Deep Green

In this inspiring episode, host Avi Rajagopal is joined by Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art and the museum's first director of research and development. Together, they explore the transformative power of design in addressing critical global issues and the various projects Antonelli has been involved in, such as the 2019 Triennale di Milano exhibition “Broken Nature,” the MoMa salon series, and her collaboration with Alice Rawsthorn “Design Emergency.”

Through these many platforms, Antonelli hopes to create community, foster awareness, and catalyze change. In her discussion with Rajagopal, she emphasizes design’s role in society and power beyond mere decoration. They reflect on the pandemic and why it was such a watershed moment for the creative community, and look to the future with hope that we can design a better legacy.

Moments to check out: 

Exploring the Impact of Design During the 2020 Pandemic (starts at 3:54)

Do you think of yourself as an optimist, even having accepted the reality of the end of our species?  (starts at 24:45)

Connect with our host Avi Rajagopal on LinkedIn!

Discover more shows from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com. This episode of Barriers to Entry was produced and edited by SANDOW Design Group. Special thanks to the podcast production team: Wize Grazette, Hannah Viti, Samantha Sager and Rob Schulte.

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In this eye-opening episode, host Avi Rajagopal welcomes Sharon Prince, CEO and founder of Grace Farms, who discusses the pressing issue of modern-day slavery in the construction sector and her foundation's efforts to combat it through its Design for Freedom Initiative. Prince highlights the importance of ensuring fair labor conditions and the ethical sourcing of materials in all aspects of the built environment. The conversation delves into the Design for Freedom report, and the movement's ongoing work to raise awareness and drive institutional responses to create an ethically sourced and slave-free building material supply chain. 

Prince and Rajagopal explore the necessity of inspecting and understanding the materials used in construction, furniture, textiles, and other elements of interior spaces, emphasizing that the next step in architectural justice must include social equity, and ethical material transparency. Listen to this critical discussion that calls for urgent action to address embodied suffering alongside embodied carbon in the green building movement in order to ensure a just and sustainable future.

Connect with Sharon Prince on LinkedIn!

Moments to check out: 

List of twelve materials with evidence of force and child labor (starts at 5:22)

Prince shares her epiphany and the need for ethical material supply chain transparency (starts at 20:30)

Prince talks about the importance of conscious purchases (starts at 26:17)

Connect with our host Avi Rajagopal on LinkedIn!

Discover more shows from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com. This episode of Barriers to Entry was produced and edited by SANDOW Design Group. Special thanks to the podcast production team: Wize Grazette, Hannah Viti, Samantha Sager and Rob Schulte.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this thought-provoking episode, the first of three conversations in our Sustainability Visionaries series, host Avi Rajagopal is joined by John Woelfling, a principal at Dattner Architects, to discuss affordable housing and sustainability but also, more broadly, finding ways to let the best ideas in architecture serve the most vulnerable populations. First, Rajagopal sets the stage delving into the current challenges faced by the building industry, such as its significant carbon emissions, plastic consumption, labor exploitation, and unequal distribution of environmental impacts.

He emphasizes the critical role architects and the building industry play in addressing these issues, asking "How can we use our work to do good in the world?" His conversation with Woelfling follows, exploring the power of design to make positive change with examples of Dattner Architects' evolving approach to responsible architecture—from its design of the New York City's first public LEED-certified building, the Bronx Library Center, to its work on 8,300 units of 100% affordable housing across the city. This engaging talk underscores the importance of rethinking our approaches to sustainability and highlights the potential for architecture to contribute to a better, greener future.

Connect with John Woelfling on LinkedIn!

Moments to check out: 

John discusses Sustainable Building Practices in New York City (Starts at 9:39)

Leveraging Passive House Building Typology to Address Environmental Inequity in the Bronx (Starts at 20:10)

Connecting with Clients and Building Partnerships to Push the Envelope (Starts at 26:44)

Connect with our host Avi Rajagopal on LinkedIn!

Discover more shows from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com. This episode of Barriers to Entry was produced and edited by SANDOW Design Group. Special thanks to the podcast production team: Wize Grazette, Hannah Viti, Samantha Sager and Rob Schulte.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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