RESEARCH & WRITING

Air-Tight Window Details for a 150-Year Old Brick Home

Achieving air-tight windows in a retrofit can be a challenge, especially when adding exterior rigid insulation. Here are the details (and reality) for one deep energy retrofit.

Using Passive House Principles to Retrofit an 1895 House

Implementation of Passive House principles yielded a 91% reduction in energy use for this deep energy retrofit by Sol design + consulting. Here's how we did it.

Five Ideas on the Future of Architecture

We live in times of dramatic change. How can architecture help create a truly sustainable world? Guest lecture at Xavier University.

Retrofitting to Minimize 30-Year Carbon Emissions

How can a 150-year-old building minimize carbon emissions over 30 years, including both upfront carbon and operational emissions?

Negotiating the Air Barrier: Consulting on Ohio's First Multi-Family Passive House

Air-tightness is a critical component of Passive House building. Here's how Sol design + consulting worked with the design and construction team to achieve these targets for this market-leading project.

Operative Temperature as an Early Design Metric

Energy Use Intensity (EUI) has become the de facto standard for measuring building performance in early design. But there are several advantages to operative temperature.

A Workflow for Early-Stage Architect-Engineer Collaboration

The most important design decisions are made when architects have the least time to vet them and engage the broader team. This workflow aims to break down barriers to good early collaboration.

Design Credo

An evolving credo for a humane, ecological, and socially engaged architecture.

Solving the Climate Crisis in the Age of Trump

Trump's election couldn't have come at a worse time for the climate: the next four years are critical if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. Here are six ways we can move forward with large-scale climate solutions.

Sensitivity Analysis in Concept Design

How to perform sensitivity analysis in early design as a way of guiding decisions -- for example, testing the relative impact of passive design strategies.

Why Energy Models are Poor Predictors of Energy Use

As more architects incorporate energy modeling into their design processes, it's important to understand why most models are wrong -- and why they're still essential.

Taking Daylight to the Next Level: How Daylighting Analysis is Changing Design

A new generation of analysis tools, and a new generation of daylighting metrics, enable architects to look at daylight in new ways -- with important implications for design. Published at ArchDaily.

Why Architects Must Lead on Sustainability

There are two reasons why sustainability must be central to the architect's practice and education: an ethical and a practical reason. (An open letter to the NAAB.)

Toward an Architecture of Performance

Is high-performance design compatible with good architecture? Does performance compromise design, or can it contribute positively? A manifesto for a unified architecture. Published in AECBytes, August 5, 2015.

Beyond Energy Modeling: A New Paradigm for Performance Analysis

The traditional energy modeling process is fundamentally misaligned with the design process. Here's a new approach that allows performance to inform design.

US Energy Codes Are Improving Fast

US building energy codes are being adopted with increasing rapidity, and the standards upon which the codes are based are quickly becoming more stringent. Published on CleanTechnica.

How Architecture Firms Innovate

Three practices borrowed from the tech startup world that can help architecture firms experiment, learn, and adapt. Published at SketchUp.com.

Predictive Energy Modeling at the Design Stage

Most energy modeling is comparative, not predictive. But when it needs to be predictive, TM54 gives relevant guidance. Here is a summary of how TM54 works.

Designing Resilience

This essay links compelx systems theory, network theory, and urban planning to explore how the built environment can address resilience at a structural level. Pubished in New Directions in Sustainable Design (Routledge, 2011).

Life Cycle Assessment of a Brick Bearing Wall

This manual Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a brick bearing wall tracks a series of environmental, economic, and ethical metrics from extraction of raw materials through the end of their useful life.

Toward the Green City

This paper, co-authored with Lyle Solla-Yates, considers how historic investments in infrastructure have shaped the city, and examines the potentially transformative effects of anaerobic biodigesters on urban metabolism and city form.

Sewers and Scientific Thought

A brief summary of how scientific thought informed waste management approaches from the nineteenth century to present day.

Resilience and Decentralization

Briefly describes the link between spatial organization of large-scale systems, resilience, and control.

Waste and City Form: Reconsidering the Medieval Strategy

New sustainable waste management technologies are poised to revive the medieval model of containment and reuse of waste. Published in the Journal of Green Building.

A Sustainable Pattern Language

This Master of Architecture thesis brings together the work of critical theorist Jurgen Habermas, physicist Amory Lovins, economist Herman Daly, and architect Christopher Alexander (among others) in order to understand the social, political, and economic conditions of a truly sustainable society.

Responding to Modernity

An analysis of two forms of residential development (suburbia and ecovillage) through the lens of Jurgen Habermas's understanding of Modernity and its alternatives. A preliminary effort to apply Habermas's critical theory to the built environment.

World Cities and Global Capitalism

A short discussion of some relationships between world cities, capitalism, diversity, and inequality. Published in Calx, a student-run journal of design.

A Brief History of Miasmic Theory

Traces the lineage of "miasmic theory" from Hippocrates and Galen to 1850s Europe. Written in the capacity of a graduate research assistant to professor Rebecca Williamson.

Modernism, Nostalgia, and Ethics

A conversation about questioning the modern project. Published in Calx, a student-run journal of design.

Architecture and the Meaning of Death

An investigation of architecture and meaning via a comparative study of two funeral chapels.

The Understated Radical

A response to Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. I argue that the underlying theme of the book is a deconstruction of the Western man/nature dichotomy.

Poetry by Chance

Poetry generated through the amalgamation of existing texts, loosely inspired by dada, surrealism, and the musical work of John Cage.

Against Nature

An essay in response to Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, exploring the Western man/nature dichotomy, its origins, its undoing, and alternative ways of conceptualizing the world.