Green Building in Academia

Would you believe there’s not a single academic presenting at “the world’s premier green building event”? Take a peek at the schedule of speakers for this month’s Living Future 2020 Online Conference. While it looks like a great lineup, it’s somewhat disturbing that the organizers found no ideas coming out of our universities worth including.

I can’t say they were wrong. Is there any impactful Green Building research coming out of academia? I’m not talking about critical theory—‘Architecture in the Anthropocene’ and such—which is plentiful and sometimes interesting. I’m talking about practical ideas and scientific experimentation which would lead directly to low-energy and low-carbon architecture.

Like all professors, I get asked to perform peer-reviews of papers submitted to academic journals. Most of what I see is very weak, in execution but more problematically in ambition. Some document things happening in practice, others apply an existing modeling procedure to a hypothetical narrow circumstance. My reviews often begin: “In my view this research is of limited importance.”

Similarly, if you’re interested in understanding new knowledge in Building Science, where should you go? MIT? Purdue? No, you should go to the Building Science Corporation. Academia hasn’t found a way to take a leading role.

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Update, August 2020: BuildingEnergy Boston 2020 (NESEA) has 108 speakers presenting next week. By my quick survey, two (!) are academics. One is from the MIT Sloan School of Management and one is from Harvard Business School (so zero from architecture and engineering).