What would it take for us in the green building movement to get the owners and builders who are still building to code minimums to join us? This interactive discussion will focus on incentives, the true overall cost add to make a building more climate conscious, and avenues that can help reach those who are not “in”. Our panel will include a developer who is undoubtedly “in” as well as a mechanical designer who often works with those who are not. We often preach to the choir; this panel will challenge you to think about how we get the rest of the market.

Throughout our experience in the K12 Practice Area, we have seen and measured how daylight can positively affect students’ performance and general wellbeing, but how can we keep good daylight levels under the pressure of a tight schedule and the aggressive performance goals of a Net Zero Energy project?

Take a deep dive into what three projects in the Northeast have done to minimize embodied carbon. The example projects have each taken different approaches: one project focused on concrete in an ICF building, one focused on envelope choices and how to meet Passive House requirements while reducing embodied carbon, and one used Life Cycle Assessment to decide between renovation and new construction for existing school buildings.

Over the past two years, Massachusetts and its consultant team has studied cost-effective commercial building approaches aligned with climate goals. This session will present a building-level review of the analysis done to inform Massachusetts’s upcoming stretch energy code and municipal opt-in stretch code. We will focus on a) Thermal Energy Demand Intensity (TEDI), b) critical role of envelope, thermal bridges, and air infiltrations, c) implications to carbon emission and fossil fuel use, and d) cost optimization for different commercial building types.

The electric grid is changing rapidly - with more intermittent, renewable energy resources contributing to the power generation supply, more dispatchable baseload retiring, and more extreme weather events causing outages. Providing uninterruptible power supply is becoming increasingly more challenging. As building designers and operators, we have the opportunity to be part of the solution by optimizing the demand side of the equation. Passive building is a design methodology that utilizes passive principles to reduce loads on a peak and annual basis.

In recent years both Boston and New York City have officially declared racism to be a public health crisis. In this moderated panel discussion, you'll hear from a group of diverse speakers that represent various aspects of the building industry. Through the lens of building science, consulting, outdoor spaces, healthy materials, policy, and medical backgrounds, we will explore and unpack how race, geography, and economics intersect in the area of healthy housing.

Ventilation-system design and occupant behavior both significantly impact indoor air quality and consequently the health of occupants in affordable multi-family housing, that is increasingly being sited adjacent to highways and busy roadways in cities.

Buildings and deforestation together produce 50% of global carbon emissions. This session will address how climate-smart forestry and sustainable agriculture can store carbon in ecological landscapes and generate wood and plant-based building materials that reduce embodied carbon in buildings. Key topics include a proposed strategy to double carbon sequestration by global forests, and an assessment of the validity of biogenic carbon claims with an expanded Life Cycle Analysis.

Multifamily Passive House new construction can be built today for low incremental cost and dramatic energy reduction. Join us for a review of eight affordable passive house projects, demonstrating that Passive House buildings in the Northeast are regularly achieving 60% to 80% lower energy use per square foot than code-built. Learn what has been hardest, what has been surprisingly easy, and what teams would do differently next time from two affordable Passive House projects built in Massachusetts: SquirrelWood in Cambridge and Harbor Village in Gloucester.

We learn much of what we know about how buildings really perform from doing measurements and monitoring. This session presents five case studies in which targeted data monitoring led to understanding and resolutions of apparently vexing issues.