Christina Ciardullo: The architect who designs life in space as if she were completing life on Earth
Christina Ciardullo is a senior architect, partner and founder of the award-winning space architecture firm SEArch+ and PhD Researcher at the Yale Centre for Ecosystems in Architecture.
SEArch+ won the 2015, 2019 and 2021 NASA Centennial Challenges, bridging design for space with sustainable development on Earth. Her current PhD work focuses on integrating vegetation into buildings for more sustainable cities. In her interview with Tina Marinakis for ADM The Green Issue, she talks about her collaboration with NASA, the future of sustainability in architecture, and how we could design “incredibly sustainable buildings on Earth.”
– How do you approach eco-innovation in your projects? Which of your projects do you consider exemplary of high performance sustainable design?
In every project I am involved in, I like to design from a fundamental physics principle or using passive methods to achieve human well-being in indoor and urban spaces. We work from an ecological perspective, in the sense that we consider the built environment as an ecosystem that simultaneously provides water, energy, heat, coolness, acoustic comfort, and aesthetic qualities. In this way, the building becomes an experiment in terms of a holistic solution that meets many needs in the same built form.
Each project is really an experiment, an evolutionary effort to improve “sustainability”. In the case of the green walls we are working on at Yale’s Center for Ecosystem Architecture, we designed walls that actively draw potential indoor air through the roots of a plant. The microbial colonies that live there will actually metabolize air pollutants. What is happening today is that mechanical systems are simply dumping these pollutants into the open air – which is both energy-intensive and dead-end.
With each iteration, we ask “what are some additional metrics we need to look at to see if this is a viable solution?”, “how do we minimize water use or use these green walls to recycle water?”, “how can we orient these walls to use daylight instead of relying on electric lighting?”, “how can we use renewable biomaterials to structure and support green walls instead of extractive building materials?”, “can we integrate food production in a meaningful way that is economically sustainable and remove the pressure to convert forests to agricultural land?”
These are not trivial questions, and while there is widespread architectural intuition about the use of plants, identifying the metrics to be able to work with them in a meaningful way requires significant research.
– Tell us more about your long-standing partnership with NASA and your interest in developing design that supports human space exploration.
As a child I dreamed of designing for space and now the dream has become a reality. The love of the planet, the universe, science, physics, meets a place of fantasy. As some of the countries and people of the world seem to have renewed interest in space, we are facing a new generation of research, which includes architecture for human beings. I have been fortunate to be involved with NASA on a few projects, many of which involve the idea of sustainable human settlement off planet, including 3D printed buildings for the moon and Mars and concept greenhouses.
Personally, I can’t separate the idea of sustainability from the moment humans first saw a picture of our planet from space. I have no doubt that the sustainability movement really took off after we saw the image of the finite and beautiful blue “marble” on which everyone and everything we know coexists. For me, planning for space is really an extension of planning for a “whole Earth”. Once we move away from the planet we realize the degree of our dependence on it. We are “embedded” in the processes of the Earth. In the past, spacecraft supported life isolated from the planet and the ability to survive thanks to a few mechanical devices. Today, really, to live sustainably outside our world, we have to take a piece of it with us. There is no way to imagine long-term, sustainable life outside the Earth without somehow recreating the biological and chemical processes we know.
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I have no doubt that the sustainable movement really took off after we saw the image of the finite and beautiful blue “marble” on which everyone and everything we know coexists.
I have no doubt that the sustainable movement really took off after we saw the image of the finite and beautiful blue “marble” on which everyone and everything we know coexists.
– How do you respond to the widespread concern that “”we can’t even protect and preserve what we have on Earth. How can we expect to create a more mature civilization in space?”
For me it’s more about the beneficial process of exercising or thinking about planning for a place that depends on the use and reuse of minimal resources, on Earth or on another planet. We would design incredibly sustainable buildings on Earth if each of them had the same requirements as the concepts of space: take care of its own waste, use clean zero energy, be built without extensive use of energy-intensive materials, and reuse the minimal materials it has.
– How is sustainability “measured”?
“Sustainability” means meeting the needs of the present in a way that future generations can also meet theirs. It implies a circular economy, where we move from resource consumption to a model in which resources are used and reused for the common good of “people, planet and profit”. How sustainability is measured in practice – the actual impact of a method or product on the sustainable use of resources – is often defined very differently depending on the context. In the literature, there are so many different ways of defining the variables involved that the definition can become overwhelming. The way the United Nations defines sustainable development, for example, tends to focus on measures of equitable development, so that it includes ending poverty and hunger and promoting gender equality. In this case, the metrics use indicators such as average birth weight or mortality rates, which are calculated differently in each country.
In the world of architecture, sustainability is often associated with reducing energy use in buildings that, traditionally, have depended on fossil fuel extraction. Thus, among the first ways of calculating sustainability for buildings was to use the energy of various appliances and equipment, such as Energy Star in the US. If, say, renewable energy sources such as solar energy are involved, then energy consumption may be less important than the choice of building materials that are part of an exhaustive mining process in terms of the Earth’s resources, and also the building through refinery combustion processes may contribute to increased carbon emissions. There are many contexts to make measurements and we need them all so that we can all work productively towards the common goal of sustainability.
– What role do you think LEED and WELL standards will play in the future? Is green design only a matter of advancing technology or should it be an architectural innovation?
LEED, WELL, BREAM, Energy Star, Living Building Challenge, Passive House. All of these really unusual efforts to quantify and define the metrics of what makes a building sustainable have been, in my opinion, extremely successful in moving forward, in terms of sustainability. When designing a building, the architect must report to all stakeholders, from funders to the city, and using these “frameworks” as a reference point for how a design addresses sustainability has been key to acceptance. If using solar energy or remediating used water on-site might be considered too costly in light of more common mining processes, these green building models were an alternative way of creating value. Perhaps LEED certification on a building was really the only way to justify the expense of, for example, low-flow, low-water-use plumbing.
They were not a way to justify the expense of, say, low-flow, low-water-use plumbing.
Once we get away from the planet we realise the extent of our dependence on it. We are “embedded” in the Earth’s processes.
If green building standards provide value and incentives, now that technological methods for improving water, energy and material use are improving, one hopes that market forces will take over, making these decisions and making them economically driven. One hopes that this progress will not just be mechanical or electronic or automated intelligent systems, but that in some cases the “progress” will be a return to fundamental physics, materials science, and indigenous methods from centuries of building before mechanical systems and abundant energy. Through the use of embedded knowledge of form and materials we can passively cool, heat, ventilate, create appropriate lighting and improve air quality – all of which we currently rely heavily on energy-intensive mechanical systems to do. Ceramics and bricks can be used to cool operable windows that create cross-ventilation for ventilation, using plants to improve air quality… all of which use fundamental physical or biological principles rather than mechanical or electrical ones.
– Talk to us about the IAQ 2020 Conference: Indoor Environmental Quality Performance Approaches to be held in Athens in May 2022.
Typically, the indoor environment of a building is regulated and measurements are calculated in individual areas – thermal comfort, acoustic comfort, lighting comfort and air quality. And although we as humans understand all of these simultaneously, in the engineering world we live in this means that we usually create one or more machines or methods to look at each problem individually. As you can imagine, this is unnecessarily material and energy intensive. IAQ 2020 promises to be an exciting time where the built environment profession recognises that these areas influence each other. The Athens conference is about the transition from IAQ (Indoor Air Quality) to IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), attempting to create a more holistic “framework” so that we can move away from individual engineering solutions and move more effortlessly towards integrated and “multi-point” solutions for an entire environment.
www.cea.yale.edu/team/christina-ciardullo
A Lifo collaboration with Design Ambassador and Archisearch.gr
