It’s time for architects to take embodied energy more seriously—the total sum of energy used to extract, manufacture, transport, and assemble materials for building—as Columbia’s David Benjamin and Harvard’s Kiel Moe make clear in their respective books on the topic. The way we design today results in buildings that consume more energy than ever before, with serious consequences. According to Benjamin and Moe, architects egregiously approach buildings as isolated objects when they are instead moving parts in a far-reaching, enduring, and complex network.
Embodied energy is difficult to calculate, especially since most metrics are insufficient; the nuanced set of conditions that govern how we build, such as the quality of human labor or the state of global trade, must also be weighed if we are to build sustainably. But, as Benjamin, founding principal of the Living, writes in Embodied Energy and Design, these aspects are outside what is normally evaluated; the insights in this book of essays bring some to light. An essay by GSAPP colleague Jorge Otero-Pailos, for instance, contemplates the influence of cultural values, writing that they “charge our relationships to architectural objects with a cultural energy that we then reify as cultural capital.”
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