Focus: Understanding how building envelopes affect performance, comfort, and durability.
Why: Core HSW topic that helps reduce liability and improve project outcomes.
The focus of this course will be on sustainability and resilient design strategies. The effects of climate change and their effects on the built environment will be studied both from the level of examining how architecture, design, and the building industry impacts the global climate and also looking at what can be done to build/design to resist these effects. Topics may include urban ecology, global warming, resilience to extreme weather, sea level rise, and wildfires, Net Zero design, passive heating and cooling strategies, etc. Students will learn about what can be done to make the building industry have a lessened effect on the environment and how to build in a way that is more sensitive to the environment that a piece of architecture is placed in. Students will also learn about what design strategies can be taken to retrofit or remodel the existing built environment in a way that can have a net positive impact on our environment. Students will examine existing opportunities through products, materials, design choices, and design strategies at the level of a product or a furnishing in or on a building up to the level of urban design at the neighborhood or city. Students will have the opportunity to explore sustainable and resilient solutions through design at a variety of levels throughout this course. Sustainability and resiliency in business practices will also be studied -- students will examine the opportunities in creating businesses devoted to sustainability or resiliency through design and will posit what opportunities in this area of design may exist in the near future.