Building on the firm’s long history of design excellence and environmental performance, Cerezo Davila will help lead the planning and design practice into a new era of highly-informed, research-driven, comprehensive, and human-centric architecture.
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) is pleased to announce that Carlos Cerezo Davila has joined the firm as Environmental Design Director. In this newly created role, Cerezo Davila will guide the firm in its ongoing efforts to positively impact the environment through its built work. Working closely with staff at all levels of the firm, Cerezo Davila will advance existing processes and create new design tools, workflows, and analysis systems to ensure KPF projects exceed the highest standards of sustainable performance and resiliency.
“With the addition of Carlos, KPF is strengthening both the environmental and research aspects of our practice,” says KPF President James von Klemperer. “As architects of impactful, large-scale projects in key city centers around the world, we appreciate that we have an outsize responsibility to make sure we are designing for a healthy sustainable future. Carlos will help us advance our practice and the cause of environmental betterment worldwide.”
“Given their density and scale, the potential of KPF projects to have a positive environmental impact is immense, not only in the operation and construction of individual buildings but also in the urban microclimates and infrastructure they are embedded in. With more than 50% of the firm’s work located in urban regions of the world facing some of the largest challenges due to rapid urbanization and climate change, KPF has a duty to deliver lasting environmental performance,” says Cerezo Davila. “Having explored the built environment as an academic, I am extremely excited to join KPF and to address some of these challenges alongside experienced and talented designers, while continuing to innovate and expand the field of building performance through applied research.“
Before joining KPF, Cerezo Davila worked as a Research Scientist with the Sustainable Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focusing on the development of workflows and tools to incorporate building performance simulation in design at all scales. His research work has studied the application of energy simulation and uncertainty analysis at an urban scale in collaboration with municipalities such as Boston, Chicago, Lisbon, and Kuwait. Boston’s proof of concept study for a citywide Urban Building Energy Model (UBEM), a term introduced in one of Cerezo Davila’s published scientific papers, modeled over 80,000 buildings and estimated their energy usage to assist the city in developing urban energy generation strategies. As an instructor in the Building Technology program at MIT, Cerezo Davila taught environmental modeling to architects and urban planners. He is a licensed architect by the University of Sevilla, and has practiced in Spain, Japan, and the United States. With a broad portfolio of major projects in urban centers around the world, KPF has throughout its history embraced sustainability by creating long lasting and timeless buildings. With more than 70 LEED certified buildings, and multiple others recognized through international certification codes such as BREEAM, CASBEE, and China’s ThreeStar, KPF has for years been committed to the measured sustainability of its projects. Now, with performance-based goals in mind to reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the cities’ mitigation goals, the firm is doubling down on efforts to integrate sustainable practices throughout the design process.
Read the full press release here.