The Future - A Girl Can Dream

It is a high wire act. There is never a guarantee. Nothing for the faint of heart...it takes a lot of courage...courage to create significant change...got to be comfortable with free fall...

As an architect, I am excited. We have all the ingredients for a very exhilarating design project...we have a great challenge...incredible design constraints that might seem impossible to overcome...the kind that inspires exceptional design thinking and creativity...that makes us think outside the box...everything goes during the conceptual phase...somewhere in those visions there is the key to solving the puzzle brilliantly...disassembling the pieces of reality...then reassembling them anew...et voila...the future emerges...

...if this particular case was not so serious and essentially about life and death and everything inbetween...

The future - where to?

A now distant friend of mine, Oliver Drerup , at a crucial juncture of Phius and my own professional path in 2011, told me that if you don't know your past you won't have a future. It was at my very first Summer Camp ever (also known as The Westford Building Science Symposium that just had its 25th re-occurrence this year) that we sat in the yard until late into the night talking history, the history of high-performance construction and environmental building technology, where it came from and where is was going and where it should be going. Thanks to his lesson that night and the embrace by the US building science community and the unwavering support from Joseph Lstiburek and Betsy Pettit that followed and my own understanding of the history and how it all was connected are we in a place today that makes me hopeful. A place from where envisioning the future is possible.

In general, as a given baseline:

The Future - a world where health and comfort and safety and peace of mind and and friends and family and community and a meaningful life define wealth...not power, money or things...

The Future - a world that is equitable, diverse and inclusive and just everywhere...that does not tolerate injustice or unfair distribution of resources...

The Future - a world where clean energy becomes center to our well being and is cherished as a life force...demand reduction and sufficiency a virtue...lowering peaks everywhere is intentional, desired, meaningful, even in the economy...expressed in a lifestyle with few extremes and more serenity...kids in school beginning at a young age are being taught about the importance of it all...

The Future - a world where technology is used to benefit all...much less work work and more time to create...for self-care, relationships, community building, for society locally and globally and active participation in democracy...to maintain and refurbish things we brought into our lives until they gracefully depart...to tend to our gardens...

In particular, what buildings have to be able to do for us in the future:

The Future - They are a key component...buildings center our lives around everything we do...family, business, society...we spend an extraordinary amount of time indoors. 80-90% percent in developed nations at least. And developing nations, as living standards rise and warmer climates are becoming more challenging, are catching up fast and are still building up. Most of new construction, and lots of it, will happen in the developing world.

The Future - In the developed world, we will see new construction decline and more "recycling" and retro "climate" fitting of the existing building stock in its place. Massive future fitting with an eye towards longevity...meeting climate goals...resilience against climate events and stabilizing and transitioning the grid that is rebuilding itself...demands to turn the existing building stock into low load, high performance zero energy all electric buildings.

The Future - Panelized construction from low carbon materials that can be easily de-built and reused and even safely discarded will lead the market. The construction process will be decarbonized to a point that absolute zero carbon on a whole systems level is within reach. Once we are done with that immense and lifesaving task we will have learned and internalized a different attitude towards resources and energy and be more conscious about our use of both in an attempt to maintain a sustainable environmental equilibrium.

The Future - In the developing world, new construction prevails for now and has a clear emphasis on low load, high performance zero energy all electric buildings built with low carbon materials to do it right from the get-go. Those construction techniques will be code and best practices globally but the developing world is in a better position to reach absolute zero carbon easier and sooner. All new buildings are also nano grids and/or organized in small island-able regions as micro-grids.

The Future - Buildings double as energy generating infrastructure and offer many new lucrative business models for a new renewable energy economy. As such, energy becomes more democratized and distributed, is no longer singularly controlled by a few giant corporations. Maybe housing even will be free one day as part of the energy generating infrastructure.

The Future - Set up as such, with the new renewable energy system at the core of the new world economy, developing nations will be exceedingly more profitable and easily catch up with the developing nations in terms of productivity. That is because their buildings and grid infrastructure have been built from the ground up for the future and they are not weighed down by having to deal with hybrid solutions or central control.

The Future - a new world order rises, entirely without war, just through the democratization of energy. Countries and entire continents are now positioned more equitably and fairer than ever. Because of increased wealth and safety of their citizens, they are now in a position to stem the effects of climate change that are already underway together.

The Future - Buildings will be healthy, comfortable and safe. No one is going to die from a grid outage during a heatwave or a cold spill, all houses now have at least enough PV and small storage to maintain non life threatening conditions in their entire houses, not just a safe room. This will be crucial until the already caused climate events will pass and have a chance to normalize which will likely take a century and a couple generations.

I'll hold it there. I know this might be idealistic but while I am writing this I am realizing that we really have no other option. The alternative is bleak.

And I am also realizing that the process begun by democracy transforming societies and the world, carried, lead and defended for most of this century by America (and yes, America has glaring flaws and everything has a dark side but I can't help to admire the idealism and resolve to forward an idea that transcends everything else), I am grateful for. And what its global leadership in promoting a big idea did was just the beginning. Those of us globally, who picked up that baton now need to make it better while America struggles to redefine itself and take it to the finish line.

Democratizing energy is at the core of world peace. I firmly believe that.