Embodied Carbon 101: Process + Firm Culture
Included in subscription
Description
In order to make true progress toward carbon reduction, carbon-thoughtful design must be part of the AEC industry’s standards and culture, instead of approached on a project-by-project basis. Hear from sustainability leaders representing a range of practices, including architecture, engineering and consulting, construction, and design/build firms who share the vision and infrastructure of their own firms’ sustainability and embodied carbon practice, and elaborate on how they arrived at a place where sustainable design and construction is built into their firms’ cultures. These leaders identify barriers to adopting carbon-thoughtful design and strategies for breaking down those barriers, including leveraging existing cultural and industry structures (for example: the AIA 2030 Commitment) and strengthening the connections between the existing values of firm leadership (for example: operational energy reduction; for example: materials and occupant health) and carbon reduction.
Course expires 11/14/2026
Learning Objectives
Identify existing firm structures or commitments that can serve as a model for integrating embodied carbon reduction into a firm’s work as standard practice.
Design a plan for the integration of embodied carbon work into one’s firm’s standard procedures, based on existing firm leadership and infrastructure.
Demonstrate the value of embodied carbon reduction in relation to firm leadership’s and clients’ existing values.
Formulate a firm/practice feedback system to evaluate the integration of embodied carbon considerations into firm-wide practices and to evolve embodied carbon work to become a more streamlined and accessible part of every project.
Andrea Love is a Principal and the Director of Building Science at Payette, the 2019 AIA Firm Award recipient for their work fusing design and building performance and has worked on four recent COTE Top Ten Award winning projects. At Payette, she integrates building performance into all of their work and leads their internal research efforts. She was the Principal Investigator on the AIA Upjohn Grant research grant focused on thermal bridging and lead the development of Payette’s Glazing and Winter Comfort tool. She is a Lecturer at MIT and Harvard on building performance, and has her BArch from Carnegie Mellon and a Masters in Building Technology from MIT where she was the recipient of the Tucker-Voss Award. She was recently on AIA COTE Advisory Group, is a past chair of the AIA 2030 Working Group, and currently serves as on the board of the Boston Society of Architects. She was a 2017 recipient of the AIA Young Architect Award and is a LEED Fellow.
Colin Booth is the Strategic Director of Placetailor, a Boston-based design-build-develop cooperative focused exclusively on Passive House and Zero Emissions workforce housing. With 20 years in design, Colin's expertise is in the integrated design process and integrated delivery models necessary for the rapid adoption of more sustainable solutions.
Barbra Batshalom is founder and President of the Sustainable Performance Institute. She is an industry leader whose vision has led to the creation of programs transforming the market from public policy to professional practice. Her work focuses on the intersection of systems, processes and culture. With a diverse background of fine arts, social psychology and 20 years in architecture and sustainability consulting, she brings a variety of skills to her work and a unique perspective engaging the human dynamics of decision-making and creative collaboration to technical work. She's an educator, public speaker and change agent that works with a wide range of governmental, institutional and private sector organizations to help them institutionalize sustainability and achieve measurable improvements in performance and profitability. SPI's Roadmap provides a framework to help firms institutionalize sustainability and deliver consistent, high quality sustainability services and was adopted by the US government last year. She teaches Sustainable Real Estate Development in Brandeis' Int'l Business School.
Steven is a Sustainability Manager at Consigli Construction Co., Inc., a regional construction firm based in Massachusetts.
Steven has guided the sustainability process on over ten million square feet of projects across many different building types and sizes, including but not limited to: k-12 schools, higher education facilities, mid-rise and high-rise residential, commercial interiors, retail interiors, and commercial office buildings. He has been a member of the Urban Land Institute’s Health Leaders Network, is a LEED and WELL Faculty member, a Fitwel Ambassador, and a Certified Passive House Consultant.
He has a Master of Science in Sustainability Management from Columbia University, and he blends business and science to specialize in sustainability, resiliency, and health and wellness strategies for the built environment.
As the Corporate Responsibility Officer for Thornton Tomasetti, Amy Seif Hattan works with the firm’s executive leadership to "green" the corporation's operations across more than 50 office locations and achieve greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals internally and externally in the firm's projects. She co-leads Thornton Tomasetti's Embodied Carbon Community of Practice, is on the Board of the Carbon Leadership Forum, and is a co-initiator of the Structural Engineers 2050 Challenge. She has long been actively involved in Thornton Tomasetti’s efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the built environment through such programs as the TT embodied carbon measurement study and development of Beacon, an open-source embodied carbon optimization tool. With over 25 years experience working in the field of sustainability, Amy was an early champion of campus sustainability efforts and she worked as senior staff at Second Nature, the organization that founded the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. She received a Masters of Public Administration of the Harvard University Kennedy School, where she focused on climate change policy and organizational change.
After pursuing degrees in Environmental Studies and Environmental Management, Kimberly has spent the past 13 years working on interdisciplinary teams tackling some of the built environment’s most pressing sustainability challenges, with a particular focus on climate change. As the Research Knowledge Manager for Perkins&Will’s Research Group, she draws upon her background in research and sustainability consulting to help bridge the gap between various practices and the innovative research happening across the firm.