Deep Green: Recent Episodes
Metropolis and SURROUND
Brought to you by Metropolis, Deep Green is a podcast about how the built environment impacts climate change and equity. Buildings are some of the biggest things we make as human beings. In these bi-weekly episodes, we explore how through understanding buildings, cities, and all the things that go into them, we can do better for the environment and all life on this planet.
When layers of wood are put together in a specific way—usually glued together—they make for a material that has the structural strength of steel. And, surprisingly, is fire-proof. We're not talking log cabins but a specific kind of wood material commonly known in architectural circles as mass timber. Portland International Airport’s new main terminal is part of a race to build the biggest building out of this wonder material. But exactly how sustainable is it? Figuring out exactly where the wood comes from, how it is grown and harvested, and how the mass timber products are used and reused is vital for getting an accurate picture of a mass timber building’s carbon footprint Jacob Dunn and Marty Brennan, both Associate principals at ZGF, are two of the designers behind that Portland Airport Building. And they have developed a tool called the UpStream Forestry Carbon & LCA Tool, in partnership with the University of Washington, to track the amount of carbon sequestered—or emitted—by mass timber. In this episode, Metropolis digital editor Ethan Tucker speaks with Jacob Dunn and Marty Brennan to learn more about their tool and why all wood buildings are not created equal. Resources: ZGF Architects Builds a Transparent and Inclusive Timber Assessment Tool
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
If we want to fight climate change, improving or retrofitting an existing building often makes more sense than tearing it down and building a new one. But which buildings does it make sense to retrofit? The Tower Renewal Partnership in Toronto argues that we should spend time retrofitting the buildings that make an impact in regular people's lives: apartment buildings with affordable rents. The kind of buildings built with regular, mundane materials, where there are very small financial incentives or margins to make big improvements. The kind, in short, that are the toughest to retrofit. Yet, architect Graeme Stewart and his firm ERA architects, which is behind the Tower Renewal Partnership, have done just that with the Ken Soble Tower in Hamilton, a Toronto Suburb. The 8-story high rise was built in 1967, and today it’s the largest Passive House–certified residential retrofit project in the world—and it offers affordable housing for senior citizens. In this episode, Metropolis Digital Editor Ethan Tucker speaks with Stewart to find out how the firm managed to make an affordable building sustainable.
Resources: In the Toronto Suburbs, Affordable Senior Housing is Overhauled to Meet the Highest Efficiency Standards
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Should one of the United States's most iconic bridges, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, be turned into a cicada farm to raise insects for food? Yes, if you ask David Rico Gomez, who is graduating this year with a degree in architecture from the California College of the Arts. David is one of the Metropolis Future100, the 100 students we selected as the top architecture and design students graduating in North America this year. And he has something in common with a lot of his peers: a commitment to sustainable architecture and a willingness to search for extraordinary solutions. In this episode, Metropolis editor Ethan Tucker speaks with David and four of his contemporaries from the Future100 list. Some of their ideas: building floating homes for extreme weather events; advancing rammed earth for interior uses; and creating hyper-flexible housing for traveling nurses to avoid carbon emissions associated with renovation or demolition.
Resources: Presenting The 2022 Metropolis Future100 Future100: Student Designers Explore Radical Sustainability
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
In 2020, a FIFTH of all the energy generated in the United States came from renewable sources. That means wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy are slowly but surely winning. Combined, they surpassed nuclear and coal-based energy for the first time in history. As we move toward cleaner sources, we have to get even more efficient in how we handle and use energy. And that means: batteries. The eternal problem in electricity generation is when you generate too much energy, how do you store it so you can use it when your capacity to generate energy dips? Architects and engineers today have hit on a novel solution for storing energy—water. While the idea of using water to store electricity is almost a century old, the two projects in today's episode use water as a battery—but for heat. First, Metropolis executive editor Sam Lubell speaks to the visionary architect Carlo Ratti, who along with his architecture firm won a Metropolis Responsible Disruptors Award for Hot Heart, a proposal to heat the city of Helsinki using a set of floating basins in the Gulf of Finland. Then, in part two, senior editor Kelly Beamon talks to Don Pawson, a director of engineering at SmithGroup, who designed the very first sewage waste energy exchange system in a commercial building in the U.S. Brilliant stuff. Resources: Carlo Ratti Designs a Floating Structure to Heat A City and Create Community: metropolismag.com/projects/carlo-ratti-hot-heart/ A Water Utility Office Designed to Rival Most Museums: metropolismag.com/projects/smithgroup-dc-water/
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Interior designers work with stuff, day in and day out—chairs, tables, lights, countertops, tiles, wallpaper. The research company ThinkLab estimates that the average interior designer has over about 26 times the buying power of the average consumer. Of course, most interior designers are buying that stuff on behalf of their clients. But the key thing here is that interior designers have influence. How can they use it to do better by people and the planet? Interior designer Laurence Carr is a trailblazer and an advocate in this area. Carr believes in design that is restorative and regenerative. Which means she doesn't want to just stop at doing less harm to the environment, she believes that design can actually help restore balance between humans and their ecology, and can allow natural systems to regenerate. In this episode, Metropolis's senior editor Kelly Beamon sits down with Carr to discuss the myriad alternatives available to interior designers today, what challenges persist, and how we can all be a bit more responsible with the stuff in homes, offices, hotels, and other spaces.
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
When we think about the carbon emissions of buildings so far we’ve focused largely on two things: the emissions involved in operating the buildings and those involved in the building materials and construction. But there’s a third piece that we’ve largely overlooked, which is all the stuff inside the buildings: furniture, carpet, the lights, the seats. All that stuff puts greenhouse gases in the air when it’s made, when it’s transported, installed, and eventually discarded. Now consider a company like Salesforce, which designs and develops enterprise software and operates 59 offices around the world. Every time one of those offices is renovated, it means carbon emissions, which is a problem for a company that’s committed to sustainable practices. But through some consistent efforts, Salesforce has been chipping away at the carbon emissions of its workplaces. In this episode, brought to you in partnership with Interface, we discuss those efforts with Amanda von Almen, senior manager of sustainability and head of sustainable business environments at Salesforce, and Lisa Conway, vice president of sustainability, Americas, at Interface, who supplies all of the flooring solutions at Salesforce—and explore why workplaces are really an important factor in the fight against climate change.
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
In 2002, the architect William McDonough and the chemist Michael Braungart came up with a rather revolutionary idea. The duo had recently published their groundbreaking book, "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things," and would go on to become leaders in the sustainability movement, In fact, they anticipated many aspects of what we today call the circular economy. But back in 2002, the architect and the chemist wrote an essay titled Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forests for a book called "The Catalog of the Future." Today, 20 years later, we return to that idea: Can buildings be like trees? This episode includes two segments. First, Metropolis editor in chief Avinash Rajagopal reads the introduction to Braungart and McDonough's essay. Then, we dive into Urban Sequoia, a proposal by the architecture firm SOM that takes giant redwood trees as the inspiration for carbon-capturing skyscrapers and cities.
Resources: Urban Sequoia Raises the Bar on Carbon Neutral Urban Design: metropolismag.com/projects/urban-sequoia-responsible-disruptors/
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Even if you don't care about technology, it's likely you've heard something about the metaverse. It's a sort of 3-dimensional, immersive internet that would take lots of technologies that exist already today, like video games, VR, and NFTs, and find a way to connect all of them. While our team was reporting on this new phenomenon for our January/February 2022 issue, we began to wonder about the carbon footprint of the metaverse. There is no metaverse without the cloud, which actually lives in buildings—steel and concrete buildings called data centers. If more people get in the metaverse, more stuff gets on the cloud, more data centers—you get the picture. There's got to be a way to start addressing this before the problem gets out of hand. Can we build an online world that doesn't destroy the real one? In this episode, reporter Audrey Grey speaks to Drs. Julie Kriegh and Hyun Woo "Chris" Lee, UW College of Built Environments colleagues, who were part of a team imagining a completely different future for data centers.
Resources: The Design Guide to the Metaverse: metropolismag.com/viewpoints/metaverse-design-guide/
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Deep Green is back for Season 2 on March 1! Can we build an online world that doesn't destroy the real one? Check your feed on March 1 for our debut episode of season 2, which will explore the carbon footprint of the metaverse. Then join us every other Tuesday for future episodes covering topics like buildings as trees, water bodies as batteries, and a whole lot more.
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Waste is a complex issue. How we generate waste, what kinds of chemicals and materials are in our garbage, where we choose to dispose of it, and who is affected the most by the trash we generate—all of these things make waste reduction and management very challenging.But one thing is clear: if we think of our trash as simply worthless and dirty, we've pretty much lost the battle against climate change. So maybe that's our starting point—our mindset about what we value and what we throw away. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Aquafil, synthetic materials producer of Econyl.
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
This episode is brought to you in partnership with Aquafil, synthetic materials producer of Econyl. A couple of weeks ago, British prime minister Boris Johnson got into a bit of a pickle with some remarks ahead of the UN climate change conference, also known as COP26, which happened in Glasgow. A group of 8- to 12-year-olds met the prime minister at 10 Downing Street this week and asked him, ‘What will you do to make sure less plastic gets into the oceans?” He got a lot of plastics manufacturers and associations really upset when he said recycling isn't the answer. Is he right? That's the question we're going to try and answer today. What is the problem with recycling plastics? In segment one, materials guru Dr. Andrew Dent, who consults with big global brands on what their products should be made of, takes us through the ins and outs of how we can address our plastics problem. Then, in segment two, we hear a success story from Giulio Bonazzi, CEO of plastics manufacturer Aquafil, who managed to wean an entire division of his company off of virgin plastic.
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
In this episode, produced in partnership with global flooring manufacturer Interface, Metropolis Editor in Chief Avi Rajagopal sits down with Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Lisa Conway to discuss how we can all fight the climate crisis—emphasis on all. Dr. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, and teacher. Her books on climate include the best-selling anthology "All We Can Save" and "The Drawdown Review." She leads the All We Can Save Project, which she cofounded with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in support of women leading on climate. She also cohosts the podcast "A Matter of Degrees," telling stories for the climate curious with Dr. Leah Stokes. As vice president of sustainability at Interface, Conway helps the company work toward their mission: climate take-back. She is also cofounder of the Materials Carbon Action Network and an incredible leader on climate change and sustainability within the architecture and design professions.
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
The COVID-19 pandemic has produced so many shifts and undercurrents in our world, and many are so subtle that historians will probably spend decades tracking and understanding them all. But some are not so subtle, if you know where to look at the data. Between April and June this year, construction of multifamily housing—apartment buildings and condos—grew by 25.5% in suburban areas. By contrast, construction of the same type of building declined by half a percentage point in major cities. There's no two ways about it. There's going to be a lot more Americans living in suburbs. Every new building means more carbon emissions in the atmosphere, so if the suburbs continue to see as much new construction as they have this past year, we have to act fast. What can we do to A) use the buildings we already have in the suburbs and B) modify existing infrastructure to mitigate some of the negative effects of new construction? Luckily, there's plenty of good news out of the suburbs on that front. In this episode, Metropolis editor Ethan Tucker speaks with Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones, who is co-author of the book Retrofitting Suburbia, a compendium of 32 case studies for how suburbs are building for better quality of life and a better impact on the planet. Resources: Can Underused Malls Help Build Healthy Communities?: https://metropolismag.com/viewpoints/underused-malls-dlr-group/
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
In this sequel to our last episode ("How Can We Create Green Affordable Housing?"), we continue the conversation with Shelley Halstead, executive director of the nonprofit Black Women Build. Conventional wisdom holds that the answer to America's housing crisis has been—how can we build new homes, build them cheaply, build them fast, and build them at scale? But every new building we put up is a carbon debt—tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We need other strategies. Metropolis editor speaks with Halstead about Black Women Build, which she founded to help Black women purchase rundown houses and learn the skills to rehab the buildings into homes they can live in. Through sheer dint of their labor, women have seen homes that they purchased for $6,000 or $11,000 now be valued at $80,000. It's a painstaking but thorough way of chipping away at racial and economic inequity, one person and one house at a time.
Resources: How Recycling Buildings Could Solve the Urban Housing Crisis: metropolismag.com/sustainability/reuse-urban-housing-crisis
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Most low-wage workers in the United States don't currently make enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment. Millennials aren't able to buy homes because they are, on average, poorer than their parents were at the same age. However, the last thing we need is to worsen the climate crisis as we solve America's housing crisis. Every time we build a new structure, we put carbon emissions in the air. If we had to provide housing for every American by building new apartment blocks, that would put us deep in the red on carbon emissions. Now, if we could convert existing buildings into affordable housing, that would be something. To discuss that and other avenues to address both climate and housing security, senior editor Kelly Beamon sat down with two guests: Katie Swenson, senior principal at MASS Design Group and author of Design With Love: At Home in America, and Shelley Halstead, executive director of the nonprofit Black Women Build.
Resources: How Recycling Buildings Could Solve the Urban Housing Crisis: metropolismag.com/sustainability/reuse-urban-housing-crisis
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
It’s August 2021 and there's no clear end in sight for the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks, of course, to the Delta variant. The Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. has had to change its advisory a few times this year. Its most current advice: If you're in an area with high infection rates, wear a mask everywhere, whether you're vaccinated or not. If your area hasn't been affected much by the Delta variant, you should still be wearing a mask indoors, whether you're vaccinated or not. It's all about air—whether you are indoors or outside. So what should we do for clean air? First, we all intuitively know now that indoor air is riskier, generally speaking, than outdoor air. Because of the way we build commercial buildings now in the United States, inside air invariably goes through an HVAC system, which is basically recirculated air that isn't immediately exchanged with the air outside. The system was built this way to recirculate heating or cooling—but of course it also recirculates germs. Our reporter Audrey Gray sits down with Nathan Stodola, chief engineer at the International WELL Building Institute, and Josh Greenfield, director of high performance design at HDR, to talk about how thoughtful design can help cool things off and keep us safe. Next, you’ve likely heard a lot about engineered and technological solutions for clean air but, as you now know, they invariably require energy and many times they're just a band-aid fix. So should we turn to nature? Should we be thinking about bigger changes, fundamentally shifting the way we design buildings and their connection to natural systems like plants, soil, and micro-organisms? To answer that, reporter Akiva Blander speaks with Brent Bucknam of Hyphae Design Laboratory.
Resources: - After 2020, Designing For Indoor Air Quality Will Never Be the Same: metropolismag.com/architecture/designing-for-indoor-air-quality/
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
The Tokyo Olympics are underway—in the middle of a pandemic, with the Delta Variant of SARS COV-2 doing the rounds. But some analysts and activists have pointed out that the pandemic isn't the only problem with the Games. Tokyo wanted to host the most sustainable Olympics yet. The organizers promised recycled cardboard beds in the athlete's village, and super green timber stadiums. But, according to a study published by researchers from the University of Lausanne in the journal Nature earlier this year, they've fallen well below the mark. Can one have a sustainable Olympics? In this episode, we try to answer that question. First, how does Los Angeles plan to avoid Tokyo's fate when it hosts the games in 2028? We speak with Brence Culp, the chief impact officer for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, and Nurit Katz, UCLA's Chief sustainability Officer, to learn more about the sustainability vision for LA28. Next up, the afterlife of stadiums. Remember that sustainability analysis of the Olympic Games? Well, the researchers identified Nine Factors that determine the sustainability of the Games. Their number one factor? Long-term viability of Olympic infrastructure. The Velodrome, originally designed for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, was recently converted into the Biodome, an enormous zoo-cum-terrarium. We speak with Yves Paris, Biodome director, and Rami Bebawi, cofounding partner at KANVA, to learn more about the project.
Resources: - An evaluation of the sustainability of the Olympic Games. Nat Sustain (2021): doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00696-5 - LA28: la28.org - IOC Sustainability Strategy: extrassets.olympic.org/sustainability-strategy/1-1 - Montreal Biodome: metropolismag.com/architecture/kanva-montreals-biodome/
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.