Pictured from left to right: Remy Mermelstein, Christina X. Brown, Carlos Cerezo Davila, Erin Heidelberger, and Quoc Dang are members of KPF’s Environmental Performance team.
Sustainability experts from KPF’s Environmental Performance team (KPFep) attended the annual green design conference in Philadelphia, PA, here is what they found.
Greenbuild is the premier conference on sustainability in the built environment, and this year’s theme, “Built to Scale,” complemented KPF’s own sustainable design ethos—as a firm, we are dedicated to elevating cities through impactful design, and the work of our Environmental Performance team is all about finding ways to achieve more environmentally friendly buildings that meet the scale of the climate crisis. Across the scores of excellent keynotes, sessions, and networking meetings our team attended, a few major themes stood out.
1. Passive House Is Having a Moment
This rigorous energy efficiency certification is no longer just for single-family homes. A number of sessions featured multifamily, commercial, and even health-care projects that are pursuing or have achieved Passive House. In many cases, developers are finding that passive housing buildings actually save money over the medium and long term simply due to their increased efficiency and reduced energy costs. KPF’s Bard College Residence Halls are a part of this trend, comprising hyper-insulated dormitories for some 400 college students, they will be KPF’s first Passive House project.
2. Embodied Carbon in Materials and More
LEED v5 places a heavier emphasis than previous iterations of the standard on healthy and low-embodied-carbon materials. LEED, along with efforts such as the AIA Materials Pledge, which KPF joined this year, and the WELL standard are organizing around the Common Materials Framework as an industry-wide model for sharing data and understanding material impacts. As the focus on embodied carbon as a major area for improvement intensifies, facets beyond standard building materials, including difficult-to-measure sources, such as building site emissions and MEP products, are getting a closer look.
3. Green Finance Goes Global
With an increasing diversity of green finance products, including loans with interest rates tied to sustainability metrics and green bonds, proliferating in the real estate finance space, owners and developers are eager to quantify decarbonization, climate-related disaster risk, and transition risk across their portfolios. Meanwhile, at the level of individual real estate assets, new tools to automate energy use monitoring, and advanced energy modeling are helping owners find operational savings and deploy strategic upgrades.
4. Sustainability Beyond Carbon
The focus of sustainable architecture has broadened beyond the strict focus on carbon reduction, this is evident in the LEED v5 standard, which places greater emphasis on holistic sustainability, human health, and community impact. At Greenbuild, KPF’s Global Sustainability Director, Carlos Cerezo Davila, joined The International WELL Building Institute on a panel to discuss how Heron, a residential tower designed by KPF, helped support the Water Street development in becoming the first place to achieve the WELL Community Standard.