The building sector is the single largest consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gas emissions. The 2030 Challenge, adopted by the AIA, provides a path to reducing our sector’s negative impacts and reaching carbon neutral design as the standard practice. This series will inspire architects to meet the 2030 Challenge through design strategies, efficient technologies and systems, and applying renewable energy resources.

The design process is an important element in the creation of next-generation buildings that meet the 2030 Challenge targets. In the first course of the AIA+2030 Online Series, we will explore the design processes to produce high-performance and carbon neutral buildings, including the Integrative Design Process (IDP). We will explore collaborative strategies that can achieve low energy outcomes, and how these strategies can be used as a roadmap throughout the design process. In particular, we will examine defining core, early design decisions such as building form and orientation.

The AIA+2030 Online Series is an AIA and Architecture 2030 co-production.

It's based on the highly successful AIA+2030 Professional Series, which was created by AIA Seattle and Architecture 2030, with support from the City of Seattle and Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance.

This detailed and interactive course introduces resilience and adaptation foundations, including history and evolution, and offers key data points that will help you develop as a knowledgeable resource on the topic, support your efforts to integrate resilient design services into your firm, and be equipped to participate in local and national resilience conversations and efforts.

This course is part of the AIA Resilience and Adaptation Series, a multi-course series that provides you with the tools and knowledge you need to design for resilience. Take all of the courses in this series to earn a certificate of completion.

Course expires on 10/31/2024

This course is sponsored by Owens Corning

Let's talk about reuse.

Designing for the circular economy, where materials are endlessly reused and waste is eliminated, requires a completely new mindset.

This conversation explores how architects can and should design buildings to be taken apart and reused as part of the circular economy, an effort entailing the use of smaller palettes of reusable materials and the development of blueprints for disassembly as well as assembly.

Course expires 10/3/2024

Women are the future of architecture, and the future of architectural practice is working with existing buildings.  In 2022, existing buildings accounted for 53% of architectural billings, and the proportion is rising.  Building reuse is an essential component of achieving a more sustainable future.  Strategies for sustainable retrofitting can reduce a building’s energy use by half.  New tools for measuring embodied carbon reveal the true cost of demolition and reconstruction.    Renovation and adaptive reuse projects are often considered to be more complicated than new construction, and for good reasons.  The issues that are commonly encountered can be challenging, but by anticipating and planning for these conditions, projects can be completed more successfully and at a lower cost. 

This session will address methods of analysis and documentation for existing buildings and will present strategies for improving energy performance, accessibility, and inclusion.  By developing expertise in existing buildings, architects can create a more sustainable practice that is better positioned to ride out economic downturns.  Women are well positioned to lead these trends.  The majority of professionals with degrees in both architecture and historic preservation are female.  We lead the field in both technical preservation and cultural preservation.  We are natural collaborators who understand how to engage stakeholders and set aside ego to achieve mutual interests.  These skill sets give us the power to affect both the environmental impact and the social impact of our built places.  We have the power--and a mandate--to transform the existing the built environment to become more sustainable, resilient, and relevant.

Course expires 10/22/2026