News from Yale CEA (August 2023)

As the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA) enters its fifth year, the organization continues to celebrate the expanded realization of its mission goals and their dissemination among an ever-widening global audience. As the lead author, CEA (along with the United Nations Environment Programme) brought together industrial and academic partners from six continents for the report Building Materials and the Climate: Status and Solutions, published by the Global Alliance of Buildings and Construction. Yale CEA is the first organization from the architectural community to provide such authorial leadership in this semiannual publication with global impact, through key contributions from its founding director, Anna Dyson (MArch ’96); Yale faculty members Mae-Ling Lokko, Barbara Reck, and Mohamed Aly Etman; former Yale postdoctoral fellow Naomi Keena; and doctoral researcher Christina Ciardullo. The report identifies the fundamental role of building materials in the production of planetary carbon emissions, the integral importance of whole-life-cycle approaches to decarbonization, strategies of reuse and circularity, shifting to bio-based materials, the improvement of conventional materials and processes, and the importance of implementing appropriate assessment tools and policies to promote decarbonization. The publication will be presented in full at Climate Week NYC, in September 2023. Leadership in this arena reestablishes CEA’s commitment to its core collaborative ambition to connect scientific inquiry with the aesthetic, social, and conceptual aspirations of architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of active political engagement beyond the traditional domains of architecture in order to radically transform the design of energetic and material systems, buildings, and infrastructures while understanding the effects of these elements on the geobiosphere at large.

In 2022 Anna Dyson, Hines Professor of Sustainable Architectural Design at the Yale Schools of Architecture (YSoA) and Environment (YSE), and Mohamed Aly Etman, Senior Research Scientist, presented research at the United Nations COP27 Conference on Climate Change, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and they will lead the Yale CEA delegation at the upcoming COP28 Conference in Dubai. In the past academic year Dyson has been a featured presenter at the Design for Freedom Summit at Grace Farms, at the Yale Club, and in the YSE Biomes series. She presented the Abend Family evening lecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Dyson will be a featured speaker at “Leave No One Behind,” the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023, in Copenhagen.

Our faculty has been joined this year by assistant professor Mae-ling Lokko, founder of Willow Technologies, based in Accra, Ghana. Ongoing exhibitions of her work are on display at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, and at the Museum of the Future, in Dubai. Lokko has recently published papers in Energies and e-flux Architecture, and has spoken at a number of global forums, including COP27 and the RICS World Built Environment Forum. She was a featured speaker in the Architectural League’s series “Field to Form,” at the panel “Yale for Humanity: Cities and Climate Solutions,” and at the 2023 Design for Freedom Summit at Grace Farms. Lokko was joined by faculty lecturer Mohamed Aly Etman in taking a group of YSoA students to explore Ghana for the technology and practice seminar “Soil Sisters.”

Our doctoral researchers, current PhD candidates, and students in the Ecosystems in Architectural Sciences PhD track have also been active in publications, presentations, and exhibitions. Phoebe Mankiewicz recently published a paper on active green wall bioremediation performance in Energy & Buildings and presented an interuniversity collaborative paper on behalf of an interdisciplinary group of coauthors at the IAQ 2020 (2022) ASHRAE Conference, in Athens, Greece. She also presented interdisciplinary collaborative research papers on microbiome sampling, at the 2022 NIST-Hosted Workshop on Standards for Microbiome and Multi’Omics Measurements, in Denver, Colorado, and on “indoor exposome,” with fellow first coauthor Elizabeth Lin, at the International Society of Exposure Science 2022 conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Mandi Pretorius presented a paper on water resources and the “Urban Domestic” at the “Precarity” doctoral conference at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She also worked with collaborators at Arizona State University, a partner university with the NSF Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), on laboratory testing of architectural prototypes in Tempe, Arizona. Pretorius conducted fieldwork supported by the Macmillan International Dissertation Fellowship in Cape Town, South Africa, and in the Lake Atitlán region of Guatemala’s southwestern highlands, investigating a renewable building-integrated approach to providing household water treatment, in collaboration with the Centro de Estudios Atitlán, at the University del Valle de Guatemala.

Christina Ciardullo was awarded this year’s AIA “Future Forward” grant. Sponsored by the Large Firm Round Table and the Young Architects Forum, the grant supports early-career professionals in testing new ideas that disrupt the traditional conception of practice, process, and product in the field of architecture. Her proposal highlighted the disruptive nature of Yale CEA’s perspective on shifts in the professional practice of architecture, claiming that in order to meet our growing responsibilities to the environment, the profession of architecture needs to support visionary design with emerging skills in evidence-based practice. Ciardullo cited the specific implementation of aspirational “sustainable” systems such as green roofs and living walls that risk elimination due to financial and knowledge barriers for young practitioners.

Seth Embry’s project Carrion Heights, produced for Ariane Lourie Harrison’s class “Feral Surfaces,” was featured in the MODEL Barcelona Architectures Festival and selected for publication in Retrospecta. He will be exhibiting his work for Anna Dyson’s doctoral prototyping seminar at the triennial UIA World Architecture Congress for its 75th anniversary in Copenhagen, Denmark, and leading the Yale School of Architecture student delegation to the event.

We would like to welcome incoming students Ina Dajci and Laetitia Morlie, who will be joining us in the fall.

—Seth Embry is a third-year PhD student and doctoral researcher at Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture.