The Building Science Podcast

Live from the Texas Society of Architects 2017 Expo and Convention, we're proud to bring you a series of episodes exploring "the multiple dimensions of beauty" through interviews with some phenomenal architects, builders, and consultants.

This episode features an interview with Peter Pfeiffer of Barley Pfeiffer Architecture.

Peter L Pfeiffer, FAIA

Peter Pfeiffer wears many hats. He is a LEED accredited professional Architect, a licensed Interior Designer, Building Scientist and Property Developer & Manager, who has spent the past 36 years designing and developing pragmatic high performance buildings and homes.

EEBA, the national Energy Efficient Building Association, awarded Mr. Pfeiffer the Conference Chair’s Award in 1994 for his career accomplishments pioneering environmentally sensitive architecture. In 2004 he was one of the first architects in America to be named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects for his life-long commitment to "mainstreaming green building in North America”. He is a founding principal of Barley | Pfeiffer Architecture, a firm recognized nationally for its pioneering use of environmentally responsive design and construction techniques. Their work has been published both in the United States and abroad in such diverse venues as the Washington Post , The New York Times, Fine Homebuilding, Better Homes & Gardens magazine and on-line where they have been awarded “Best Of Houzz” in the Design and Service categories for two consecutive years. He has been a guest on National Public Radio, the HG-TV network, as well as on The Discovery Channel and This Old House.

The National Association of Home Builders honored him as the “National Green Advocate of the Year” in 2003 for his life-long achievements in “mainstreaming” green building. Peter has been an active charter member of the NAHB Green Building Subcommittee since its inception in 1999 and has been active in the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Homes program. In 2006 Residential Architect cited him as one of the 10 most influential residential architects of past decade. Recently Peter was nominated for the prestigious Hanley Award for his meaningful efforts to advance green building in America.

Modern building materials are generally feats of engineering marvel - we’ve managed to manufacture countless high performing systems, yet it has often been at the cost of human exposure to harmful chemicals. But it’s not a hopeless situation. There are people who are helping the average consumer understand what’s what. Join Kristof in a wide ranging conversation with Gina Ciganik and William Weber from the Healthy Building Network.

Gina Ciganik

Chief Executive Officer

Gina has been growing and scaling HBN’s vision since assuming the CEO role in 2016. Previously she served as Senior Advisor for Housing Innovation, establishing and leading the HomeFree initiative, an expansion of HBN’s healthy materials work into the affordable housing sector. Recognized as a national leader in transforming human and environmental health through strategic partnerships, innovative business practices, education, and leading-edge research, Ciganik has a proven track record of creating healthier spaces where we live, work, and play. Prior to HBN, she was Vice President of Housing Development at a Minneapolis-St. Paul area affordable housing development organization, where she spent two decades creating thousands of healthy, affordable homes. Her efforts culminated in the construction of The Rose, a 90-unit apartment building in Minneapolis that set a new national standard for healthy materials.

William Weber

Collective Impact Director

Billy oversees the leadership and design of HBN’s communities of practice and educational activities, with a focus on the HomeFree Affordable Housing Initiative. A widely sought and accomplished speaker, technical advisor, and facilitator on innovative projects regionally and nationally, Weber’s work focuses on the integration of sustainability and architecture through applied research, exploring and developing tools to evaluate and compare what are often disparate aesthetic, economic, and environmental goals. Before joining HBN he served in multiple roles over a nearly 20-year stint at the University of Minnesota, including as Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Building Research and Lecturer at the School of Architecture. Weber has both a B.A. and M.Arch. from the University of Minnesota.

Home Free Website - 9 Product Categories

Healthy Building Network

HomeFree

HomeFree Products

Chlorine/PVC Research

Chlorine and Building Materials (A Global Inventory of Production Technologies, Markets, and Pollution Phase 1: Africa, The Americas, and Europe)

Antimicrobial Research

Healthy Environments: Understanding Antimicrobial Ingredients In Building Materials

HPD Repository

HPD Public Repository

Building Science Report - Multivariate Insulation Analysis

Making Affordable Multifamily Housing More Energy Efficient: A Guide to Healthier Upgrade Materials

One of the most uncomfortable topics for anybody to wade through is the nearly ubiquitous and constant exposures to hazardous chemicals and compounds which we all encounter in daily products. The construction industry is no different - many building products are chock full of chemicals that are known health hazards to humans. As the body of scientific knowledge about these chemicals and their health impacts grows, it’s important that professionals and consumers have a sufficient understanding of their presence and purpose.

Join Kristof as he interviews Dr. Tom Bruton, Senior Hazardous Substances Engineer at California Department of Toxic Substances Control and formerly a Senior Scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute, on a class of chemicals called PFAS, which are present in many common building materials and making their way into our bodies through a variety of exposures that are easy to forget in day-to-day life.

_________

Dr. Bruton is a Senior Hazardous Substances Engineer at California Department of Toxic Substances Control. He works at the interface of science, business, and government to promote healthier products and a healthier environment. Trained as an environmental engineer and environmental chemist, Tom’s experience ranges from contaminated site remediation to chemicals management in supply chains to regulatory policy, with particular expertise on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
_________

Dr. Bruton is a Senior Hazardous Substances Engineer at California Department of Toxic Substances Control. He works at the interface of science, business, and government to promote healthier products and a healthier environment. Trained as an environmental engineer and environmental chemist, Tom’s experience ranges from contaminated site remediation to chemicals management in supply chains to regulatory policy, with particular expertise on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
_________

PFAS

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of highly fluorinated synthetic chemicals notable for their non-stick, waterproof, and grease resistant properties and also for their extreme environmental persistence. Building materials are a high-volume use of PFAS that have received relatively little attention. PFAS have many uses in the building industry, including in roofing materials, flooring, paints and coatings, sealants, glass, and more. Annual sales of PFAS-containing building materials are more than $26 billion.

_________

Green Science Policy Institute

The Green Science Policy Institute was founded in 2008 in Berkeley, California, by Executive Director Arlene Blum after she learned that the same chlorinated tris flame retardant that her research had helped remove from children’s pajamas in the 1970s was back in furniture and baby products. Since its founding, Green Science Policy Institute’s scientific research and policy work has contributed to preventing the use of “Six Classes” of harmful chemicals in consumer products and building materials worldwide.
Team

Hosted by Kristof Irwin
Edited and Produced by M. Walker

It’s time to fundamentally reevaluate the way we build - not just at the level of detailing, but at the scale of the city. What are the decisions we make about density and how do they affect our daily lives? Why do we orient our urban infrastructure around cars when they’re incredibly inefficient ways to move people around? Why can’t you get to 90% of your daily needs within a 15 minute walk? Join Kristof as he interviews Ruchi Modi of the architecture and urbanism firm, PAU on a range of topics exploring how urban environments (can and will) actually benefit the entire planet.

Ruchika Modi, AIA

Ruchika Modi is an associate partner and the studio director at PAU. A registered architect, she oversees all aspects of the design process in the office. Most recently Ruchika completed design development for Riverfront Square, a 730-unit residential project in Newark, NJ. She is currently spearheading the design of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, NY, an adaptive reuse project to transform a factory into offices with a mixed-use ground floor; the master plan and design of forty-one buildings as part of a mixed-use new development in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; and an arcade infill and POPS design for an Emery Roth–designed office building in Manhattan.

Before joining PAU, Ruchika was a senior associate at Standard Architects and a founding partner of Studio r&star in New York City. She has also worked at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects, Richard Lewis Architects, Maria McVarish Design Services, and Tim Perks Architecture.

Ruchika holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she was awarded the Charles McKim Prize for Excellence in Design / Saul Kaplan Traveling Fellowship, the William Kinne Fellows Prize for Study and Travel Abroad, and the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize. She received her BA in economics from the University of Delhi and a BA with distinction in interior architecture from the California College of Arts, San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture in New York, the International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, and the China International Architectural Biennale in Beijing.

PAU

Founded by Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA FRAIC, in 2015, PAU is both an emerging and an established global practice. We embrace architecture and city planning as allied fields operating along a range of scales. We break down disciplinary boundaries by expanding the definition of architecture and rejecting the silos that have ossified it. Our designers use both sides of their brains to be as creative as they are analytical. Given the breadth and depth of our teamâ€TMs talents, but also in an effort to raise labor standards in our field, we treat our personnel with the utmost respect in terms of compensation, staff development, benefits, and work-life balance. Our team of twenty, our network of experienced collaborators, and our clients all come to PAU inspired by our desire to palpably and positively impact the world. Together we thrive on constraints such as program, constructability, public process, regulation, budget, and schedule as the fuel for innovation and beauty. To achieve this, from the precise scale of an architectural detail to the large scale of a master plan, ours is a group of “swiss-army knives,” professionals who employ an unprecedented range of skills and mindsets. We are fluent in multiple languages: we speak architecture, we speak culture, we speak ecology, we speak economics, we speak academia, we speak urbanity, we speak government, and, perhaps most importantly, we speak the language of democratic public process, because the complexities of the projects we design demand no less. Below are brief descriptions of the individuals who form our unique collective, a group of thinkers who build, utopian pragmatists whose dreams of impactful design have been forged in the white heat of hard-fought experience.

The famous astronomer and educator Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.” What Sagan was pointing at is the fact that for us to really do anything from scratch, we have to understand the system in which we exist.

The planet and all its inhabitants exists as a massive, complex system of interconnected systems that we don’t always see. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown us that public health is part of a global web, inextricably linked. On a smaller scale, the materials and energy that we use to build and operate our homes and cities rely on these natural interconnected ecosystems. Effortlessly spanning scales from the level of the planet, a vast forest or a single home, the science of Systems Ecology provides a powerful perspective and valuable set of tools that can inform skillful design and construction practices for homes, buildings and cities.

How do natural ecosystems provide us with all that we need for our lives, homes and cities? What are the basic ingredients that are “cooked” in this recipe? Join Kristof as he interviews Miaomiao Hou and Dr. Bill Braham for a fast and furious dive into the infinite complexity of emergy. You’ll never be able to un-hear this. We will unpack some of the terms and concepts needed to unlock this powerful, versatile, quantitative way to understand what matters most when it comes to resources and energy, and why. Along the way we will learn about energy that remembers where it comes from and the layers of transformations it goes through along the way to us, so we can make better decisions on how to use it wisely.

For complete show notes, please visit the episode’s webpage.
Team

Hosted by Kristof Irwin
Edited and Produced by M. Walker