How does Notre Dame’s School of Architecture address the issues of climate change confronting our world, using the lens of the built environment? Though we live in a society and a culture that may often be focused on the new, we can respect the legacy of which we are stewards, and understand the value of that legacy, when we realize that the “greenest” building is the one that is already built. Hear how the University of Notre Dame is investing in our future with the Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability – the only center of its kind in the world. Join Stephen Hartley, associate professor of the practice at the School of Architecture, in conversation with Carl Elefante, FAIA, FAPT, former president of the American Institute of Architects and inaugural senior research associate of the Duda Center, and a leading expert in the convergence of historic preservation and sustainability worldwide.
Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.
How does Notre Dame’s School of Architecture address the issues of climate change confronting our world, using the lens of the built environment? Though we live in a society and a culture that may often be focused on the new, we can respect the legacy of which we are stewards, and understand the value of that legacy, when we realize that the “greenest” building is the one that is already built. Hear how the University of Notre Dame is investing in our future with the Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability – the only center of its kind in the world. Join Stephen Hartley, associate professor of the practice at the School of Architecture, in conversation with Carl Elefante, FAIA, FAPT, former president of the American Institute of Architects and inaugural senior research associate of the Duda Center, and a leading expert in the convergence of historic preservation and sustainability worldwide.
Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.
welcome to Fireside nd the podcast from ThinkND that brings the experience and expertise of Notre Dame to you whenever, wherever from stem to art, from religion to health. Listen and learn with ND on the go. Good morning. I'm Steve Hartley, associate Professor of Architecture here at the School of Architecture at Notre Dame, today we'll be talking to Carl, a Lafonte Senior Research Associate here at the School of Architecture. we will be discussing how the School of Architecture addressing climate change? And this is a huge issue, obviously facing everyone in the world and no greater area of the world. Deals with climate change and addressing the climate change than our built environment. This week's podcast is possible thanks to, the Michael Christopher Dita Center for Preservation, resilience and Sustainability, the Notre Dame School of Architecture, think nd the Notre Dame Alumni Association. So Carl. Can you please tell me a little bit about your involvement here in the School of Architecture?
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Good morning, Steve. It's great. Be here with you this morning. and, I'm here at the School of Architecture, as the first visiting researcher for the Michael Christopher Doda Center for Preservation, resilience and Sustainability. And the first thing I want to say about that is I believe the Michael Doda Center for Preservation, resilience and Sustainability is the only center for preservation, resilience, and sustainability that I know of in the entire world. You know, so this is really, Advancing a conversation that, really isn't happening in a lot of other places. I would say that there's a lot of, a Venn diagram where there's lots of overlap of different people talking about different aspects of this topic. But I think that we should really, you know, kudos to the School of architecture here in the University of Notre Dame for really investing in. An important subject that essentially not a lot of people are really spending a lot of time on. So I am here as this first visiting researcher. just thrilled to be here because this is an important conversation that not nearly enough energy is being, really put into advancing this topic. for the three people out there who know who I am, the chances are that the reason why you know me is, this kind of, quote that I've become famous for, that the greenest building is one that's already built. And, you know, this is something that I've been, preaching for. 20 plus years, that we are in a society and a culture that is so completely focused on the new and the, now that we have a really hard time, respecting the legacy that we are the stewards of and really understanding the value of that legacy. And as you said in your introduction, look out the window. The built environment is a lot of stuff, you know, humanity has been building things for at least something like eight or 9,000 years. And we've built a heck of a lot of stuff, and particularly since the end of the second World War, the building stock, the number of cities in the world. literally the number of cities in the world now. In the millions, is well over a thousand cities. the cities with over 20 million, you probably wouldn't even recognize the names of most of those cities. the amount that's been built, in the last, three quarters of a century is astounding. It's absolutely astounding. So here we are talking about a topic. Climate change that, is enormously impacted by what we've built, where we've built it, how we've built it, and how we operate it. Every one of those steps. Incredibly energy intensive. And of course, with the technologies that we're using today, it's not just energy intensive, it's fossil fuel energy intensive, which means that it has an enormous carbon footprint that comes with it. here we are. Saying we're in this discipline architecture that is focused on the biggest contributor to climate change, that there is the building sector, when you take both the embodied emissions that are associated with the industry of building, and then also the operational emissions of really running the habitation that we occupy. so it's this huge. Huge question. It's this huge problem and how many people are actually paying attention to what we've already got. If you ask the average architecture student or the average architect out there, they're so focused on the next thing they're gonna build that it's very hard to get anybody's attention on what's already here. And the fact that the Michael Christopher Doda Center for Preservation, resilience and Sustainability is actually. you know, put a flag in the ground and said, we are going to pay attention to two things that are relevant here. One is existing buildings, what we've already built, that are what we call our built heritage. And the second is the traditional knowledge that. The Built heritage represents. It's amazing that, the, this Center is investing in this topic and it's also amazing that so few others are not.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:We're certainly very grateful to the Doda family for their support on to found the program and found the center, and we hope that we can really make an impact. It's, something that you, you said a, a minute ago, and that's embodied energy, and for people who don't understand what embodied energy is when it comes to buildings and building materials, can you. expand on what the concept of embodied energy is and why it's so important to existing structures.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:sure. and it is something that, you and me and three other people who are listening to the podcast, you know, understand what it means. It is a little bit of an esoteric topic. So let me just start by saying. The idea of energy in anything that we do and the energy in your car, the energy in the building that you're occupying, or the, or where you, the energy that goes into the steel you use to make a building. No one even talked about that until 1973 with the oil embargo. And then all of a sudden our energy footprint became very clear to us because it got four times more expensive overnight. And that moment. Of the light bulb coming on about, paying attention to energy happened dramatically overnight. Just all of a sudden, oh my gosh, we have to pay attention to energy, including in our buildings. And to just give you an idea of how absolute that was, many buildings. we're built without submetering. you know, it is it didn't care where the energy was going. It wasn't even worth spending a few hundred dollars on putting a submeter in. So you, you would know how much energy was going to lighting, how much energy was going to heating and cooling, how, et cetera. It just, it was like, no, we didn't even bother take, taking care of it. We didn't even bother keeping track of it, I should say. we're now a lot of years later, like 50 is the number, that's a lot of years. And so the awareness about energy, is something that has really, become a much deeper topic. And in the, in our world of the built environment, there are basically two categories. And this is true of all disciplines, but in our discipline it's, you know, it's got a little bit of special. jargon to it and so on. it is the operating, energy and then also the embodied energy that literally goes into the making of buildings. So the operating energy part of it, most people are, can get their heads around really easily. that, you know, you turn the stove on, you're using energy to. Cook your soup. you turn this thermostat up'cause you're cold, you're using energy to heat or actually increasingly to cool the spaces that you're in. but look at the, look around at the room you're in. What is it made out of? What were the, processes that were involved in mining the ore that went into making the concrete or making the steel, et cetera, et cetera. You put that all together. And in the totally like average building, just picture whatever you wanna have as the average building out there. an average building has. About the same amount of embodied energy or embodied greenhouse gas emissions for building it as it will take to operate that building for 20 or 30 or 40 years. In other words, the initial energy and the initial carbon footprint for making a building is huge. It's absolutely giant. And if you know, look at how big buildings are, look at the robust materials that are made out of course there's a huge amount of energy, and with that energy comes carbon footprint.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:And you know, it's funny that you say that'cause we look at buildings now that are being designed today and you know, their lifespan or their span until redundancy is 20 or 30 years, most of the time, if not lower. I, and materials itself, I always, you know, talk to people about vinyl windows and the vinyl window industry is, they're doing great at selling their products. and for some areas of the country, your energy recapture for taking out the historic wood windows that were there for a hundred years and replacing them with vinyl windows. That energy recapture might be 20 years, is actually longer than. The product itself is designed to last for, so the concept of you're gonna save money now, or you're gonna save money in the next six months or a year because you're less efficient, but what is or more efficient then what does that mean in terms of cost of making that material, and not only the cost of making that material is cost of getting the old material out, and where does it go? Unfortunately, we have. There is a growing industry in material salvage, as you know, and stream diversion. But there's still a lot of waste in the construction industry of that embodied energy we took this, these two by fours and we cut down these trees and we milled them, and we're gonna use them for temporary shoring for three weeks on a construction site. And they go in the dumpster and they go down to the landfill or into the, incinerator depending on where you're at. So given the su substantial impact on the environment attributed to building development transportation sectors, it's clear that if we're gonna meet our sustainability goals that are set forth by the international community, it will require a rapid and deep change in our contemporary building culture, the way we build, the way we settle land, move ourselves, and materials around. how can the architectural profession take the lead in moving towards this transformation and how is it responding now?
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Great. the, your comments that led up to that question and that question are both really important. And I wanna go back to what I said about the. Our awakening to the importance of energy that happened in 1973. in a way, climate change is having, another moment like that where we're awakening to our carbon footprints. And it's closely related to energy, but it's not really the same thing as energy. and it's again, it's almost, you know, we've got another dialect that we now have to learn how to use. and so it's a little different. the other part of this energy awakening and now the carbon awakening that we should just understand is that everything about our practice today was shaped at a time when we weren't awake to either one of those things. We weren't awake to energy and, the consequences of using it. we weren't awake to our greenhouse gas emissions footprint and the consequences of that. Therefore, a lot of things that we take for granted, oh, this is good practice. This is what we should be doing, are actually really, biased by what I like to call those modern era. biases that, you know, yes, I want to have an electric car rather than a gas powered car, because that's a really good thing. We don't even ask, what do we need a car for at all? The car is 3000 pounds of stuff that has an incredible greenhouse gas emission that's associated with making that car. How many years of operating a green? You know, electric car does it take to recapture the footprint of having manufactured that car? do you need a car to drive around in anyhow, you know, and so I, I just want to just take this up to the top level, you know, really, you know, exaggerate it to say, if you take that line of thought about modern abi and really take it to the top level, you realize that the modern era that has existed at this time of plenty of fossil fuel energy. it's the amount of energy that we've had over the last 200 years. Is so unprecedented in the history of humankind. We've just been awash in available energy. We've been so lucky. There's so many things about our modern way of life that just would've been impossible if we had to burn wood. I. You know, we were, we were talking the, you know, earlier about this notion of, you know, brick used to be a really special material because you had to burn so much wood to make brick. Once coal came along, brick became a cheap material and everything got built for brick. No problem. Okay, that's just a little anecdote of this world that we're in awash in energy we're, we've been so fortunate to be able to do that. On the other hand. It's a total anomaly in the 9,000 years of building cities, being able to build cities where we don't have to think about energy. We're spoiled brats, man. you know, we don't have to worry about that stuff. we're just so lucky to not have to be worrying about that stuff. on the other hand, here we are, we have climate change. maybe we do need to have to be worrying about that stuff. Maybe we do need to be going back and thinking about. What was it like in the world before we had this glut of energy? You know, what were we doing to not need nearly as much energy as we need today? You know, just to give you an idea, the average person in the world, not even just here in the United States, the average person in the world needs a third of a railroad car of coal. Of energy to burn every year. So your little family of three people, you're burning a railroad car of coal every year to just heat your house, drive your car, go on your airplane rides to South Bend, Indiana, whatever it is that you're gonna do. You know, we've just have and just this unbelievable amount of energy that we're using. our ability to really be asking these questions about what did the world look like before? How can we really have, a much more enlightened idea about really where do we need to be using energy and for what purpose? Where do we need to be having a carbon footprint and for what purpose?
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:brings up a pretty good question, or pretty important question is for the last 20 years or so, what I've seen is preservation and sustainability have been basically running on parallel tracks. And I think all the way back to, the National Trust Preservation Magazine's cover from, I think it was 1977, I think you might remember it. It was a, it was a building that had essentially been drawn over to look like a gas can, talking about embodied energy back then. It is a classic, you know, cover of Preservation magazine. They've been running on these parallel tracks, the tracks very rarely meet. How do we bring of traditional building, which is something that we espouse and really focus on here at the school of architecture or traditional building, intangible heritage, traditional building techniques, design materials and the sustainability world, which frankly and a lot of times talks about how technology is going to save us.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Yeah.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:Where should we start that conversation? I think.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Yeah, so the conversation's gonna start by us becoming crushed under an avalanche of existing buildings. You know, if you, study and I'll just use the United States of America because that's where we are. and that, and those are statistics that are probably familiar to more people you know, than other others. But, so using the American building stock statistics. The amount that has been built since the end of World War ii. It is just absolutely stupendous. It's mind boggling. If you know the world before then, and look at the world population before the end of World War II and after the end of World War ii, we've added more than 5 billion people in that period of time to a world that had less than 3 billion people before that period of time. So of course, we've built a lot of stuff. Lemme just give you one other little factoid that just blows my mind. The average house today in the United States of America that's being built is three times bigger than the average house that was being built in 1950. The family size has reduced to almost half of what it was in 1950. So we have families that are half the size and we're building houses that are three times bigger. We did a mere, you know, 70 to 75 years ago. really what, why does we need that much more space? But we, we just do. And in, in the United States of America, I threw that coal car stat at you before. every American has a thousand square feet of building for their use. We all have a thousand square feet of building at our disposal.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:That's an extraordinary number. absolutely extraordinary number. I know looking at some of my research and seeing that to 1972, we built 40 million. New homes in this country. and what builders realized very quickly is that the center part of the room doesn't cost that much. So they would add not adding to the walls, adding to the center part of the room, which would increase your square footage, and now everybody wants the 2,800 square foot house or 3000 square foot house for the smaller family. We fill it with stuff that we don't need. And I can see this in the overabundance of storage unit. seem to pop up everywhere.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:so to go back to your question though about, you know, this intersection between preservation and sustainability, and I would actually say now it's really preservation and climate action. it, it is, something that, you know, the numbers are simply making it so that we can't ignore it. And another really interesting number that, that's making it so that's showing that we really can't ignore it is. American Institute architects has kept track of monthly billings by architects and also kept track of monthly building codes, excuse me, building permits that are being issued, across the country in 2022. In 2023. There's a new world out there. Okay. it's like this is historic. This is like all three of us are paying attention to this, but this is a historic moment and what's happened in the last two years is that both architectural billings for existing building renovation work have exceeded architectural billings for new construction work. Now, that has happened a couple of times previously, but it's happened in the absolute. Pit of a recession when there was no new building work going on. And we've had, since the great recession in 20 11, 20 12, when new construction has started to ramp back up, the renovation work has not dropped off. So we're at a, we're in a different place. Why are we in a different place? Because there are so many millions and billions of square feet of existing buildings that need to be taken care of. The other thing that happened, and this is 2023, is that there were more building permits issued in the country for rehab work. For new construction work. So we're literally, we're seeing the evidence of this massive building stock that needs care. And you were talking about kind of service life is the term that I would use of materials and buildings and, you know, buildings need care. some materials need a lot of care. You need a new, you know, coat of paint every 10 years, whatever. That reality has also made it so that, the amount of work to simply care for buildings is also knocking on our door. So buildings that are more than 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old, 60 years old, as you go up in that timescale. The expected amount of work that you need to do for those buildings goes up. And the one other thing that sort of imp that you were talking about that comes to play here is, oh, the old courthouse on the center, center square that's made out of granite. Every a hundred years, you really ought to clean the granite. That's about what it needs. Okay. the materials that we've been making buildings out of since World War II is this whole new class classification of materials. actually, you mentioned vinyl. Plastics, material conservators understand that plastics are dynamic materials. They never stop chemically reacting with each other. They have accelerants and they have retardants and things like that. those processes never stop. their material life expectancy is. Unknown is the answer to that. We literally don't know how long a vinyl siding or a vinyl window will last. You know, the, and do, oh, a wood window. How long will it last? if you keep painting it and you reco it, it will last a thousand years. No problem. That granite facade will last forever. Literally the, you know, the, you know, the, a absolutely documentable lifecycle of that granite facade is forever. and we use forever materials like concrete, you know, stone, Build everything out of'em. The building code says we have to have a, an earthquake proof building, a hurricane proof building, a fireproof building, a terrorism proof building. We're gonna make it out of things like concrete that will last forever and our design ideas. It was gonna last for 40 years. Why are we using forever? Materials to build buildings for 40 years? get on a plane, go to Rome. Go admire the 2000 year old buildings. Why are we building buildings for 40 years? What's, what's the embodied, you know, energy, the embodied carbon footprint, implication of something as stunning as building, building things out of forever. Materials that we're only thinking about, lasting for 40 years. Makes no sense.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:it's interesting you say it'cause I actually. I think about this a lot is when I look at new buildings coming up and I look at the concrete block and the grout that's going into the concrete block and the rebar. And I think about this, I drive past it almost every day. This brand new storage unit, center that's going up. And I said that thing's gonna get torn down in 15 years. Maybe it might be gone in five years. How did we get to this point? Where we've become such a disposable, it's such a disposable building culture, not necessarily the materials concrete is a forever material, but how did we get to the point where we think, oh, I'm going to, I'm gonna spend all this money and all this material, all this energy for something I'm gonna throw away in five years, do we turn back the clock on that? That courthouse on the square was meant as a. As a center point and a of that community and a point of pride, how do we get, how do we change the way that we think about buildings and think about cities? To go back to this concept of if we're going to build, we need to build permanence, not for making some money out of this and then from it.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:so I, I'm not sure I have a very good answer to your question, but I would say that. I really try to be resistive to, in, especially in the preservation world, to talk about going back to anything we have to be going forward to things. You know, we have a future that, we need to be responsive to, not a past that we need to be responsive to. The past can teach us some lessons for the future, but our focus is really about the future. you know, what is it? That, I'll go back to just saying that we have at least 9,000 years of building cities, okay. we have had fossil fuels beginning to be used, very, commonly about 400 years ago. We have cities that are really built with fossil fuels at their heart for at most 200 years. So our. Current practice is this very new thing. It's very unproven. We've just discovered after less than 200 years of really baking all this stuff into our world that there's some pretty bad consequences that we have to do something about. You know, this is all new stuff. Like we're skating on thin ice with speed skates. this is just happening very quickly. how it got here is a really tough question to answer on the other hand, like, where does it need to go from here? And we have 9,000 years of Prefo fuel, practice to look at. And, the, the in, in architecture, we're really lucky that we don't even really need to read a book about it. Fortunately, there are, we can read books, we can actually go sit in it, you know, that, you know, there, there are buildings that you can experience that are a hundred years old right here in your town that are still the way they were built a hundred years ago, and probably in your town 200 years ago, and maybe in your town. 300 years ago, and if you get on an airplane, you can go to a town where you can go sit in a building that's 2000 years old. So we actually have in Built Heritage, this incredible record that is a material record of how it was done, who built it, what did they build it out of, what crafts did they need to build that we don't have to. Imagine what that might have been like. We could go to those places and we can actually experience them and study them. That's something about the built environment that's very unique and I'll just say one more thing. I. About this. It's oh, you know, we really need clean hydrogen to, you know, make 21st century buildings. No, we don't. we had 9,000 years of buildings without fossil fuels and without clean hydrogen. Let's first ask the question before we figure out how to have buildings with clean hydrogen. Let's first. Ask the question of what did buildings look like without fossil fuels? How? How did we make that work?
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:that's really interesting. and it's funny that you say that, and I probably have should have framed that question a little bit'cause I talk about this in my preservation theory class is not every old building can be a museum. And in fact, most of your work when you're dealing in preservation is adaptive rehabilitation and moving those buildings not freezing them in time. I think you brought up that you're absolutely right. Preservation is about the future. It's not necessarily about the past. it's obviously using the past to, to influence the future, but. about one thing that actually is involved in this and you've touched on it, and that is, something that's you and dear in my heart and that's the crafts and the building and learning from traditional crafts and reintroducing traditional crafts in a world. And I've spent 20 years training. in traditional crafts, and a lot of times what it is, it's almost fighting. you know, we don't wanna go to the big box store and buy mortar that is 90% Portland cement. We wanna make our own, which is a line base or something like that. how do we incorporate, how do we as an architecture school and as architects, esp. Push for additional training and additional education in the crafts.'cause I'm sure you've seen it. the cost of buildings continuously is going up. And the big part of that is labor because there simply aren't enough people coming into the field, not only in traditional, but also new bill, but specifically about traditional work.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Yeah, so this is something with a few different parts to it. you know, that, and that's true of a lot of things that in, as we look at climate change, and what we need to do to adjust to re retool in ways that greenhouse gas emissions are not just baked into everything we do, in the first place. you're talking about. Traditional material craft and, you know, we're thinking about brick and stone and, you know, wood and things like that. our building stock is no longer made out of those materials. You know, the, and I would say it's probably pretty fair to say that something like about 20% of our building stock at most. Is made out of those traditional materials. The other 80% is modern era technology used to make modern era buildings. and so increasingly our question about what are the skill sets that we are going to need. To care for. Our buildings are now actually really dealing with a whole new set of buildings, a whole new set of materials, et cetera. And I actually think that for us as preservation people, this is a new challenge that we need to face. I don't think there's a lot of people really spending attention to that. You know, there's Tom Jester's book on the modern era materials. the, I, frankly, I'm not aware of any historic preservation program that it has got the, you know, building craft necessary to, take care of all glass buildings being studied, you know, so it's a big issue that just in, in and of itself, What those modern era materials are. How we are making buildings today, is just a really big question. that, we have traditional knowledge to refer back to. if the past teaches, what does the future learn, which is, by the way, is a title to a book that you know, which I just think is the great greatest version of that phrase that I've ever heard. But, so what does the past teach here? let's just take one example with buildings. Traditional buildings used to be built with at most 30% windows.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:Yes.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Because a solid wall is a really great thing. It's really easy to insulate, it's really easy to take care of it. It's mad at materials that lasts forever, et cetera. Windows leak. Windows make you cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Windows are a problem, you know, so traditional buildings were always built with a very limited amount of window opening. even like a gothic cathedral with these huge windows. If you actually, if you actually calculate the percentage of opening there, it's at most 30%. You know, so all glass buildings, what an oxymoron what actually it just, you know, it, it just doesn't make any sense. The New York Times headquarters in New York City, it's got this, you know, Bri sole of all these grill, these grills. Those grills are there to reduce the amount of light that are on the inside of the building. That's made out of all glass. Why make a building out of all glass if you have to shield the building from the amount of daylight that's coming into it? It just doesn't make any sense. the all glass building is the biggest. Biggest misnomer, the biggest mistake that's ever been made in, in, in architecture. It's just, it absolutely makes no sense at all. you know, we're building materials, we're building out of materials that have super high energy and super high greenhouse gas emissions built into them to create buildings that have too much glass that, that too, which allows too much light. You know, you go by an all glass building, what do you see? The bottom three feet of window is the backside of somebody's desk. what in what way? Does that make any sense? So at any rate, I'm obviously having a moment here, you know, but the, you know, the, so literally, what are the lessons from traditional buildings that really would be of value to us here? I'll just use that one. Make your building 70% solid wall. Then we'll talk.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:Fantastic. And I, no problem. Having moments of giving you huge questions, expect your answers. and I'm gonna roll into another huge question to see if you can, answer this one. So we've got the cities that were built before the really, the massive use of fossil fuels. You know, we'll call that, you know, city 1.0, and then you have City 2.0, which is the introduction of fossil fuels sprawl and cheap energy. that error is coming to an end. How do we make. Modern City 3.0. What do we need to do to address issues of urban development and urban life in a world that has got an A footprint from Modern City 2.0?
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:Yeah, so great question and I love the terminology that you're using as well in that, of the people listening to this squirmed in your, in their chairs, when you started to talk about city 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, because we're Americans and we don't believe in cities, we have a hard time even with the word city. there's some percentage of our population that actually says, oh, cities are good. But a lot of people really have a hard time thinking that the future will be an urban future. It's like real uncomfortable with the idea I want to have my house with the yard around it kind of thing. and I just wanted to dwell on that for a minute to say that we're actually at another historic moment. And so the 21st century, there's a lot of people that talk about, oh, the 21st century, it's the climate change century, it's the whatever, what it actually is. It's the urban century. More than anything else, it's the urban century. And what do I mean by that? When the century dawned 2000, for the first time in human history, that's a long time, by the way, human history. there are more people that live in cities today than not in urban environments. For the first time in human history, by the centuries end, the UN predicts that nearly nine in 10 people will live in cities. So we're literally to, if you are gonna have 10 billion people in the world, or 12 billion people in the world, the only way that's gonna happen, the only way that's gonna work is if people live together in dense, compact areas that we call cities. the other thing I'm gonna say about it is that. Our attitude about squirming in our chairs about cities. that's part of our new world anomaly. That's part of the last 200 years of, in this case, people having available transportation so that you could even think about living outside of a city and a job, you know, unless it was growing corn, you know. Cities have always been, and actually, you know, ed Glaser is the kind of the an economist at Harvard University has written, wrote a book probably 20 years ago called The Climate of the, excuse me. A book called The Triumph of the Cities that talks about how important cities have been throughout human civilization to really be the place where the ideas exchange and where there are actually people that can spend time designing buildings or writing books or whatever.'cause everybody out in the field spending all their time farming and raising the animals. so we have to get over our. Or discomfort with even talking about urban solutions as being something that's positive and something that actually would potentially be able to create a situation where, for example, everyone might have a place to live. or everyone might have a place to get a good education or everyone might be able to have food and healthy food to eat. So the idea that all of those things will be possible and only possible through an urban solutions is, revolutionary. And again, it just goes back to we're at 8 billion today. adding thir, we have added 13 billion people. Excuse me, we've added a billion people every 13 years for the last 60 years. That's the rate we're on, you know, so just count it up another 13 years, another billion people, 26 years. That's two. You know, it just we're, you know, if we're gonna have this many people. We are going to need urban solutions. Oh, architects, does that sound like something that maybe you would be interested in and might be re relevant to?
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:I hope so. So I've got one more question for you. so you've joined us, you joined us as the initial due to fellow here, beginning in the fall semester, and you'll be returning next semester, for the spring. And you've proposed a series of faculty round tables. To consider some themes related to all the things that we've discussed today. would you unpack of those themes and speak about what you really hope that the, those discussions could accomplish while you're here with us?
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:so I'm thrilled that you asked me that question'cause, I think it's, it's important for us to, really continue this conversation, and not just have it be between the two of us and the three people that are listening to this podcast, but really en engage the full faculty community here. and actually we'd love to see the, we'd love to. Engage the whole university community in this conversation. So the round tables, we're gonna do five round tables in, in the spring, and it's basically, literally continuing this conversation. It starts with, recognizing that the climate crisis is actually happening, not in a vacuum, but happening in the context of, really serious questions about. You know, the future of peace and prosperity in the world. And so I like to think of it as the climate imperative is happening at a time where we need to be talking about the justice imperative, and then the solution is going to be the urban imperative that we just simply are going to need to solve all these problems by understanding what the future of cities looks like. The current condition of our cities is that there's not a city in this country, and here we're in South Bend, Indiana, and it certainly applies here that doesn't need healing. that are, the conditions that we have today are suboptimal. We have over a half a million people in the richest country in the world who are homeless. 20% of them are veterans. We can't take care of our veterans. Just, it's, it's mind boggling to me, mind boggling. so there's a lot of healing that needs to be done. A lot of what we talked about today is what do we look at in that city 3.0? What is the beyond modern world look like? What does the world that's not addicted to fossil fuels look like? What is a world that is not experiencing a justice crisis look like, et cetera? And then just very much in the preservation, resiliency, sustainability mindset. There are two things that, that we think from a preservation standpoint are really important. One is building reuse. We've got a lot of stuff to take care of the other one is the idea of regional solutions.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:Yes.
carl_1_12-04-2023_105105:and, what is, you know, what are we doing here in the United States of America in the Northern Hemisphere? What are people doing in tropical climates? You know, that architecture used to be very regional. I. Very regional and part of the modern era world, that, that has been fueled by fossil fuels and great transportation and all that sort of stuff is a universalism, literally architecture was the international style. That was the beginning of modern architecture was the international style. what is the regional style? What happens if we. If we rediscover regionality. So all of those topics are things that the School of Architecture, could really do a lot to really, not just, embed into the educational program, but also be doing more, forward thinking research on as well. So we wanna engage in that conversation in the spring.
stephen_1_12-04-2023_105106:Excellent. I look forward to those, and I'm sure, my colleagues here at the School of Architecture will be very engaged in all of these conversations. Carl, as. Always. It is a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking to me today. and thank all of you for joining us on Fireside nd on behalf of the Notre Dame School of Architecture, the Michael Christopher Deter Center for Preservation, resilience and Sustainability and ThinkND. I hope you enjoy this episode and will visit think.nd.edu to learn even more. Until next time, inspire your mind and spark conversations. Thank you for joining us on Fireside nd, and thanks to the School of Architecture's Communication Team for coordinating our conversation today. of Notre Dame School of Architecture, the Michael Christopher Deter Center for Preservation, resilience and Sustainability and ThinkND. I hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll visit think.nd.edu to learn even more. Until next time, inspire your mind and spark conversations.