Sustainable Architecture: Ecological Artifact

Buildings account for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. Sixty percent of Maine homes are heated with heating oil, the highest percentage of any state, and Mainers spend more than a billion dollars on heating oil each year. Improving the efficiency of our homes and buildings is essential for transitioning away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions.

In this course, students will learn how to safely transition buildings away from fossil fuels. This includes understanding the science of energy and moisture movement through a building, how to monitor carbon monoxide and other harmful combustion gases, and methods to reduce energy loss, while maintaining comfortable levels of humidity and fresh air. Students will gain proficiency measuring air leakage with a blower door, using an infrared camera to assess insulation levels, calculating heat loss, and identifying solutions and best practices to develop a plan of action for homeowners.

They will also learn about high efficiency mechanical systems like air source heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and how to assess lighting and appliance electrical usage. Students will learn how to carry out cost calculations for energy savings and research and share information on rebates and incentives available for homeowners. This will be a very hands-on course, with weekly labs to teach energy auditing field skills. This course will include presentations from local energy contractors, and students will participate in energy audits of residential buildings on or off campus. Through these experiences, students will meet and interact with home performance businesses and non-profit organizations in the local community. As time and weather conditions permit, students will gain experience implementing efficiency solutions such as insulation and air sealing.

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to conduct energy audits for homes, identify cost-effective improvements, and prioritize energy improvements to maximize energy savings. This course will provide students with the tools and experience to reduce building energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in a holistic, whole-building approach.

Evaluation will be based on completion of assignments, participation in class discussions, and mastery of field skills.

This class will explore general weather and climate patterns on global, regional, and local scales. We will discuss the major forcings driving global climate fluctuations - on both long (millions of years) and short (days) timescales, including natural and anthropogenic processes. We will also learn about basic meteorology and the processes producing some common spectacular optical weather phenomena (rainbows, coronas, cloud-types, etc). Students will complete a term project comprising a photo-documentary journal of the different weather phenomena they observe during the 10-week term. The field component of this course will be self-guided through the observation and documentation of weather phenomena. Who should take this course: No prior geology/science experience is needed - but expect to do a bit of basic math in this course! The course level is intermediate because it will not cover foundational principles of geology (or other sciences) but instead the course will be integrative and require students to practice both their quantitative and qualitative skills. Take this course if you are passionate or curious about climate change, but do not know much about the science of climate and weather!

Climate change is one of the biggest and most difficult challenges faced by contemporary societies. The challenge has multiple facets: environmental, social, political, economic – each with its own complexities. This course focuses primarily on the social, political and economic components of the climate problem, framed by the concept of climate justice. In the course students are introduced to basic conceptions of justice, the latest findings of climate science and possible impacts on regional scales, and the global politics of climate change, principally in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Climate justice and its operationalization is the principal organizing theme for work over the term, addressing questions such as: how the costs of climate change impacts and efforts to address climate change could or should be distributed between rich and poor, global north and global south; and what are the possible means whereby those costs might be addressed through collective action at various levels: local, national, and global. Students will be evaluated based on regular quizzes, several short papers, class participation, and a final synthetic paper or project.

Climate change and biological diversity are prominent issues on the global political and environmental governance agendas and in public environmental consciousness. Each issue will be the focus of a major United Nations summit in 2026. At these meetings, Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) and to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will carry on with implementation of these major international environmental treaties. Meanwhile, public narratives of the escalating and intersecting dual “crises” of climate change and biodiversity loss provide a broader context for questioning the role and effectiveness of intergovernmental treaty regimes in addressing these crises.

This course will take a comparative and critical look at these two multilateral treaty regimes on biological diversity and climate change. Students will study legal characteristics of each of the treaties, how problems are defined and addressed within each, mechanisms used for implementation, and the governmental and non-governmental actors involved in the work of treaty implementation. We will also look at how these two treaty bodies work together to address issues at the intersection of climate change and biological diversity. Finally, we will spend some time in the course reading a range of theoretical perspectives and pondering larger political and philosophical questions: Are our current intergovernmental institutions up to the challenge of addressing these immense planetary challenges? What are the potentials of and limits to intergovernmental spaces and collective action that might we discern? What role might there be for non-governmental actors and social movements to contest and construct more effective regimes? How does a study of these regimes help us imagine what a global politics of the terrestrial might look like?

Students will be evaluated based on their participation in class discussions, dedication to preparation for and participation at one of the meetings, and a final project related to one of the treaty regimes.

Participants in this studio course will examine the CoA campus path system from the standpoint of mobility, access, and landscape narrative. We will examine the path system as it exists as a physical artifact and the access and safety challenges associated with it (abrupt grade changes, inadequate lighting, etc.). We will also conduct research to uncover stories about the landscape history and landscape spaces on campus that might be curated to tell a rich story about this unique place, how it transformed over time, the ecology and biotic communities that are present, and some of the forces that might affect its future (climate change for example). Student teams will be led through a process to develop visions for the future of the campus path system, building on what already exists, and that synthesize technical parameters (associated with improved access through regrading for example) and qualitative and experiential dimensions of the path network experience. The goal will be to utilize these design visions to inform a campus-wide conversation as to what a better functioning, more equitable and more indelibly memorable campus path system could look like and be achieved. Given the focus on design and emphasis on an iterative process that will entail making drawings of paths and landscape features, the class is best suited for students with artistic/graphic backgrounds including drawing experience. Evaluations will be based on participation and sustained engagement with course content, responses to this material in the form of short, illustrated essays that combines notes and simple diagrams, photographs, and sketches, and commitment to an iterative process centering on use of drawings to convey information about existing spatial conditions and to project what these path spaces might look like in the future.

This topical studio explores the application of ecological design principles in urban settings to counteract ongoing environmental injustices. Participants will investigate low cost, high impact approaches to water reuse for a neighborhood in medieval Islamic Cairo (Egypt) suffering from poverty, food insecurity, and increasingly severe climate change impacts. As with many other neighborhoods in Cairo and cities throughout Egypt, the residents of al-Khalifa confront the irony of abundance amidst scarcity: living in a hot, arid desert environment where rainfall is virtually nonexistent at the same time dealing with a failing water supply infrastructure (leaky pipes) raising the groundwater table, saturating and undermining building foundations, and exacerbating respiratory illnesses. This studio will investigate possibilities for intercepting and treating this water to help drive community-scale rooftop gardening (in a city where food prices have risen dramatically in recent years), introducing street level evaporative (passive) cooling features to improve comfort by ameliorating the urban heat island effect, and in other ways enlisting recycled water to beneficial ends and premised on the notion that “there is no such thing as waste.”

A “research” studio is a highly collaborative one. Studio participants will have opportunities throughout the term to interact with a Cairo-based team of urban designers, digital animators, storytellers, engineers, heritage conservationists, ethnographers, and others. Students with experience and/or interest in design, food systems, chemistry, the arts, environmental sciences, environmental economics, women’s and gender studies, heritage and cultural history, and anthropology are encouraged to enroll (previous coursework in these areas is not required but will be helpful). This research studio resists “solutionist,” “techno-optimist” approaches (“we have the solution to all your problems”), operating instead from the standpoint of humility in the search for path-of-least-resistance correspondences between available resources and culturally appropriate end uses. To that end, reflection on and articulation of one’s positionality in our global world provides a subtext for all that we do.

Evaluations will be based on participation and sustained engagement with the core studio themes, honing of collaborative capabilities, and commitment to an iterative process involving succinct compositions of written narratives and diagrams and other visual representations of the systems we will be examining. Above all, the studio requires initiative and engagement as we transition from a highly facilitated framework at the beginning of the term (topics, resources and methods that the instructor choreographs) to more independent and applied research given the “life” that project-based work acquires as the term progresses.