Sustainability in Practice  

Reducing carbon across scales and typologies

Sponsored by Architectural Record

 
 
Photo © Tian Fangfang
Shenzhen Energy Ring.
 
February’s special Sustainability in Practice section highlights materials, design approaches, research, and technology that reduce carbon footprints across scales and typologies, from biomass plants to office towers to mass-timber structures with big green ambitions. Also included in this expanded CEU section is an in-depth conversation on building renewal and material reuse with structural engineer and MIT professor John Ochsendorf.
 
Joined by Juliana Berglund-Brown, PhD researcher at MIT, Ochsendorf is one of several speakers at RECORD’s forthcoming Sustainability in Practice event whose work is also featured in this section, including Ilias Papageorgiou (founder, PILA) and Merritt Bucholz and Karen McEvoy (founding directors, Bucholz McEvoy Architects). The full slate of speakers and registration information for the February 19th event at MIT Media Lab can be found here.

 

Select an article to read more.

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Bucholz McEvoy and ZAS Create a Mass-Timber Showcase for a Toronto Environmental Agency

By Joann Gonchar, FAIA
 

Watershed Moment

A regulatory agency focused on flood prevention gets an exemplary new headquarters

Photo © Michael Moran
Toronto and Region Conservation Authority Headquarters.
 
 
JUST OVER 70 years ago, in October 1954, Hurricane Hazel cut a path of destruction through the Caribbean, the eastern United States, and Canada. In Southern Ontario, the storm dumped 11 inches of rain on Toronto and nearby communities in 48 hours, killing 81 people, washing out bridges and roads, and displacing more than 1,800 families.

Out of the disaster was born the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). The organization’s mission includes regulating development to ensure responsible management of water, land, and natural habitats, and protection from extreme weather events, especially flooding. Its jurisdiction encompasses nine watersheds and their Lake Ontario shorelines and spans multiple municipalities representing almost 5 million people. “It is what government would look like if it were defined by water,” explains Steve Heuchert, a planner and an associate director at TRCA.

 

A Tall Order

After decades of disregard, a high-rise in skyscraper-averse Greece undergoes a refresh.

BY PHOEBUS PANIGYRAKIS
 
Photo © Yiannis Hadjiaslanis
Piraeus Tower’s fins minimize solar heat gain.
 
 
IT’S NOT EASY to be an optimist, especially as an architect. You have to gloss over hardships, play the cards you are dealt, and deliver a message of lightheartedness to a frequently emotional audience, often while standing on the fragile stage of politics. These cases all apply to Piraeus Tower, in the port city neighboring Athens for which the high-rise is named. The building nevertheless reinvigorates the prospects for skyscrapers in Greece, a country that has been largely unfamiliar with, and borderline hostile to, this building type for more than five decades.
 
The design of the 24-story tower, promoted as the first “green and digital” high-rise in a country of almost exclusively low-rise structures, is now characterized by its neutral yet playful facade. Owing to the brise-soleil elements of its curtain wall, which continuously shift in elevation and rotate in plan, the tower’s verticality is visually broken into a sort of spiral. With its privileged position on the port’s waterfront, the tower might appear from afar as a maritime flag, waving against the wind. Up close, the building offers shade to passersby via a recessed gallery that surrounds its plinth, whose three floors accommodate retail, contrasting with the office spaces of the upper floors. A slanted cantilever, seemingly opening like a hanger door, announces the main entrance while also suggesting movement, mirroring the louvers above. But the tower’s design is hardly the main story.
 
 
 
Photo © Guy Nordenson
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Horyu-ji temple in Japan houses the world’s oldest surviving wooden structures.
 
John Ochsendorf (pictured) is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a speaker at RECORD’s Sustainability in Practice event at the school this month. His research focuses on the mechanics and behavior of historical structures. He is the recent recipient, along with Juliana Berglund-Brown, of an approximately $1 million, three-year grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to measure and mitigate carbon emissions in construction. The grant will fund research to advance understanding of structural steel products at the end of a building’s life and assess the impacts of reusing steel in new buildings. Here he talks with fellow structural engineer Guy Nordenson.
 
Photo © Holcim Foundation
John Ochsendorf.
 
 
Nordenson: I want to get your reaction about the recent restoration of Notre Dame. From these older structures and their alteration, we can discuss the impact of material choices and decisions to demolish or reuse.
 
Ochsendorf: I personally am very happy with the decision to restore, not only in-kind with materials but also in technique. Many of the timbers were hewn by hand, so that you can see the axe marks, and it was an opportunity to nourish those crafts, to make sure we still know how to shape oak timbers. I do think that people who visit expect to see something that represents authenticity. If you were to repair that roof in steel or carbon fiber or some other material today, we could have built it faster and cheaper, and the photos for most of the tourists would have looked the same. You could have put slate on the outside. But does it matter that those are oak-timber frames built in a traditional way from locally harvested oak trees? I think the answer is yes. Ultimately, any structure represents our values and it’s a cultural act, and rebuilding it in stone and wood using traditional techniques showed that we still have an ability to do hard things. I think there’s something quite poetic about the act of rebuilding it by traditional means.

Originally published in Architectural Record

Originally published in February 2025

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
  1. Discuss architecturally distinctive plants for generating heating, cooling, and electricity, and the pros and cons of the alternative energy technologies they house.
  2. Explain technical practices and strategies behind successful adaptive-reuse and retrofit projects, especially as they relate to high-rise structures.
  3. Describe design principles that can reduce embodied carbon, improve building performance, and enhance occupant comfort.
  4. Investigate the specification of reused or upcycled steel components, and their suitability for new projects.