CSBR

Sustainable Shelters

In 2009, the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History approached the CSBR about assisting in the development of an exhibition that explored natural world shelters and how humans might emulate aspects of that in shelter design.

The resulting exhibition, Sustainable Shelters, contained many themes including a variety of bird, animal, and insect shelters, a comparison between high-performance enclosures and conventional construction, life cycle impacts of common building materials, window performance, and the impacts of home size.

After a year-long showing at the Bell Museum in 2011, the exhibition went on to be displayed at other museums nationwide for another seven years

Design for Community Resilience

In 2010, John started a relationship with the UMN Extension Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDP), kicking off a program to assist rural MN communities that seek to develop or preserve an asset using sustainability and resilience as project drivers.

The resulting exhibition, Sustainable Shelters, contained many themes including a variety of bird, animal, and insect shelters, a comparison between high-performance enclosures and conventional construction, life cycle impacts of common building materials, window performance, and the impacts of home size.

After a year-long showing at the Bell Museum in 2011, the exhibition went on to be displayed at other museums nationwide for another seven years

LCA of Buildings

Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, is the process of quantifying all of the environmental impacts or effects of a project. It is a notoriously protracted, exhausting, and complicated process, which meant that LCA's were not commonly done.

In 2006, John and the CSBR partnered with the Green Building Initiative and the Ottawa-based Athena Sustainable Materials Institute to develop a user-friendly tool to calculate and compare the life cycle impacts of a building.

By the early 2000's, the design and construction industries had a solid understanding of how their buildings used energy during normal day-to-day operation.

However, there was another significant contributor to environmental problems that the design and construction industry created that was not well understood — the impacts associated with the materials the buildings were actually made of.

Even though the EcoCalculator was retired in 2017, the calculations and effects of building materials continue to be a relevant factor in selecting building materials.

The Athena EcoCalculator allowed designers to simply enter the square footage of potential assemblies for the foundation, structure, shell, and interior walls of a proposed building, and then instantly see the amount of energy used and mass of raw resources needed to make those materials, and the associated environmental impacts related to global warming potential, air and water pollution, ozone depletion, and human health.

Sustainable Communities in Haiti

After a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, John partnered with UMN researchers Jim Lutz, Liliana Ninaquispe, and Anne Hake to design housing prototypes that would provide near-term housing relief which would eventually converge into cohesive neighborhoods with sustainable features.

Delmas 32

The plan for the Delmas 32 Neighborhood sought to improve infrastructure, communal services, and recreation areas while responding to local building conventions and weather concerns. The design of the houses attempted to incorporate traditional Haitian community culture while improving sanitation and minimizing energy consumption.

Santo Community

The Santo Community plan sought to rebuild the most devastated area of Port-au-Prince. The houses were designed as "starter units," with the large lots providing flexibility and space for additions. While freshwater wells provided water for a block of houses, each house had its own composting toilet system. Bioswales collected runoff to create "ecological corridors" in the overall plan.

Building on John's Vision

In 2014, Richard Graves, AIA was hired to build on John Carmody's leadership at the Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) that he founded. The center is in a unique position to enhance Minnesota's reputation as a progressive incubator of environmental practice and policies. CSBR continues to learn from the community of people and projects pursuing the B3 guidelines and integrates those lessons into the education of practitioners and students in the College of Design. In addition, the process of using guidelines as a research and market transformation tool that the new director and staff learned from John has inspired scholarship of the future of metrics for sustainable building, new tools such as the 21st Century Development Matrix and new policies such as a Trajectory for the Future of the Minnesota Commercial Energy code based upon SB2030 performance.

Click on images to download the PDF files of the exhibit