fix the model so it's a little bit better. The interesting thing about that is now you have a model of your building that's a little bit off because you made some wrong guesses when you put the inputs in there. By the way, an energy model has things in it, like what are all the characteristics of the walls and the windows and the occupancy schedule and are people coming and going and the lighting and all of these things go into the model to try to predict the thermal and the energy behavior of the buildings. And usually they're used in the design phase to do good things like optimize the design, what is, you know, which windows should we use and should we spend more money on the HVAC system or the lighting, et cetera. But then after the design phase, they're not really used. And so I wanted to say, could we use these to find operational problems in buildings? Because we have this epidemic of buildings that are green on paper. They win the awards, then they're built and they're energy hogs. So what happened? If something is broken, can we use the models to find those? Well, there's a lot of inputs that are wrong in the models. Guesses that we made wrong. But at the same time, there's an interesting thing because the model is the perfect version of the building. So there's not a bird's nest in any of the dampers. Somebody didn't forget to turn off the simultaneous heating and pooling and conference room three. All these crazy things that are happening in our buildings are not in the models. So at some point, can you be able to find those problems with our models? And I have to say that I got kind of lucky with our own building, Gunn Hall. So I built and tried to calibrate a model, did a reasonable job with the electricity, but there's something really going on with the pooling. And no matter what I did in the model, I couldn't match what was happening in our building. And so finally, someone said, well, maybe your model's not wrong. Maybe the building is wrong. And as it turns out, we looked back through the historic records and you can see here were the, we used chilled water to pool our building and you can see here was the usage in 2007, 2009, et cetera. And then we realized, based on the results of that energy model, that actually the chilled water meter was broken. So once that was replaced, here was the bill, the energy bill of the next year. There's $130,000 a year difference. So when you think about it, these models, they're not that great. They require a little bit more work to make them so much usable. We were grad students paid in pizza, but if we actually got paid market rate, I estimated that maybe at most, it would have taken $15,000 for us to have updated this model to the point that we could use it to find something that in this case was $130,000 mistake. And a group of other buildings I looked at, one of the worst case scenarios was this project where we could say that there's $188,000 of unexplained energy use. There's probably a big chunk of that that's just the model being wrong, but there might be a big chunk of it that's the building being wrong. And it turns out in this case, there were a bunch of things wrong with the building that they were able to go back and find. So it's just something to think about. But then I got excited about, okay, well we need to do a better job of predicting what occupants do in buildings. So one thing that we do in these models is we say, aha, it's 60 degrees, or it's 65 degrees, they'll show open their windows. And so all of the windows in the models were open at the same time. But we know that that's not really how human behavior works. So we did a fun project where we tested behavior in some residence halls. And we were able to kind of guess about when people were opening and closing their windows based on this algorithm that we developed tracking the indoor and outdoor temperature and the CO2 levels. And so then when we did that, we said, well, let's see if we can build a better behavior model. Like what influences people to open and close windows? It's indoor temperature, it's outdoor temperature, time of day, et cetera. And so we built this model. It was kind of a crazy model where at every time step the model, the energy model would kind of roll the dice and use our probabilistic model to say, okay, 60% of the people should probably open their windows at this temperature, et cetera. But we also wanted to test that. Just because we can make a more complicated model, does that make it better? No, not necessarily. But the cool thing was that yes, our crazy model did work better. Well, that's great for this particular residence hall and they happen to be renovating it so that was good news. We have a pretty accurate model and this would influence things like whether or not you should upgrade the heating system. But that's a lot of work for one building. The cool thing that we found though was that these behavior models are generalizable to other buildings and it doesn't even have to be the same kind of building type. So we could use a model from an office building in Switzerland and it still worked better than what we're using as a building, kind of the business as usual case. So that was pretty exciting for us. Also kind of pretty nerdy. So one last thing I'll say about the future of simulation is it is kind of weird that right now we build these models where we put one input for each of the inputs, we pick one number and then we give our clients the architects one number back. Like your building will use 80,000 kilowatt hours per year. And it seems to me that if we wanted to get serious about this then maybe we should have probability curve for all of these unknowns. We could be sampling from them and running, we have the computing power to easily run thousands of simulations and then we could output a probability curve. So I think that anytime you're an architect if you're working with modelers and they give you one number, I think you should kind of think about well what would be more useful for you as a designer. And right now this might be too much information and too much work for the kind of work that we're doing but if we're gonna get serious for example about performance contracting. So people are building buildings now where the client is saying, okay design team you have skin in the game. We expect the building to perform at this energy level. If it uses more energy then you end up UOS money. If it uses less energy then we share in the game. So this pain share, gain share. So when we're getting into that scenario maybe we want to think a little bit better about how we're doing our models. All of that lead up led me to this real focus on occupants and buildings and looking at over and over again how occupants are affecting buildings. And then I realized that's not actually the more interesting question. And so now my current research is more about how are buildings affecting the occupants? So we're making all of these decisions whether it's for energy or other reasons in design how are they affecting people's well-being in the buildings. And after all considering energy and health separately has not worked well in the past. So if you think about architecture post 1970s oil crisis where we're really crouched down and try to get more energy efficient we ended up with these deep floor plates, these dark tinted windows dialing back the ventilation rates until people got sick building syndrome and then there was a backlash against the energy efficiency movement. By the way just Googled terrible 1970s architecture and that came up. Go figure. Considering one without the other didn't work well in the first generation of lead buildings either. So in the name of occupant wellness the first generation of the lead rating system actually promoted lots of glass, lots of daylighting, good views, et cetera. To the point that there was a backlash because the early generation of lead buildings often performed worse in terms of energy than their non-green counterparts. There was a lot of over glazing, et cetera. So really we need to be, before thinking about energy we need to be thinking about occupant wellness and et cetera. So that's kind of what we're trying to do now. So just a few quick projects working on benchmarking. One of the things that we're doing is trying to think about benchmarking comfort and energy at the same time. So one of my pet peeves is when it's summertime and you have to dress like this in your office or vice versa in your apartment building when you have to open the window because it's so hot and it's the only way you can survive in there. I think that that's a special kind of energy waste but I think we all can agree that we need to eliminate. And so we proposed basically a new metric for overheating or over cooling degree days and we think that we're measuring things in buildings so we can keep track of the temperatures so we should keep track of that. How many hours of the year and into what extent are you overheating or over cooling your buildings? Pretty simple, let's do that. Let's tackle that first. Another problem I think right now with benchmarking is a lot of these rules and building codes and even the new New York rules are based on energy use intensity. How many kilowatt hours per square foot per square meter are we using? But we know, we all know that we build buildings for people not just in closed space. This building is probably using a lot more energy in this building, but is that a problem? No, it's serving a lot more people. So I think the problem is the reason that we use energy use per square foot is because we don't have more information so we just assume that it's a good proxy for what we really care about. So what we did is in a group of 29 dormitories, multi-family buildings, is that really true? So we ranked the buildings by energy use intensity, the way that everyone kind of thinks about buildings and energy in the industry, and then we actually ranked them by per person day or per person hour and it totally changed. So if I were gonna think about which of my buildings are energy hogs and need to be retrofit, I probably would look at building N and then as it turns out no, actually building H is doing a terrible job. And it was so far off that I'm not even sure that there was a point of benchmarking the buildings in the first place. You could have kind of rolled the dice and come to this conclusion. So that's a pretty scary, at least for this building, that was a pretty scary finding. I talked before about the generic energy codes and finding a way to include the urban context. The way we did that was to simulate the buildings with lots of different combinations that one might design, like different building shapes, orientations, et cetera, so that there were about 12,000 different combinations. Kind of ran them through, you can see how they're changing, running all of the simulations. And I talked about how simulating the context really matters. And it really did change not only the energy answers, but really who cares. It changed the design answers. So it really was leading you to design the wrong thing by not having the correct urban context. Guidelines should consider urban energy. Another thing that I feel like we need to look at is passive survivability. So anyone who lives through Superstorm Sandy can tell you what that's like when a building is, or other events, what a building is like when it's been out of power for a while. So one of the things we wanna look at is how do our buildings fair when we have power outages, which are predicted to become more and more frequent as we have more extreme weather events, and also we have more draw on our grids. So here's an example where we took those 12,000 different designs in New York City. We ran them for a week normally without, with energy systems. So you can see that they're kept pretty constant in terms of indoor temperature. And then we said, okay, the power goes out. What happens to the temperature in these buildings? And you can see that the barely code compliant building performed much worse than an upgraded building. The other thing that was pretty cool about the New York set was that the best building for annual energy use also was the best building for passive survivability. So that's good news, if you were optimizing for one in this case, you would be optimizing for both. But there's this assumption in the industry that that's always the case. And we wanted to test if that was true. And it turns out that it wasn't. So we also picked a hot climate and it's kind of surprising that the discrepancy happened in the hot climate as opposed to a mixed climate. But what happened here in Shenzhen is things ran normally with the air conditioner on and then when the air conditioner shut off, you can see that, okay, yes, the minimally code compliant building got very hot. But then in the buildings that had better amenities, if you wanna call it that, better insulation, better shading, et cetera performed better, but they weren't the same. So designing for energy wasn't the same as designing for passive survivability. So this is just one example of thinking beyond energy to health. I also think that we sort of assume that everybody has air conditioning and as the climate heats up, everyone's gonna be fine. Even in a place like Boston, a third of people do not have any kind of air conditioning whatsoever. But even people who do have air conditioning, now studies have come out to say that it's not often 100% effective because people cannot necessarily afford to run it or they can't afford to maintain it or it's undersized, et cetera. So we've been doing a lot of work lately also in vulnerability to indoor heat and the changing climate. So this is a little bit, I put this one in because I thought this might be more interesting to people who are architects, you're designing buildings, you're thinking about early phase design, things like what direction should my building face, how big should the windows be? Well, right now it's, I think that designing windows is a really, really important decision. When we run these scenarios, usually the size of the windows is the thing that has the biggest impact on energy. By the way, is it the bigger windows or the smaller windows that perform better in terms of energy? Smaller, yeah, good, got it. So that's pretty, pretty true unless maybe you live in a really great climate where you can have natural ventilation a lot and you want big, openable areas. But pretty much most of the US where we don't have great weather, the smaller windows are better. I'm an architect, I came from a design background. I love views, I love daylight. And the way that we have to think about this problem right now is very difficult because pretty much we're one off designing one thing at a time, maybe we're simulating it to figure out how it works in terms of daylight or energy. And that's pretty much it. And we have no idea what the view looks like out of the windows. So we were trying to fix that problem so that you can think about these things all at the same time. The other problem is that you're designing one thing at a time and maybe you're getting feedback. Or maybe you went crazy and you said, let's run 10,000 simulations of my building. Maybe we'll run an optimization algorithm that like a genetic algorithm or something that's gonna tell us what is the best design combination. Okay, great, well then we have one number. It turns out that kind of whichever way you run this, you sort of have one number at a time. And the problem that I have with that is even if you do this crazy, multi-objective optimization with the computer where let's say you go crazy and you're designing for like three objectives at a time, which is hard to do. Daylighting and energy and cost or something like that. That's still only three things. You, the human designers, when you're designing, you're optimizing for thousands of things at the same time. You're thinking about aesthetics and circulation and relationship to your neighbors and building codes and egress and so many other things. And so I feel like it's a little bit hard when we're trying to inform that with these sort of one number at a time. So what we were trying to do is to, first of all, come up with a way to visualize views so that the poor architects can know what it's gonna look like. It's one of the number one things that people care about in a space is what is the view out so that you can see what that looks like. And then also find a way that we can combine this with other aspects that we care about with windows. Like I said, energy is huge. So let's think about the view, the energy and the daylight at the same time. And let's present this to the architect in a way that they can use it in design. So it turns out that there's a new tool coming out that's called Google, or maybe it just came out, Google Earth Studio, which combines Google's street view maps. They're street view photographs with their 3D models of cities. And so now you can place a camera in any of these cities, which is hundreds of cities that have these models. You can place a camera anywhere. You can set its elevation, its viewpoint and its direction and it will give you the view. So we just hacked into their system basically with permission and we said, okay, well let's use this for design now. So here's an example of real photographs that we took and I think on the top. And then here's what's the model of photographs that come out of Google Earth. And then we said, great, well now all we need to do is to add this to architecture. So we found a way that you could design our room and our algorithm can figure out where you are in the room, what's your viewpoint in the horizontal and the vertical range. And then just apply that to Google Earth. So for example, we might be designing a building and this would be the panoramic view that we could see from our building. So in and of itself, I think that's a design, I think that's a boon to the design phase. But then we said, okay, well what if the user can set up a view preference? So you can kind of vote on what you would want to see or not want to see. So there might be things like your neighbor's HVAC equipment that you wanna say, that's a negative score, I don't wanna see that. Or the Empire State Building, you would love to see that. So that's a positive score, et cetera. So then you can set the algorithm to using your own user defined score, give you a numeric value for view. Why is that important? Well, the reason that's important is because you have all these other aspects of the window that can also be numeric. Like what is the daylighting? What is the energy? And so then in this case, you can run through maybe thousands of iterations of possible windows, sizes and shapes and different shading that you could have on the window. And then what you can end up is having a number of, sorry, I'm putting it on my screen. You can see a number of results. It's a little confusing here, but oh, here it is. Basically I could line up from best to worst, thousands and thousands of iterations and you can see what those windows would look like. And why do I think this is important? Because then you can see the patterns and that's the thing that I think is important to design. Not that one number answer, but you can see something like, okay, I've heard that facing do-self is the best idea in terms of energy. And if you ran some sort of other simulation, optimization routine, they would tell you that. It would tell you, ah, the tiny window facing do-self is the optimal. But what you wanna know as an architect is like, that doesn't quite work for everything else I'm trying to do. How bad is it to be off of that? And that's what this can show you when you get lots and lots of iterations. You can look at the patterns, you can see quickly something like, oh, you know what, if I'm rotating, as long as I'm within 15 degrees of do-self, it's not too bad, I can live with that. Oh, so the window sizes, okay, that is kind of a big deal, but if I add the shading, it doesn't matter as much. So you can see those patterns and then you can make the choice. How much does this matter to you in the grand scheme of things with everything else that you're thinking about? So I'm kind of excited about this tool. Finally, the last thing that I'm working on that I'm actually really excited about, although we don't have a lot to show yet, is mold. I'm excited about it as a researcher, kind of scared about it as a human being. So you know that in this country, we have a tradition of building these layered envelopes, walls, roofs. We have stud wall with insulation inside to control thermal issues. We have barriers to control air, to control vapor. And the idea basically is that we, for example, when it's cold outside and it's hot and humid inside, we're making pasta and we're showering and creating all this humidity, you don't want that air migrating into the wall and condensing. So that was the, you know, in the northern climates, our rationale for having these vapor barriers on the warm side of the wall. But you would never build a wall like that. For example, in Georgia, their building codes are completely different. Why? Because they have long extreme summers where their air conditioning inside and the heat and humidity is outside. So if you had the vapor barrier like that, what would happen? You would have all that moisture in your stud cavity with your insulation, which by the way, great food stock for mold. And also by the way, there's a lot of debate about how bad mold is in buildings. But the World Health Organization and the CDC have linked the presence of mold in building with substantially increased risks of things like asthma in children, allergies, other respiratory issues. So I'm not an expert on what mold does to people. But generally, mold in buildings is something to be avoided. So brings up the question, okay, we have different building codes for walls in New York, in all of these different climat zones. What's happening with climate change? New York is becoming a little bit more like Georgia. So that's what we wanted to study. So now we have possibilities for predicting future weather and using that in simulation. We have state-of-the-art hydrothermal, meaning moisture and thermal simulation capabilities. So we're running that in walls. And now we have based on some research out of Finland where they actually just grew mold over and over and over and over again in all these different conditions with all these different building materials. We have a pretty good sense of what are the conditions that grow mold. And so what we're trying to show here, for example, is this is a regular code-compliant New York City wall that's operating today. And this is the mold growth index. This means it's microscopic, we can't really see it. And what happens in the summer, a little bit of mold starts to grow, dies off in the winter. It happens every year, not a problem. That's today's climate. But as soon as we switch to the future climate of New York, this is how that same wall forms. So this is potentially very interesting because there's a whole lot of walls built like this. And then we've gone in and we've studied this for different vintages of building codes in New York City, in Philadelphia, and in Washington, DC. There's a lot of uncertainty that's going into this, but the answers are pointing towards we might be heading towards a mold epidemic in buildings. What are we going to do about it? So that is a snapshot of some of the research I'm working on and have worked on. Thank you so much for your attention. Any questions? That's a great question. So the question was, when you're modeling, how do you count for future developments next to the building? So I'd say that the status quo in practice right now is to do nothing. So one option would be to guess what might be there in the future and to model that. And what we were doing in that one project is to say, well, we don't know, but let's try a lot of different guesses. So that's one option is to kind of computer generate a lot of different scenarios and run them all. And then you can do a sensitivity analysis to see, well, how big of a change does this make? Then you could even look at maybe the median results to say, okay, here's what we think is most likely. Great question. I am with you. Thank you. That sounds great. I think logistically it's hard enough to start this in 2030 because the industry is really gonna need to ramp up. I think they also need time to work out legitimate, there are legitimate loopholes and sort of reasons why, like I showed, it energy use intensity, which is how these buildings are major, it is not perfect. So you could have a building that shows up as an energy hog, but it's a data center that runs 24 hours a day. So they need time for those people to be able to addition for variances and they need to be able to work out their system to make the system fair and to work for those people. So I think they just need time to ramp everything up. Studies, have you found there's like a rule of thumb better placed with the vapor retarder? Is it on the exterior or something? That is really, so the question was, is there a better place to put the vapor retarder in terms of the mold studies? What's tough because we need to think about the climate now and so we can't take New York and just move the vapor retarder to the outside of the insulation because then you would get mold today in the winter. So it is a hard study. In some of the climates we found that today's building codes help because say in Philadelphia and DC, the current building, and in New York, the current building codes put ask for more insulation. So a lot of times you have a layer of rigid insulation outside of the stud cavity and that's working well enough to kind of move the dew point within the wall so that our studies show that that seems to be helping so that we don't get that mold problem in the future except the problem in New York City is that that still wasn't working. So we're still showing the mold in the future climate. So we have to think about other things. So is it going to be a different configuration of the wall? Are we going to have to use dehumidification in our buildings? Which by the way is not, it's only going to work so well because the humidity's coming from outside but also that's kind of a scary thought because that's very energy intensive. So now we have to combat the mold from climate change by using more energy. So I don't have a great, we're looking to study that right now. What do we do about it? Yeah, that's a great question. So the question there was what do I think about variable thermal comfort? Use the example of men and women. The thinking is have different thermal comfort standards. How can we design for that? How can we deal with that in simulation? Right now the way most buildings operate is there's a set point, you're all familiar with this. There's a set point for the room. There's something on the wall that's a thermostat that tests the dry ball temperature and then adjust the temperature accordingly. And we're trying to basically adjust the whole volume of air to be one temperature. And if we kind of zoom out, that's really a kind of an inefficient way of doing things because really we don't care about what temperature it is up there. We care about how each of us feel. So I'm really excited about other research that other people are doing like at Berkeley where they're looking at individual comfort controls and delivery systems like heated and cooled chairs. Or I think even now we have underfloor air systems where people can adjust the vent right at their space or right at their desk. And I think that if we started to consider thermal comfort more like we consider lighting where we have kind of the lower level ambient lighting that people could adjust their own task lighting, I think that very soon in buildings I think that's gonna be the norm. Because I think from a comfort standpoint people are gonna start demanding it. We can be as comfortable as we want in our cars. Why do we have to suffer in our buildings? So I mean, I think that is gonna be interesting to simulate, but I think we can do it with sort of agent-based simulations where we kind of make models of the different kinds of people that we expect to be in buildings. But yeah, that would be more complicated. So I'm not an expert on this, I'm not working on this right now, but I really think it's something that's gonna happen soon and it's gonna change buildings. You raised an interesting possibility of getting bankers to invest in savings or the investment could start. Is that happening? Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. The question was you raised the question of bankers investing in design upgrades and building retrofit projects. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that one. I know that a student of mine was trying to start a platform for crowdfunding retrofits in buildings. And he actually won a big, I'm pretty proud of him. He won a big fellowship to try to make that into a reality. So he's working on that now. So I know at least his pitch was for crowdfunding medium-sized office buildings which were kind of slipping through the cracks. The people who I think are investing in this in a way are the ESCO's Energy Service Corporations, at least for existing buildings and retrofits. So going in and saying, okay, you have a building, it's an energy hog, you don't have the upfront capital to invest in it. Let us come in, invest in it, and then we'll share the profits with you and you can pay us out of your reduced energy bills. So that's one way that I know this is happening, but is it being traded on the New York Stock Exchange? Not that I know of. You said you certainly see it with solar already. Yeah, he said you certainly see it with solar. And so for example, like S-FREX, like solar renewable energy credits, one person can be investing and you could be getting paid basically to put solar on your building. Kind of a different model, but same idea. Great, that is the golden question. So the question was, how do you propose that we going out, working for bosses who maybe don't believe in the importance of energy efficiency or sustainability, how do we convince them? And I would say it's not just bosses. I mean, I think that it's, the bosses are convincing the clients and the clients are convincing their chief financial officers and that is a very good question. And I teach, it's such an important question that I propose to teach this class and I've been assistant all along that that we must have this class, it's called energy environment and economics and I co-teach it with finance guy and we try to show how you can explain good ideas in a language that someone who maybe is the chief financial officer thinks about. So I think that's one step to kind of think about it in terms that someone, one person might be hired and their job is to bring this project in on time and on budget. So how do you speak to them in terms that are meaningful to them and that's always the challenge but I think the one piece of advice that I give is to think about the human beings that are involved and what are those human beings what are their pressures? What are the things that are keeping them up at night and why do they say that they don't care about this? Is it because they're evil people and they want to kill the planet? No, it's because you know they are, hopefully, you know they're trying to meet these other demands. So I think one idea is to try to hey find those win-wins and then explain it in a way that shows that it is a win-win and that you're meeting both of those needs. So to say okay I'm asking you to this crazy thing we haven't done it that way before that's a little bit scary but let me show you that you know what it's gonna we have the capability of building this three months faster and that's the thing that's keeping you up at night. So I think you know just thinking about the human beings that are involved and what are their pressures? Okay. So taken to the maximalist extent you've produced a ton of models that can take into the maximalist extent all those decisions that go into building a structure are being used up. The pondering part of this question is what does that mean? Like what does that look like? Is that okay? That is a great question. So in case anyone didn't hear for the recording it was let's take this to the maximal let's assume that you could simulate so many different iterations of a house you can come up with the optimal design that would meet the needs of the population what would that mean and is that a good idea and is that okay? So I think that's a great question and I sort of love simulation and modeling so I kind of geeked out and got into that without first saying that all models are wrong but some of them are useful. So I definitely live by that mantra and try to think about well what is the question I'm trying to answer and is it worthwhile to build a model and will that give me any more information? So no, I think it's a ponderous question you're right because we could never build a model that was simulating everything because like I said you the human designer are optimizing for so many different things at the same time and by the way and that's the thing that architects are really really good at and that's why it's great that we have partnerships between architects and engineers, et cetera because I've worked with a lot of both and I think that engineers are really great at solving a finite problem in a really accurate non-BS way and they're great at that and that's great for us to partner with them for that reason but then I think that architects are great at thinking larger about all of the questions that are it's an undefined problem and we find a way to proceed anyway we find a way to iterate through that design and our design's not gonna be optimal at the end either but we've found a way to try a bunch of different things that's a rule out different options and so I think the optimal simulation modeling strategy would be to figure out what is the designer struggling with what is the thing that they need to answer and providing them that information in a way that allows them to make better decisions so I guess let's say we could do all those different simulations I guess ultimate for me would be to visualize the results of that in a way that the designer could quickly get the gist of it to quickly understand the meaning of making these different design decisions like I'm gonna make my building taller I'm gonna make it wider I'm gonna make the windows wider so that they just instantly have an instinct for what that means so that then they can take their own priorities and have the information to make the right decisions for the design so I guess that would be the ultimate in modeling okay so sorry so we're talking about existing buildings and then oh great so the question was about okay we talked a lot about new buildings what about existing buildings how can we make them more energy efficient I'm butchering your question I'm sorry but basically what should the strategy be how can we make them more energy efficient so I think that's really interesting too because it kind of has rules of thumb for new buildings about what's the order of things that we should do like first we should do all the passive stuff that we can do reduce the loads then we should pick the efficient systems then we should worry about generating etc etc for existing building I think all all rules are out the window because you have to deal with what's there and so I think one of the overarching things also is that there are people still in the building so for example if you can you move everyone out of the building so for example an empire state building they kind of did that floor by floor where they literally moved everyone out totally retrofit the building and so they had all of the choices at their disposal so that was great they didn't have a lot of insulation they could add insulation they didn't have good windows they actually retrofit their own windows to put a film in the middle of them to make them from double pane to triple pane so that was great but that was kind of a unique opportunity whereas in a lot of buildings it's just too expensive to actually move the people out so now you're working around with humans that are there so that's why we end up getting things like putting solar panels on the roof which if you were starting from scratch would that be the most cost-effective opportunity for saving carbon? No but guess what? it's all on the roof so that's something you can do while there's still people in the building and you're using the building so then it becomes a really attractive option so I think existing buildings are interesting they also, we have a whole bunch of them that are really bad so the bar is low someone once told me if you haven't if you haven't changed your lighting in six years change it and then change it again in six more years because lighting is just moving so fast so there's opportunities like that in existing buildings but also there's a lot of challenges too it's hard to pay for new windows when you already have existing windows whereas in a new building you have to buy the windows anyway so it's just an incremental upgrade so I'm sorry that's so that's what I can do and say it's kind of a case-by-case one of the things that we see with a lot of existing buildings is the very, a lot of heritage which can be sealed up very easily very cost-effectively that's what that was a good point so talking about the air leakage so one way is to if you kind of look at programs that are in place maybe by like mass saves in Massachusetts they fund certain retrofits or utility companies sort of have certain retrofits that they like to fund that's kind of a good thing to look at because they kind of have looked at a lot of buildings and figured out the low hanging fruit so absolutely air leakage is a pretty low hanging fruit when lighting, if it's not new it's a pretty low hanging fruit changing to programmable thermostats is a pretty low hanging fruit so kind of looking at those lists of utility rebates is often a good idea any last questions? oh please that's a great question so that question was about, you know, in the beginning I showed three vernacular architecture examples from three different climates and the question was is that a good idea to look at vernacular architecture from a certain region as maybe a starting point for thinking about strategies and I think it is and I think that that's an exciting strategy sometimes it breaks down because some priorities have changed and technologies have changed, of course so it can be a starting point it doesn't always work out so I'll give an example like the Iranian courtyard house really efficient you know it's a hot climate but the way that they used to use those houses was they built it around a courtyard with a water feature in the middle so great evaporative cooling et cetera et cetera, self-shading and the family could move from room to room so that in the hot summer they could live in the basement or you know in the cool mornings they could move to the east room or whatever and so that was fantastic and it was a great way to provide comfort before the advent of fossil fuels but today we prioritized at least in urban settings we prioritized space over energy so our priorities have shifted so now we can't have one giant house where people can move from room to room to room to be comfortable because we don't have the space and we have the cheap fossil fuels so it's easier just to condition one small space to meet the needs of all the years so it's just little things like that the one project that I showed where we ran all those simulations we actually called it energy vernacular and our idea was that vernacular architecture came about by generation after generation of trial and error of building things the climate and figuring out what worked and we were saying that we kind of forgotten how to do that and how to do that with our technology and our urban context so we thought, well, can we speed it up instead of having generations and generations of builders trying this out can we just run a polo of simulations sorry and get to it so the idea is we thought that we can make an energy vernacular by just doing a bunch of simulations and then we kind of backed off on that idea because we realized our hubris of thinking that we could come up with all of those combinations to make anything useful for anyone and I'm a little bit scared of doing that because there's so many particulars in buildings where you make one little change in the building like if you change the coefficient of performance of your cooling system versus your heating system then that affects maybe how big your windows should be or vice versa so there's little details that have big effects in buildings that we didn't want to mislead anyone so I'm still trying to get to that solution so we tried to produce the answers that we felt confident that made sense but certainly for anyone building I mean I think it's a great starting point to start with the vernacular and I think it comes up with a really unique picture the research you've done and others the question was how does the GSC's gun hall implement these strategies or my research while we replace the chilled water meter so actually gun hall is kind of a terrible building or an energy standpoint but there's a lot of good people taking it very seriously so I have to give them a lot of credit and they've done a lot of good things over the years trying to increase the energy performance they have adding energy recovery trying to seal up those leaks such as the big problem in gun hall I mean both the air leaks and water leaks so I think the news is that they are making progress I think we're going to start doing some retrofits to the lighting and I've gotten roped into being on the advisory board now for gun hall so we will see how it goes and how the research influences it First of all the talk was fascinating Oh thank you really you started with scary stuff at the beginning where we talked about Pakistan losing its entire source of water then when we got to solutions they're much more near term and much more approximate and much more in the current paradigm but I'm really intrigued with the ideas that you've developed in that field but are you thinking into the larger next-generational shifts we need to do as we move off the carbon economy Great so the question for the microphone was you know I started off with big problems and then the solutions that I'm showing are really near term and so what are some long term ideas that is a great question and for one thing a part of the reason that I'm focusing on some near term solutions is because we don't have much time because the scientists are showing us that we have to reduce the carbon now and so that's one of the reasons I'm focusing on some of those near term things but I think some of the longer term solutions are really kind of backing up and thinking about why are we building this in the first place why are we designing this way so starting to think about comfort and health in different ways you know what does it mean to design a residential space what does it mean to design for sleep you know what does that look like when we zoom out so I'm starting to try to ask questions like that why are we doing this in the first place and what do we need are we asking the right question and if not what question should we be asking and then how can we answer it anything else well thank you so much for your attention this has been an honor and I love all your engaged questions thank you I decided to put in again briefly if I can to talk a little further about TREMCO and some other things it won't be very long and I appreciate your patience one of the things there are several elements of our partnership with TREMCO and I hope they're a little instructive and they can provide opportunities to you all what TREMCO has done with us is to provide support for a lecture each semester annually and also a graduate student prize for sustainable design in the integrated design studio in the ARC 513 and we've been doing those for the last six years and we'll continue to do that something that we do with TREMCO oh I'm sorry and one other aspect is that TREMCO hosts the American Institute of Architects to convene here in the summer and invariably students that are here in studio and in other coursework are all able to get together and talk about similar sustainable related issues with a lot of practicing architects who invariably they're happy to have you ask them for work and to talk about things they do or find out what you're doing and things like that one other thing that we've never been able to do until tonight and it'll be brief but hopefully wonderful is one of the other aspects of our partnership was that hopefully not surprisingly we wanted to give something back also what Roger Williams does is we support an intern to work for TREMCO in the summer and sometimes we've even had two of them and our first intern and now a TREMCO employee who got his bachelor's degree here and his master of architecture about three years ago now worked for various firms became a TREMCO intern so Steve Hughes who is the director of TREMCO that is here to talk more about this partnership and then Christian will tell you a little bit about this if this seems interesting to you is the way we do this on our side is that we have a program that some of you may or may not have heard of yet affectionately described by or called by Greg Lermey the out to lunch program is that we take firms out to lunch up in our conference room rather than you having to find out wherever they are it's really hard to do often and they're all over the place and students have a chance 12 or 15 people can have lunch with a firm in this case a a building industry firm in other cases architecture firms or planners or nonprofits that want to have interns and so everybody gets lunch which we support and then you work out how you may want to go ahead and say work with TREMCO and I will now let Steve Hughes come up and tell us about the TREMCO intern program and then Christian can describe how it worked for him and why he thought it would be a great idea to keep working in the building industry after working for architects thanks very much thank you Steve so I'm an architect by trade and I know the faces in the audience I've seen you here a year after year so you may wonder why a building material manufacturer is so interested in architectural students and architects in general and the thing is in our business we're involved with the building we're involved with roofs and walls and the connection and air tightness and all that good stuff Steve and I have talked about this a lot you see a varying degree in the field right now people are able to deal with this do it correctly detail things correctly and sometimes people don't even know why they're speccing a certain material or anything like that so the more we can interact and educate architects and help them understand what's better building practice and things like that the better for us is keep people on and design the right thing I think naturally everybody wants to do the right thing things correctly so we found that being able to work with young architects and work with architects in practice is really very helpful to what we want to do which is be premier building manufacturer envelope folks so part of our philosophy was we train all our folks at Tremco on how to do roofs correctly how to do all these things that we've been talking about we take some students and put them through our training and do all the things that we do on a daily basis with our work we use drones to analyze building facades we figure out what's wrong with buildings why they leak and let young interns get their hands on that type of technology as well and get a little bit of an understanding at this level of what you can do in that type of a field so it's been pretty successful Christian is our first hire out of this program and it was helpful that he did our internship he knew a lot more about the inside workings of Tremco and what we do than somebody right off the street and I think with that I'd like to turn it over to Christian I can answer any questions you got afterwards thanks for the introduction so coming out of an architecture firm Steve called me to do an opening in Tremco so I said I went to architecture school it should be easy I know everything about roofs but it's very wrong there's actually a lot more to it and I really thought what really interested me was not only that new roofs are energy efficient but they also can have a social impact or environmental impact on the surrounding area either it comes down to putting a green roof on a hospital children's hospitals so kids can play on the lawn on the roof or whether it be having a green roof cool solar panels on top of a roof I found all this very interesting and there's a lot of varying degrees of how you can do roofs on different kinds of buildings I thought this was all very interesting and the actual internship really helped me kind of broaden my horizons on what we can do to actually improve buildings for the future and that was one of my main draws for the job itself well I started in Cleveland, Ohio then moved over to Toronto was there for a couple months it was a great time got to meet a lot of people who went to GritLab in Toronto Toronto University which is basically they study green roofs so I was there for a while I worked with drones it's a program called Skybeam they actually use infrared cameras on these drones to scan roofs to see if there's any moisture damage or any needs for the builders themselves and many other roof inspections and some general pair that I learned while I was there do you have this with other types of faces or your faces along the way which is really great thanks for everything everybody thank you