Franca Trubiano: Architectural Material Ecologies — Accelerating Policy Changes in Support of a More Sustainable Building Industry and Environment

Distinguished Speaker in Sustainable Cities Series
Abstract
Architects, engineers, and builders can play an important role in accelerating the pace at which policies are improved in support of a more sustainable building industry and environment. Addressing the material practices that subtend the production and reception of our built infrastructures is critical in this regard. Clean energy transitions, embodied energy accountability, material circularity, building material health, integrated design advanced energy building retrofits, and equitable spatial justice are all mechanisms in support of this goal and the subject of this talk.

Bio
Franca Trubiano is Chair of the Graduate Group (Ph.D. Program) in Architecture and Associate Professor at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. She is codirector of the Mellon Humanities Urbanism and Design (H+U+D) Initiative at Penn, where she conducts funded research in the area of Building Ethics and Construction Labor. Her work on sustainability has been funded by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy. As Principal Investigator and inaugural member of the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI), her three-year funded research project resulted in the creation of Advanced Energy Integrated Design Roadmaps of use by all members of the AEC industry in pursuit of advanced (deep) energy retrofits. She is the author of Building Theories, Architecture as the Art of Building (Routledge, 2022), coeditor of Women [Re]Build; Stories, Polemics, Futures (Oro, 2020), editor of Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge, 2012), and coeditor of the forthcoming BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS: Design for the More than Human (ACTAR, 2023). Trubiano is a Registered Architect in Canada.