Library of Reuse CEA Lab, ETH Zurich

Scanning is essential for knowing what materials are in buildings in order to renovate, reuse, or deconstruct them sustainably. New and ever improving technologies help engineers understand what materials are in a building so that they can better plan what to do with them.

Romain Geri is the director of Scanways, a company based in Geneva that offers specialized digital surveying for architecture, engineering, and construction. Scanways produces high quality and high precision 3D scans, building information models, and virtual reality tours of buildings.

 Many of the current efforts to mitigate climate change and its effects rely on digital solutions. But what would our designs for landscapes and buildings of the future look like if we slowed down and paid more attention to the traditional knowledge that humans have acquired over millennia?

Julia Watson is an urban designer and best-selling author on nature-based technologies for climate resilience. She teaches urban design at Colombia University in New York. In this interview, she discusses climate change awareness and indigenous technologies in sustainable building and education.

Human consumption far oversteps planetary boundaries. Limiting consumption and economic growth seems like an obvious strategy for cutting emissions and protecting the environment. But Alessio Terzi, economist for the European Commission, explains why degrowth is not sustainable. He also discusses his 2022 book.

Digitalization is crucial for making construction more sustainable and circular. But the sector is slow to digitalize its processes and often relies on fragmented data.

Martin Fisher, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, explains how digitalization improves project management, automation, and building information modeling to better navigate tradeoff decisions for more sustainable construction.

Human habitats and their infrastructure require a lot of space and resources. Could virtual and mixed reality help architects and engineers build spaces that put less pressure on our urban environments?

Iro Armeni, professor at Stanford University, leads the Gradient Spaces Lab, where she combines computer science with architecture and engineering to create more circular, multifunctional, and reusable spaces.

Lifecycle assessments (LCAs) are necessary for understanding the environmental impacts of buildings. They’re needed to calculate the service life of all of the components and materials in a building, and how much embodied carbon is involved in producing them.

André Stephan, professor of Architecture, Architectural Engineering and Urban Planning at the Université catholique de Louvain, researches how to scale up life cycle assessments so that they can be used to better understand the carbon footprint of the construction sector. In this podcast he talks with Catherine De Wolf, Professor of Circular Engineering for Architecture at ETH Zurich, about data, computational tools, the challenges of creating life cycle assessments for buildings made of reused materials in particular, and in what ways academia is responsible for reducing the environmental impact of construction.