Carlos Cerezo Davila

A sustainable design expert with research focused on modeling and analyzing building energy use patterns at an urban scale, Carlos has served as KPF’s Environmental Design Director since 2018. Carlos leads the Environmental Performance team (KPFep), closely collaborating with teams across the firm’s global network to establish sustainability benchmarks and workflows that ensure the firm’s projects support KPF’s environmental mission.

As Head of Sustainability, Carlos manages firm-wide initiatives aimed to minimize the environmental impact of KPF projects and operations through an “evidence-based” design approach. KPFep develops computational tools to incorporate carbon, energy, thermal, and daylight modeling in the development of every design.

At the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s new campus in Guangzhou, Carlos led the development of the sustainability vision for the project, collaborating with the design and technical teams to inform the planning of a climate-ready, live-work campus. HKUST(GZ) is designed to be net-zero carbon by 2050 and promotes resiliency through flood prevention and wetland protection.

Before joining KPF, Carlos worked as an Instructor and Research Scientist with the Sustainable Design Lab at MIT, focusing on the application of energy simulation and uncertainty analysis at an urban scale in collaboration with municipalities such as Boston, Chicago, Lisbon, and Kuwait City. In Carlos’s published scientific research, Boston served as the test case for the development of one of the first citywide Urban Building Energy Models (UBEM), which allowed to estimate the energy use of over 80,000 buildings to help inform local energy policy.

As an instructor associated with the Center for Real Estate (CRE) at MIT, Carlos teaches environmental design to architecture, planning, and real estate students. His research work has been published in multiple scientific journals such as Energy and Buildings and Building and Environment.