What's the future got in store for architecture? A return to tried and true organic construction methods like adobe or rammed earth? Buildings that are as alive as human bodies? Something in between? How do we create more beautiful and livable spaces while also making the built environment carbon-negative?
This week's guest is Dr. Wil Srubar, Assistant Professor of Architectural Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, Technical Director of Materials R&D at Katerra, and Cochair of the Carbon Leadership Forum Network and serves as its global hub director.
We talk about trends in architecture and materials science and try to ferret out what might be coming down the pike, particularly in light of the article Wil wrote in The Conversation, "Buildings grown by bacteria—new research is finding ways to turn cells into mini-factories for materials".
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Dr. Will Shrubar, Assistant Professor of Architectural Engineering and Materials Science at University of Colorado Boulder, Technical Director of Materials R&D at Katera, and Co-Chair of the Carbon Leadership Forum Network, And you also serve as the Global Hub Director. Do you have much free time, Will?
Dr. Wil Srubar: I do get enough sleep occasionally.
Ross Kenyon: That’s good. I’m happy to hear that. Well, a colleague of mine passed me your article at the conversation called Buildings Grown by Bacteria. New research is finding ways to turn cells into mini factories for materials. Naturally, this caught my attention. I imagine someone listening has never heard anything quite like this unless they’re already plugged into this space. So what is happening with material science? What inspires you to write this? What is going on?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Yeah, you know, I agree. I think it’s an interesting, thought-provoking proposal. But a little bit about me. I grew up. On the plains of Southeast Texas on a cotton farm and cattle ranch. And to me, you know, going outside, living on a farm, everything was very much alive. And I remember driving into the city, big city of Houston to go to baseball games at the Astrodome with my dad. And first being in awe that humans could build such structures. It’s what really inspired me to become a structural engineer. But I realized that when you go into the city, Everything is quite sterile and quite static.
And what is human is human. And then the natural world is really kind of separated from that. You can kind of think of stark contrasts like Central Park, for example, where you have this green space that is really nature separated away from what is human. And in that human space, the built environment You have materials like concrete, glass and steel that, again, are quite sterile, static, very much not alive. And, you know, growing up on the farm and being the generation that urbanized into cities, I really found a lot of inspiration in that, really in blurring the boundaries between what is natural and what is built.
And so throughout my career, I’ve Really dove into concepts related to sustainability in the built environment, understanding environmental impacts of building materials, certainly energy consumption, certainly embodied carbon. But really in my academic research, we toy with these ideas of bringing buildings to life and really truly blurring those boundaries.
Ross Kenyon: Why would you want a building to be alive or to blur the distinctions between the organic and the built or the human created? Why would one even want to do that?
Dr. Wil Srubar: There’s certainly great research. There’s certainly great research that shows the benefits of biophilia. And right now, even today, we’re incorporating more and more biomaterials into the built environment. And the greatest example that I can give you Right now, some pioneering work that has come out of Europe and into the United States, and that’s building with mass timber. And so now we are able to build large-scale structural systems out of biomaterials. And there are certainly perceived benefits for building with natural materials, being exposed to more natural environments, even though you are indoors.
And that just leads to occupant productivity, occupant comfort, feelings of wellness, well-being. And even in office buildings, there’s documented evidence that shows people People are out sick less if they are in a building that has incorporated a lot of biophilia. And certainly, that’s certainly an attractive quality of those materials. What my work does is take it one step further and say, OK, we know that wood is a biomaterial. It was once alive. But what we do with wood is we do take it out of the forest and we store that carbon for a long period of time.
And what we’re trying to ask is, well, perhaps there could be organisms that are kept alive, that make materials for us, that are put into buildings, and that could serve some useful functions while in use.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that makes sense. I’m very curious to hear more about this biophilia angle. Something that I’ve noticed that’s related in Seattle is that the lot sizes are not always super big. So people have to maximize spaces. But the way that they do this feels... Very much out of sync with the neighborhood and the rest of the houses on it. Like you’ll often see houses that are, I’ve seen some that are like Cape Cod that they’ve added an extra story to or a giant modern farmhouse that is a story or two grander than much of these like Very old Tudor style homes or craftsmen that are supposed to blend in and blend in the same way.
Like I grew up very close to Taliesin West in Arizona. I remember going and seeing Frank Floyd Wright’s home and school there and being really impressed with the Prairie School aesthetic of trying to not dominate the environment that you’re in, but to sort of blend in almost. And biophilia is maybe another way of going towards having a well-integrated living space. Am I halfway on to something here?
Dr. Wil Srubar: You are. I mean, you’re toying with concepts. You’re kind of talking about disappearing buildings and how buildings can kind of disappear into the natural environment. That’s exactly what biophilia tries to do and certainly what I believe should be really the A primary goal of modern architecture is, but again, that’s my perspective and my opinion, certainly there are others.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, is there anyone who just defends just like high modernism or brutalism and that’s just what they, they love concrete and like, those guys are out there, they have to be, right?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Well, I think that’s my evil twin because I also share a huge passion for concrete. I think it’s an exceptional material. It has so many benefits. No other material is moldable, formable, as durable. Or no other material is used more in the world than concrete. So concrete as we know it is the second most consumed material on earth after water. It has shaped humanity as we know it. But really, there are consequences to its ubiquity. So concrete, as many of your listeners may know, concrete Is a huge carbon emitter up to 8% of our global CO2 emissions can be attributed to cement and concrete manufacturer use and disposal.
So it’s a it’s a pretty gnarly thorn for the construction industry. But, you know, I have this love hate relationship with concrete because it is such a such a wonderful material.
Ross Kenyon: Are there ways to improve concrete? Well, we’ve done some episodes on on actually how to make it Less emitting than conventional ways of producing it. But is there also ways to make it aesthetically closer to this biophilic vision that we’re having in other types of materials in the built environment? Is anything happening like that? Or is that still very far away?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Yeah, well, there are these really great examples of these undulating forms and hyperbolic shapes. There’s some architects a few decades ago that were playing around with this in Mexico and in some parts of Spain. Santiago Calatrava structures certainly speak to a more organic form. The problem with those forms, though, is that it’s actually quite expensive to get concrete in those types of shapes and in those shapes in that size. That’s why the promise of 3D printing is so appealing for folks who know and love concrete, because you can make those forms and shapes much more economically.
Right now, the development of the 3D printing technology with concrete, though, is such that we’re not yet able to realize all of those benefits quite yet. I think we’re kind of in the In the trough of disappointment right now with 3D printing. But I expect that in the next 10 years, there’ll be a few breakthrough technologies that will enable us to build biophilic forms economically out of concrete.
Ross Kenyon: Every so often, I’ll see amazing prototypes or people who printed a house. And I imagine this sort of Like somewhat egalitarian open source future where you’re downloading CAD designs and then printing your house based on modular units that you can attach together and also the possibilities of basically starting from scratch to reusing that material and redoing your house in a very simple way. This is definitely very science fiction. Is that a possibility within my lifetime that I could just be redoing my house and redoing it based on 3D printing?
Dr. Wil Srubar: I would say yes. Less so out of concrete, but possibly more so out of different materials like earth, like rammed earth, earthen structures that would possibly be a little bit easier to recycle and reuse. The problem right now with 3D printing of concrete is that you need First off, not very many people are 3D printing with actual concrete. They’re printing with cement paste, which is a lot of cement and some water. And you probably know from previous podcasts that cement is the culprit in terms of carbon emissions. So per volume, a 3D printed concrete is certainly more environmentally efficient.
Unfriendly than, say, just a regular volume of concrete. But, you know, if you kind of take a look at rammed earth construction and how it’s constructed, it’s almost as if it’s 3D printed by hand already. You know, you have these forms in which earth is placed in between the forms and it’s tamped and slowly layer by layer, the rammed earth Structure rises from the ground. It’s a lot like slip form construction for high rise buildings and concrete, but it’s really made out of earth. So those structures, I believe, are a little bit more recyclable, reusable.
And so I think you’re onto something with thinking about the possibilities of drawing up, you know, in CAD or some 3D modeling software, what you want your next house to be. So instead of just remodeling with furniture, you’re remodeling the entire structure and 3D printing with materials that are recyclable and reusable like earth.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that idea. Okay, well, rammed earth sounds So there’s this somewhat of a spectrum with past orientation and maybe future orientation and some of these actually living Almost bacterial buildings. That’s not good branding. Don’t use that, by the way. Not bacterial buildings. But you have brand earth, which sounds low-tech and old school. And then also, I see it at a place in Japan. I think this came up on Kate Simon or Andrew Himes’ episode. But it was a form of adobe, basically, that was a straw and mud construction, something like that.
And very cool and low-tech. But also, apparently, the heating and cooling properties of it worked very well. I don’t know that we created something out of our heads that has worked better than that in some cases. So those are all part of this biophilic kind of space that is experiencing a resurgence. And you’re on this cutting edge trying to say, actually, there’s a lot more we can do. Is that kind of right?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Absolutely. You know, I really do think that the building industry will be returning to some What we would consider primitive forms of construction like adobe and utilizing more agricultural products, agricultural wastes like straw and hemp fiber and other types of biomass waste that would normally just compost out in the field or incinerated for some biomass energy. I really do see us returning to those because, and we can get into talking about the carbon footprint, but what we would, what the challenge is, is making those low-tech materials modern and high-tech. And I think that’s a, that is something, kind of a grand opportunity and a grand challenge for material scientists like me and like others who are Again, trying to find new and creative ways of lowering the carbon footprint of the built environment and transitioning it from a carbon, the industry, the construction industry, from a carbon emitter into a carbon sink.
My work at the university, and why I will say, you know, folks who are In the industry today, you know, the Katera’s of the world who have sought have, you know, we see much promise in mass timber and utilizing more biofiber in construction. So it is already becoming a reality. What my academic research does, on the other hand, is try to get people to see beyond the primitive materials So that we land somewhere in the middle, right? I think that we have a lot of provocative examples of using photosynthetic bacteria and algae as starting precursors to make materials that really grow the materials for us.
And while those solutions, I think, are decades away, I’m hoping to nudge the industry in the direction of using Other biomass that’s perhaps non-living anymore and infusing that waste, using that waste product as a starting precursor for materials in construction today and even tomorrow.
Ross Kenyon: How do you take, quote unquote, primitive building materials and modernize them? How would you modernize Adobe? I imagine people must be working on stuff like this.
Dr. Wil Srubar: Yeah, they are, but what’s really lacking right now in the field are engineering codes and standards, really good technical data, predictable productized materials that have repeatable, consistent properties. And so it is a gnarly, wicked problem that spans material science, structural engineering, Codes and standards, policies, you know, lawmaking, all of that, you know, really to get a new material into practice in the construction industry. I mean, it takes an army and it takes multiple, you know, it’s kind of a Swiss army knife, really, you know, multiple tools to unlock the potential.
But I really do think what we’re seeing right now In the carbon space, you know, the Bay Area low carbon concrete code, the city of Portland just adopted a low carbon concrete procurement policy, the buy clean bills in California and Washington. I really do think that the policy levers are being pulled and it’s really the right time for material science and engineering and codes to all come together to see this massive infusion of new high-tech, low-impact materials in construction. Interesting.
Ross Kenyon: I wouldn’t have expected it to go that direction, but that makes sense. And I also imagine that insurers probably play a pretty big role in this too.
Dr. Wil Srubar: Certainly. You know, I had a few conversations with some folks in the insurance space and, you know, we certainly do need examples. You know, we do need prototypes. We need projects that, you know, not necessarily take Take on the risk, but de-risk the technology. We need folks to help de-risk a lot of the technologies because you’re absolutely right. The insurance folks are something, the insurance space is something that is watching us as well. And they’ll ultimately need to be convinced. Otherwise it’ll be a no-go from a client perspective with using some of these new materials.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I keep getting distracted because this entire topic is fascinating, but we should really talk about this original article. Maybe you could just lay it out, and I swear I’ll try not to interrupt and take us down any rabbit holes for now.
Dr. Wil Srubar: The article that I wrote for The Conversation really compared... Buildings to human bodies, right? So you have the structure, which is the skeleton, you have a skin that regulates temperature and humidity, and buildings generate waste and they’re wired, you know, just like human bodies are. But unlike human bodies, buildings don’t grow, they don’t regenerate, they don’t self heal. You know, for for someone who really wants to blur the boundaries between the built environment in the natural world, this kind of introduces a lot of what if what if questions. So what if the walls and floors and the roofs of buildings were alive and actually grown on site?
And perhaps, you know, what if what if we were able to keep those materials alive? So that they can interact with us. They can interact with the environment. They can help us regulate temperature, humidity. They can signal to us when perhaps there’s a virus or something toxic in the air. And, you know, I really do think with some of the foundational research going on at universities, in my lab included, you know, we’re a lot closer than one might think. What’s particularly exciting is that there are organisms that make materials. So if you kind of think about, certainly there are plants that make cellulosic materials, trees and hemp and bamboo, certainly that is true for plants and we’re Very custom to using those materials in construction.
But there are also other microorganisms like bacteria and fungi that make materials that we could potentially use in construction as well. The best example I can give is cyanobacteria, marine cyanobacteria that make these wonderful limestone, have these massive limestone deposits called stromatolites that are kind of grown out of just precipitated minerals, just tiny little mineral by mineral by these marine cyanobacteria, which are photosynthetic, and it grows this massive rigid structure, which is not unlike a concrete structure. And the beautiful thing about bacteria is that With the onset of synthetic biology and the toolkits that have evolved from that field, we are now able to decode the DNA of those organisms, understand which genes are involved in making the materials, how they make the materials.
We can manipulate the genes to make And architect different shaped materials of different sizes. You know, this is some of the work that has been going on in my lab in collaboration with a bunch of talented researchers at the University of Colorado. We’ve shown that we’ve been able to basically encode the blueprint of a mineral right into the DNA of bacteria. And while that’s on a very, very small scale, if you extrapolate that to the macroscopic scale, getting to this concept of using bacteria to make other different types of materials for buildings, having them retain some living functionality in buildings, we’re really not that far off.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, there’s so many angles. That’s wild. And then I know cyanobacteria, those exhale oxygen, right? So you would probably have a nice working and living space. That’s oxygen, right?
Dr. Wil Srubar: It’s really important for me and my research team To use photosynthetic organisms and so cyanobacteria are on the top of our list of organisms that we think haven’t been fully exploited in the carbon capture carbon storage space as much as they could be. Certainly, there are these large-scale cultivation ponds of algae, which are just basically cyanobacterial cousins, microalgae, and other types of algae that are certainly grown for biofuel production and even some other food products, cosmetics, et cetera, pharmaceuticals. But we’re really the first group to be asking questions like, How can large scale cultivation of algae produce building materials?
How can we leverage photosynthetic organisms that are so fast in growing and fixing carbon dioxide right into their biomass? How can we use that carbon negative process to produce a material that is suitable for use in construction? So that’s why, you know, Photosynthesis in general, especially rapidly grown materials, leveraging photosynthesis is really, really key to the carbon capture and storage solution space in the construction industry. And people don’t normally go beyond Thinking about trees growing in a forest, you know, trees are really slow growing. I’m a firm believer that we cannot rely solely on woody biomass grown in the forest.
We have to turn to rapidly grown photosynthetic organisms and plants like algae, like cyanobacteria, like hemp, straw, grasses. And if we Allow that biomass to grow, fix the carbon dioxide, and if we can encapsulate it, keep it encapsulated for long periods of time, well, I really do think that’s the primary strategy by which we can turn the built environment into a carbon sink.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love this. It’s so intriguing. So there’s a vision of housing and buildings that is in the near future, which is And it’s sort of like everyone has a nest and a ring and everything can be controlled by your smartphone and your house is interactive in a digital capacity. But then you’ve taken this about 10 steps further and you’re talking about programming new types of microscopic life that builds and retains its own integrity and that have been designed for specific functions such that everything has been I don’t know, you’ve altered the shape of life in a very controlled way for an entire building.
Is that what you’re trying to do? Is that the goal?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Yeah, I think people think of buildings of the future as being super electrified and having these interactive wallpapers that sense that you’re in the room and it’s kind of like a big touch screen. But yeah, I actually think that those could be bacterial cells that are transmitting electrons to and from each other. There are bacterial communities that do this, that are electrically conductive. And certainly there are a myriad of organisms that light up upon a Receiving some sort of stimulus, whether that be pH or light or humidity or carbon dioxide, they’ll change colors.
Lichen, for example, lichen that you see going on hikes in the Pacific Northwest, some species of lichen will change color if there are elevated levels of CO2 or other toxic chemicals in the air. And so, you know, it’s just a matter of engineering those systems, those biological systems, to exhibit those functionalities in a very controlled way. The other thing I’ll mention is that, you know, the DNA of organisms, you know, folks are kind of looking at DNA as a way of permanent storage instead of data centers. You know, we kind of think we need to keep building silicon chips over and over and over again.
But we could actually grow some organisms that store a lot more information right in our DNA strand. And those sequences would be that decoding mechanism to pull your old pictures out from college and to look at them. So there’s some really creative folks thinking about this. And yes, again, it’s a little bit science fictiony, but I see the clear links in the chain. So the ivory tower isn’t that high.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I have two comments, one of which is kind of silly, which is, this reminds me, there’s a dystopic version of this that’s basically Akura. I don’t know, have you seen that old Japanese film?
Dr. Wil Srubar: I haven’t, but I’ve had a few colleagues.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so I’m not alone in thinking that. Basically, yeah, an organism that absorbs everything and just grows and grows and is out of control.
Dr. Wil Srubar: But that’s the silly one.
Ross Kenyon: And then I have a facile one, which I will maintain there’s a distinction between these two words that I’ve used. But like a cliche 30-something that I am, I’ve been brewing a lot of kombucha. Lately, my kombucha bills were just too high. And so the SCOBYs, like the fungal matter that grows on the top of a batch, you reuse those, but they only last, I think, between five and 10 batches. How do you make it so that your walls don’t die and have to be replaced? Or how do you have a system that is continuous and doesn’t require intervention?
Or do all these systems, do you just have contractors in the future who are biochemists who come by?
Dr. Wil Srubar: I think the sky’s the limit with the imagination. What’s interesting, you bring up the point that eventually your kombucha starter eventually dies. I usually get the question of, well, what happens when my house becomes a skyscraper? That it just keeps growing and growing and growing and becomes kind of the blob and takes over the world. And I go back to exactly your last point, the fundamental biochemistry. If we understand the limits of growth and the conditions of growth of certain microorganisms, then we can control it. So for example, we put food in the refrigerator.
We put yogurt in the refrigerator. It’s a living thing. But we put it in the fridge because we want to keep the bacterial metabolisms So that trigger of temperature, keeping it cold, doesn’t allow the bacteria to keep growing and even producing gas as a production that’s produced as By breaking down the lactose in the milk. So the same is true for the materials we work on in the lab. We understand the right levels of humidity and temperature and moisture that would trigger bacterial growth. And on the other end of the spectrum, spectrum trigger its dormancy or hibernation.
And, you know, when we think about future applications, there could be microfluidics and micro environments that trigger very localized activities of different bacteria in much the same way that we would wire a television, have little, you know, LED lights. Light bulbs that must be wired everywhere, providing just the right nutrients and just the right conditions for the bacteria to be switched on or off, depending on what we would like them to do.
Ross Kenyon: Fascinating. So I’m going to continue in the similar cliche vein where I’ve also been making sauerkraut and kimchi. I really wish I could claim I started doing it before COVID, but like everyone else, I got really into it. But a lot of this is supposed to be anaerobic and not exposed to oxygen. So how do you... There must just be different types of organisms that are... Because I think when it is aerobic, there’s a risk of bad mold becoming present. But that isn’t really a risk with the types of microorganisms you’re working with, no?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Certainly, there always is. There’s always some contamination issues that we have to think about. I equate the materials that we work on to bring more food into the picture. I need a snack, I think. It’s about snack time. It’s a lot like a sourdough starter culture. If you can think of it that way, where our material starter cultures are such that we grow up a dense culture of bacteria. We enable those bacteria to glue our sand particles together by the minerals and the polymers that they secrete. But then we can control, we can stop the growth of those bacteria.
What we showed in a paper a couple of months ago is that If we make what we call a parent generation, it’s like your sourdough starter culture, we can actually split a parent generation brick, we can actually split that brick into two and using the same starter culture that’s already existing in the brick, those two halves will grow into two full bricks. And we completed that process two subsequent times. So we made eight full bricks out of one parent starter culture, for example. It’s just like how sourdough keeps spawning generations at an exponential scale if you share it with your friends, exponential numbers of children.
But to your point, it’s really important for us since we are working with aerobic bacteria That we again control the conditions during manufacturing and storage. We impart some antimicrobial abilities to the materials so that no other organisms can cross contaminate. So it all goes back to that microbiology and biochemistry and understanding really the rules of the game.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Will, since I have you here, could I ask you some questions about architecture and architectural trends? Yeah, absolutely. So how long do you think is this sort of like I don’t even know how you describe it, this like obsession with open space and minimalism going to last? I sort of I’m craving like a return to the arts and crafts kind of kind of moment. Like, what do you think, what’s happening next? Like, when are we going to get over this moment that we’re in now?
Where do you think we’re going to go?
Dr. Wil Srubar: You know, this exact question crossed my mind yesterday when I was walking, when I was walking my dog, because we have a house in Boulder and Boulder is actually a relatively low density community. And I was thinking about urban centers and how over the last two to three decades, we have been fighting for densification, densification, densification. And in reality, the reality we’re in now, that poses a lot of threats. And so I do think right now there is some There’s a confluence of different ideas of wanting to make sure our cities are dense, wanting to give access to kind of open space and parks and even again blurring these boundaries between nature and what is natural and what is human.
But I think a lot of this is going to be called into question. I think I would have had a different answer for you six months ago than what I do today. Uh, because I think we’re going to be taking a more critical look at, at office space, um, and, and densification and, and, you know, what that, what that really means, um, uh, for cities of the future.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. One thing I’ve noticed too, is, um, Seattle. Okay. I live in Ballard. That’s where Nori’s office is. And Ballard is a Scandinavian, historically a Scandinavian neighborhood, fishing neighborhood. And you’ll see apartment buildings that have names that are clearly Norwegian, but they’re not made in a Pacific Northwest vernacular. They could be literally any apartment building from any big city in the entire world. But I know people want to get back to using local materials. So you mentioned Katera and cross-laminated timber and using products that are closer to home. Seattle, I would like to see a lot more wood buildings.
I would like to see us get away from one size fits all. We all have the same house, independent of which continent we live on. There are benefits to standardization, but I think it’s a bit soul killing, too.
Dr. Wil Srubar: There’s certainly... There’s a concept that I try to get across in virtually every conversation I have related to building materials and kind of the vernacular, and that’s really embracing the surrounding rural communities as the localized breadbasket, if you will, for fibrous materials that are low impact, low carbon, that need to be embraced by every Every municipality. So, you know, Seattle, for example, yes, wood is very much in the DNA of the region, but there are also, again, you know, some farming communities, some agricultural spaces that have up for offer some biomass that could be turned into high performance building materials.
And so I think, you know, I do think It’s interesting because folks have traveled the world quite extensively. They’ve come into contact with different styles and different forms of architecture. But when I really do think about cities of the future, I really do think of them as a regional nexus that is much more of the place. And I think we’re seeing that a little bit now with COVID is I haven’t even Thought about leaving the Front Range of Colorado, and I’m really looking to this region as really the extent of my reach in terms of resources.
And I think that’s just going to occur on a slightly larger scale when cities start to think about supply chain, sustainability of those supply chains, And materials for construction and architectural gems of the future will not be excluded from that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I hope you are right. At least it would make for more interesting dog walking experiences. I mean, the way that you’ve chosen to live your life and the profession that you’ve selected for yourself, clearly you think architecture and creating spaces is a key part of our experience that is interacted with so regularly to be worth a lifetime of labor. Why do you think that is? I think a lot of people take architecture for granted and maybe don’t notice it as much as they should. What do you think about that?
How could they learn more or dive into this in greater detail, both as someone who may at some point like to own a home, but also as someone who wants to nerd out on this science like we’re talking about?
Dr. Wil Srubar: Follow me on Twitter. I’m just kidding. I will link to your Twitter. Do not worry. Yeah, my social media presence is a little bleak, but so, and let’s see, so your question is, you know, how can people learn a little bit more about It was a big garbled question.
Ross Kenyon: You’re right to double check. But yeah, I guess what’s a good place for someone who wanted to, I mean, part of it is I name dropped the whole taxonomy of different American housing styles. And we talked a lot about that. Where’s a good place to start wrapping your head around how people think about spaces? And then I guess also, where would you direct them for some of these frontiers that you’re working on? And by the way, we barely covered any of the stuff that you do. So let’s just have you back on again soon.
Dr. Wil Srubar: So over the last five to 10 years, I really do think the construction industry has recognized, at least in North America, a critical need to understand and share resources around low carbon construction. And what I really do believe is that Kate Semenen and her founding of the Carbon Leadership Forum has really served as the flagship organization for professionals to see examples and to get information, see examples of successes and even some challenges and even failures in the building industry and really to work together Toward a low carbon and carbon negative future in construction.
So I would urge folks to first follow my work. So my work has been featured in the New York Times. I’m on NPR. And we do have a website where we do publish a lot of our work, but certainly key into the Carbon Leadership Forum if you’re interested in learning more about sustainable architecture, especially as it pertains to low carbon construction.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, thank you so much for being here, Will.
Dr. Wil Srubar: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been great.
Ross Kenyon: It was a lot of fun. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please share it with a friend. Give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed and have a lovely day.
