Archinect - News

Gensler works on new hybrid timber data centers for Microsoft

2024-11-04T18:48:00-05:00

A Gensler and Thornton Tomasetti-led data center project that highlights the enormous potential for similar environmentally-minded hybrid mass timber designs in the booming typology is on its way toward completion in the suburbs of Northern Virginia.

The firm is working with Microsoft to deliver a pair of new centers made using CLT materials. Microsoft says their presence will reduce the buildings’ overall carbon footprint by 35% compared to conventional steel construction, and another 65% compared to those made from precast concrete—an important step as such projects gain priority in the new data-driven economy.

Video courtesy of Microsoft

Microsoft has previously committed to becoming fully 'carbon-negative' in its construction footprint by decade’s end, developing a plan that has since seen setbacks due to the volume and pace of expansion and a subsequently high rate of 'indirect emissions' skyrocketing by 30.9% over just three years.

Another innovation meant to combat this i...

Can the 'first carbon-positive hotel in the U.S.' claims of the Studio Gang-designed Populus be validated?

2024-09-30T10:28:00-04:00

Populus goes one step further in its boast of being 'carbon positive', not just offsetting the hotel’s carbon footprint but actually taking out far more carbon than it puts in – a promise few businesses would dare to make, for both financial and publicity reasons. As a term, however, 'carbon positive' can be linguistically confusing [...] and with no clear definition of what 'carbon positive' means, there are no metrics by which to determine its validity.

The project, first announced in February 2021, has since garnered skepticism amidst its developer Urban Villages' claims of being a first-of-its-kind carbon-positive American design in the typology. The true sustainability of the firm’s 2009 Aqua Tower in Chicago has been scrutinized in the past by online commenters.

The 265-room Populus, with its blinking 'lids' fenestration, opens for the first time on October 15th.

U.S. Department of Energy grants $39 million to projects developing carbon-storing buildings

2022-07-21T19:01:00-04:00

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $39 million to 18 projects dedicated to developing technologies that can transform buildings into net carbon storage structures.

The initiative titled the Harnessing Emissions into Structures Taking Inputs from the Atmosphere (HESTIA) program is being led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

The awardees will use the funding to develop alternative building materials and construction techniques. The decarbonization goals for the program align with President Biden’s plan to reach zero emissions by 2050, aiming to increase the total amount of carbon stored in buildings to create carbon sinks.

“This is a unique opportunity for researchers to advance clean energy materials to tackle one of the hardest to decarbonize sectors that is responsible for roughly 10% of total annual emissions in the United States,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm remarked on the initiative.

The fiel...

Texas A&M researchers receive $3.74M for the development of 3D-printed hempcrete buildings

2022-06-21T15:33:00-04:00

A project by researchers at Texas A&M University has received a $3.74 million grant for the development of resilient, 3D-printed building designs using a new green material called hempcrete. Its usage has the potential to lower the environmental impact of traditional construction methods and make housing more affordable and available.

The funding was made available by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Harnessing Emissions into Structures Taking Inputs from the Atmosphere (HESTIA) program. Leading the project is Petro Sideris, assistant professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who will develop residential and potential commercial construction designs. His team consists of assistant professor Maria Koliou, department head and professor Zachary Grasley, and professor Anand Puppula from the department, and associate professor Manish Dixit and professor Wei Yan from the Texas A&M College of Architecture.

Hem...

Innovators turn carbon dioxide and industrial waste into carbon-negative products

2019-06-26T15:38:00-04:00

Scientists from round the world are meeting in Germany to improve ways of making money from carbon dioxide. They want to transform some of the CO2 that’s overheating the planet into products to benefit humanity. They don’t claim the technology will solve climate change, but they say it will help. Carbon dioxide is already being used in novel ways to create fuels, polymers, fertilisers, proteins, foams and building blocks.

BBC environmental analyst, Roger Harrabin, details three novel ways to turn excess carbon dioxide into potentially profitable carbon-negative products: high-grade fertilizer from agricultural waste products; food-grade beverage carbonation and biogas from horse manure; and most interesting for the architecture and construction industry, building blocks made from the ash of a waste incinerator plant.

Blocks using the latter innovation by British firm Carbon8 Aggregates have already been used in the construction of the Renzo Piano-designed Shard tower in London, the tallest building in Western Europe.

Company creates a carbon-negative plastic

2015-05-05T19:18:00-04:00

[Mark Herrema] and Kenton Kimmel, a high school classmate, founded the Irvine, California-based company Newlight Technologies in 2003. After years of research, the team unveiled a way to produce plastic from carbon emissions that is actually more affordably priced than oil-based plastics. The "secret sauce" is a biocatalyst that combines air and methane, and reassembles all of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules into a thermoplastic the makers call AirCarbon.

Newlight's work appears really interesting, addressing two separate but related issues: "first, oil dependency, by replacing oil with captured carbon emissions, and second, climate change, by creating a market-driven carbon capture platform." Basically, the technology comprises using a biocatalyst to combine oxygen with carbon and hydrogen molecules extracted from methane, producing a "long-chain thermoplastic polymer molecule, called AirCarbon." Like other "carbon-negative" technologies, this project involves actually removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, rather than merely attempting to reduce emission levels.

Smithsonian Magazine interviews the team behind AirCarbon. Some good snippets:

"...In the past, all biocatalysts were self-limiting, meaning that they could only make a certain amount of polymer before they would turn themselves off and make carbon dioxide instead of polymer...Over the course of about ten years of work, we developed a new kind of biocatalyst that does...

Could this revolutionary new material replace concrete?

2015-04-15T14:46:00-04:00

Perhaps the most important and widely-used building material, concrete also has an enormous environmental impact. This is largely because in order to produce one ton of cement – the material that binds together rock aggregate in concrete – about 900 kg of C02 are emitted. In fact, the concrete industry is responsible for roughly 5% of carbon emissions worldwide, making it one of the two largest industrial producers of the greenhouse gas.

But, thanks to an accidental discovery, a environmentally-friendly substitute to cement may be on the horizon. A recent report by PBS features the invention of environmental chemist David Stone: a cement-like material that isn't just carbon-neutral but actually carbon-negative. Called 'Ferrock,' the material primarily contains iron dust and silica, both of which can be sourced via recycling. In fact, in order to obtain silica (basically crushed glass), Stone has employed a local man to collect glass bottles that have been left in the desert. While m...