Embodied Energy and Design: Stephanie Carlisle and Sheila Kennedy

Embodied Energy and Design Friday, April 22, 2016 Session 1 Scale: Systems Stephanie Carlisle, Associate and Environmental Researcher, KieranTimberlake Sheila Kennedy, Professor of the Practice of Architecture, MIT, and Founding Principal, KVA MATx Buildings are ideas made physical. They carry silent histories. They manifest culture, values, and technologies. And they also embody environmental impact. In terms of numbers, buildings account for about one-third of the world’s solid waste, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. They are serious and un-ignorable. The physical presence of buildings has always been imposing, and now the making of buildings has become imposing in a new way. The energy story involves a striking twist: in the past fifty years, operational energy—defined as the energy for things like heating, cooling, and lighting—has actually declined as a percentage of total energy consumption in buildings. At the same time, embodied energy—defined as the sum of all energy required to prod