Facade Tectonics Institute Focuses on Carbon Emissions Reductions

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The Facade Tectonics Institute’s World Congress will take place October 12-13, 2022 in Los Angeles. The theme of the two-day event is Counting Carbon: Leveraging the Facade System for Carbon Emission Reductions. This biennial event features peer-reviewed papers, special sessions, and tours of projects in the LA area. For more information and a full schedule of events, visit www.facadetectonics.org.

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I was sadly too late in submitting my paper to this conference. I studied the impact double vs triple pane IGUs had on high rise construction at a whole building LCA level so that upfront embodied carbon could be compared against future operational carbon savings. Sadly I did not get to expand this study beyond Climate Zone 5, as it would be significantly more informative/impactful.

I look forward to seeing what will be presented at the conference. I fear it will mostly be focused on operational carbon savings.

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Thanks for your comment. There will be several papers given on embodied carbon at the World Congress. FTI has a task group on this subject and it is of great interest to our members also.

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I hope you are wrong, Scott, but we shall see. There is a lot of interest in the embodied carbon aspects of facades by people that are just too busy to do much research and author papers. This is beyond unfortunate, in my opinion, and a loss to the entire building industry and is, thereby, an industry problem. We have to convince firms to provide time for their employees to pursue and share research initiatives.

I’m very interested in this research you are doing on IGUs and would love to see it published one of these days soon. There may be other publishing options that we can help with, if you are interested in pursuing that. Also, love to have you in our embodied carbon task group at FTI, please consider.

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@micpatterson - I’ve been meaning to connect with you to discuss this :slight_smile:

I’m a bit discouraged (and probably too cynical) because I keep seeing research, papers, and presentations about the “benefits” of double skin facades, that have absolutely no consideration of embodied carbon. :man_shrugging:

Shoot me an email, sfarbman@databasedplus.com, and we can talk more about my study and the FTI task group.