District/Neighborhood
Slashing Upfront Embodied Carbon: How to Replicate Success
Learn lessons from prize-winning submissions to MassCEC’s Embodied Carbon Challenge, as well as One Boston Wharf Road, a 17-story net zero operational carbon office building that reduced upfront embodied carbon dramatically while reaching net zero operational carbon. This session will share low-cost, high-impact lessons learned across Challenge participants, and will dive into details of how One Boston Wharf Road reduced upfront carbon from cladding materials, low carbon concrete, and innovative materials like Sublime Systems concrete.
Blighted Site to Thriving Community: High-Performance Buildings for a Healthy Neighborhood
An abandoned industrial site in Lawrence, MA is now home to 80 low-income families, living in Phius certified apartments near a riverway, public transportation, and shared recreational resources. This transformation includes the adaptive reuse of a mill building to house a local grocery store and family health clinic. Local non-profits provide programs for educational, fitness, and wellness training within the campus. Notably, this development was proven replicable, as it was built in two phases, providing opportunities for learning and improvement throughout the project.
Scaling Mass Timber Construction in Dense Urban Environments: Three Not-So-Little Projects
Using mass timber construction instead of concrete and steel can greatly reduce the embodied carbon of new construction, but faces specific challenges in dense urban environments in addition to limited contractor experience and cost risk. This session presents an affordable housing project in New Haven and multi-family and adaptive re-use projects in Brooklyn that highlight how effective design and project planning can mitigate these challenges to increase the construction of high-performance mass-timber buildings in urban cores.
Beyond the Building: Climate Justice and the Solidarity Economy
Explore how place-based strategies rooted in solidarity and economic justice can foster equity and build resilience beyond the buildings we build and companies we run. We'll talk about the the transformative power of cooperatives, community land trusts, crowdfunding, participatory design, affordable housing and more, through the perspectives and real-world case studies of an architect and community developer.