Archinect - News

Former Lakers favorite Rick Fox now has carbon-neutral concrete company aimed at building change

2024-01-05T18:36:00-05:00

His pitch is pretty straightforward. In a world where companies—including construction companies and their clients—are trying to gloss their climate credentials, and where countries have made commitments to hit carbon reduction targets, why wouldn’t you shift wholesale to carbon-neutral concrete? The answer, Fox says, is simply inertia. “Why would they change what’s working for them? They’ve been burning rocks for 200 years.”

The company Fox co-founded with an architect named Sam Marshall, Partanna, has been active since 2018 in using its product, which was developed with the help of materials science researchers using a mixture of brine taken from desalination plants and slag. Arizona State University's Dwarak Ravikumar says an outside review of the data that pertains to its environmental footprints and scalability is needed, according to another recent profile in The Verge.

Still, Fox's ambits are admirable for someone of his position and fame. He says Partanna has a plan to construct one thousand homes in the country. Their product can also be used in coral reef development. "The business plans to build and operate facilities around the world, initially in key territories where it has long-term offtake agreements with customers, including The Bahamas, the Middle East, and the United States," their website reads.

Additional details about the year-old operation can be found here.

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20% of landscape architects expect to see greenhouse gas emissions budgets in future projects, ASLA survey finds

2023-08-22T17:08:00-04:00

The American Institute of Landscape Architects has published the results of a members' survey on the role of landscape architecture products in aiding decarbonization and biodiversity in the built environment. Insights were garnered from 454 landscape architects, designers, and educators out of the ASLA’s member base of approximately 15,000.

A significant 55% of respondents stated that their clients do not establish a greenhouse gas emissions budget for their projects. However, 20% foresee it as a potential future requirement. When asked about the data that would assist in accounting for emissions, 51% prioritized embodied carbon factors for materials, closely followed by 50% wanting projected carbon sequestration details for tree species specification.

Regarding accessing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and emissions assessments, 55% advocated for a curated register of baseline data, possibly developed by ASLA or a similar body. When procuring from manufacturers, 34% of p...

Team of UBC students builds one of Canada's first near-zero embodied carbon campus spaces

2023-04-21T12:33:00-04:00

A team of students from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has built a near-zero embodied carbon building on campus using hempcrete, wood, and steel as primary materials.

Called the Third Space Commons, the project was led by Third Quadrant Design, UBC’s first green building design team. The group is comprised of 60 students from the Faculty of Applied Science and the Sauder School of Business. The building is a wooden structure spanning 2,400 square feet, made from the adaptive reuse of an existing single-family home on the campus. Every aspect of the project, from the materials to the building methods, were chosen to decrease and capture carbon emissions.

The building’s thermal insulation is made of hempcrete, a concrete substitute made of lime and hemp fibers that is effective in carbon sequestration. Its foundation was constructed with reusable steel piles, and, for most of the project, the team used light wood framing instead of engineered wood, which contains fossil fuel-derived adhesives. The team also reused many materials from other construction sites in Vancouver, including the building’s windows, solar panels, appliances, and lumber, whic...

Hempcrete has been added to the U.S. building code appendix

2022-12-05T15:22:00-05:00

For many years, industrial hemp was illegal in the US due to hemp’s association with drug use, despite the fact that it does not contain more than 0.3 percent THC [...] Building residential homes with hempcrete was therefore effectively outlawed until 2018, when the Farm Bill distinguished between hemp and cannabis plants. Then, in September 2022, hemp building materials were added to the model US residential building code, paving the way for legal use in 2024.

The International Residential Code (IRC) accepted a modified appendix in September that some are hopeful could be a catalyst for further adaptation throughout the building industry. Builders for Climate Action spokesman Chris Magwood says its greatest potential lies in commercial construction, though applications within residential design do present inherent challenges owing to drying times, insulation R-Values, and other factors.

Previously on Archinect: Hemp is about to take an outsized role in the building industry's push to go green

"I don't think that hempcrete will ever play a large role in the residential market," Magwood recently explained to Treehugger. "The fact that it is a composite material that uses a lime-based binder means that it is less insulative than other options and more expensive. Somebody has to mix, form, and cure the material, whether that happens on-site or in pre-fab units or blocks. To meet basic minimum code requirements in colder climates requires at l...

SOM presents 'ready-to-build' Urban Sequoia NOW design at COP27

2022-11-08T17:53:00-05:00

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has revealed an update to its Urban Sequoia project it says can be built right now, during a presentation that took place today at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

SOM Partner Chris Cooper was on hand to make the presentation of his firm’s refined design for a carbon-sequestering building that can be used as a weapon in the fight against carbon emissions globally, three-quarters of which are generated from urban areas alone.

“We recognize the need to alter the trajectory of climate change by going beyond net zero,” Cooper said during the presentation. “We need to take carbon out of the atmosphere through the built environment, and we have developed a design to do just that.”

Image: © SOM | Miysis

Despite some considerably less-marketable obstacles to its effective implementation, the technology for carbon sequestering has come a long way in its development to offer itself as a plausible answer to the challenge posed by the need to a...

The new Children's Museum of Eau Claire demonstrates the innovative benefits of Structural Round Timber application

2022-11-04T12:27:00-04:00

The Children’s Museum of Eau Claire (CMEC) is a first-of-its-kind structure that demonstrates the innovative usage of Structural Round Timber (SRT).

The two-story, 24,000-square-foot building was designed by Steinberg Hart in collaboration with KPFF and an extensive team of timber engineering experts, fabricators, and forest product companies. One such firm to help bring this project to life is Madison, Wisconsin-based WholeTrees Structures. The woman-owned national timber products company aims to "improve the economic viability between healthily managed forests and the rural communities" that surround them.

Image courtesy of WholeTrees Structures via Facebook

In a press release published on October 31, CMEC Executive Director Michael McHorney shared, “Working with WholeTrees and their partners is helping us deliver on a key goal of this project, to reduce the carbon footprint for construction. As a result, the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire has sequestered more than 350,000 lbs....

Is carbon offsetting a misleading tool of the building industry?

2022-05-16T15:16:00-04:00

Six months after the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, columnist Kunle Barker wrote in the UK Architects' Journal to take a stand against the industry’s oneiric focus on “lofty ideals of zero-carbon and on soundbites” and towards a more considered system of new project evaluation, advocating for the “need to develop a viability methodology that is independent, objective and focused on carbon impact versus social need.”

“Let’s rid ourselves of these conceited phrases and instead focus on the real issues,” he wrote, arguing that need will always push architects into costly demolition efforts and away from restoring structures that may, in many cases, be better suited for adaptive reuse. “Offsetting is not sustainable. In fact, it's not even close to being sustainable, and most worrying of all, it is allowing lazy, ego-driven designs to be accepted by us all. We must find an objective and fair way to assess if (and how) a building should be constructed. This is the only way the built en...

The U.S. Department of Energy has invested over a billion dollars into mostly failed carbon capture programs since 2009

2021-12-31T11:08:00-05:00

The Biden administration wants to shove more money into projects that are supposed to capture CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities before they can escape and heat up the planet. But carbon capture technologies that the Department of Energy has already supported in the name of tackling climate change have mostly fallen flat, according to a recent report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office.

According to the report, the Department of Energy (DOE) has invested about $1.1 billion in 11 carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects since 2009. Of those, only three were ever built, however, the sole participating coal plant shut down in 2020, leaving only two industrial projects in operation.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggests that Congress consider implementing a mechanism for greater oversight and accountability of DOE CCS demonstration project funding. GAO also recommends that the DOE improve its project selection and negotiation processes and that they should establish more consistent scopes, schedules, and budgets for projects.

SOM unveils vision for carbon-absorbing cities at COP26

2021-11-12T14:28:00-05:00

With COP26 entering its final day in Glasgow, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill have used the event to unveil their vision to transform the built environment into a network for absorbing carbon. Titled 'Urban Sequoia,' the project is centered on the concept of “forests” of buildings which sequester carbon and produce biomaterials to support a new carbon economy.

Rendering © SOM | Miysis

To create the scheme, SOM based their approach on an optimization of building design, a minimizing of materials, the integration of biomaterials, and the use of advanced biomass and carbon capture technologies. As a result, the firm estimates that if every city around the world built an Urban Sequoia in line with their design, the built environment could remove up to 1.6 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.

“We are quickly evolving beyond the idea of being carbon neutral,” said SOM Partner Chris Cooper as the project was unveiled. “The time has passed to talk abou...

California adopts suite of high-rise timber regulations

2020-09-09T17:31:00-04:00

The California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) has adopted a series of new code regulations that pave the way for the state to begin to implement the widespread construction of tall mass timber buildings.

In late August, the CBSC moved to advance the adoption of recommendations made for the 2021 International Building Code that would articulate regulations for the creation of mass timber structures rising up to 18 stories in height using Type IV-A construction. With Type IV-B construction, the new regulations will allow buildings up to 12 stories tall, while Type IV-C codes will shape towers rising 9 stories high.

In a statement announcing the adoption of the new codes, State Fire Marshal Mike Richwine explains that “The early adoption of mass timber codes can be a benefit to California in many ways, but I would like to highlight three of those advantages in this proposal. Number 1, it has the potential to increase the market demand for mass timber production in California to ...

Scientists push back against "Trillion Trees" initiatives

2020-02-14T12:29:00-05:00

Perhaps the biggest risk is that the appeal of natural-sounding solutions can delude us into thinking we’re taking more meaningful action than we really are. It “invites people to view tree planting as a substitute” for the sweeping changes required to prevent greenhouse-gas emissions from reaching the atmosphere in the first place, says Jane Flegal, a member of the adjunct faculty at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

James Temple, writing in the MIT Technology Review outlines the argument against viewing tree-planting as a climate crisis silver bullet. While planting trees might seem like a quick and easy way of helping to abate the climate crisis, Temple explains, increasingly, researchers are finding that estimates touting the potential tree-planting efforts might have for absorbing and sequestering carbon are likely overstated. "We can’t rely on trees as a stand-in for the separate monumental task of cutting emissions from our energy, transportation, and agricultural systems," Temple argues.

As the uptick in forest fires worldwide—from California to the Amazon to Australia— show, trees can quickly go up in smoke. Arizona State University adjunct faculty Jane Flegal tells the MIT Technology Review that “just shifting the stock of CO2 from the atmosphere to the land biosphere is not a permanent sequestration of emissions. Carbon sinks can become carbon sources very quickly.”

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Carbon-sequestering cement absorbs power plant emissions as it hardens

2020-01-20T13:14:00-05:00

The key binding ingredient in concrete is cement, which has a massive carbon footprint. [...] So Sant and his team set to work on a greener approach that starts with a compound called portlandite instead of traditional Portland cement. The production of portlandite also releases CO2. But its unique chemistry allows it to absorb CO2 later in the process, when the concrete cures and hardens into precast blocks and other shapes.

The Los Angeles Times takes a look at the University of California, Los Angeles-based Carbon Upcycling team's efforts to bring CO2Concrete, a carbon-sequestering cement product, to the market. The team is vying for the Carbon XPRIZE, a $7.5 million prize competition aimed at monetizing carbon sequestration through the creation of new consumer products.

The innovative concrete mixture absorbs and stores carbon dioxide as it cures and requires less carbon to produce overall, offering a potential pathway toward low-emissions concrete products. According to the research team, if all the concrete in the world were made of CO2Concrete, the material could store 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or roughly 2.5% of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions.

The prize is sponsored by fossil fuel industry groups NRG and Cosia.

EU to pay Gabon to preserve its tropical rain forests

2019-09-23T19:34:00-04:00

Gabon will become the first African nation to receive funding to preserve its rainforests to mitigate the effects of climate change. [...] Norway will pay $150 million to Gabon to battle deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The deal is part of the Central African Forest Initiative [...] The partnership sets a carbon floor price of $10 per certified ton and will be paid on the basis of verified results from 2016 through to 2025.

According to QZ, since 2000, Gabon has created more than a dozen new national parks to help preserve the country's forests. Roughly 12-percent of the Congo Basin Forest, the second-largest tropical rainforest behind the Amazon, is located within Gabon's borders.