Upon hearing the word “environment” people most likely will form a mental image that is purely natural: a tree, a lake, or a meadow. But the environment that most people actually inhabit is one of concrete, steel, and drywall. Recognizing that this environment must also be managed with the future in mind, the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford is planning to spearhead the development of a new focal area for the Initiative on the Environment and Sustainability: the Sustainable Built Environment (SBE).

“Buildings consume something like 40 percent of all the energy and about 70 percent of all the electricity in an industrialized society,” says Raymond Levitt, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and a leader of this new effort to marshal the university’s vast but fractured expertise in the technology, economics, and sociology that shape the human habitat. “The built environment has such a big impact on all of those elements on the natural environment—on land use, on oceans, on fresh water, on air quality—that there ought to be a specific focus within the Initiative that brings together people from all around the university.

“Civil and Environmental Engineering is one of the central disciplines in designing and constructing the built environment, but research to find more sustainable ways of developing and operating buildings and infrastructure will require input by scholars from earth sciences, law, business, public health, and other disciplines.”
                                                                                              
For the built environment to be sustainable, it must have minimal impact on the natural environment and its systems (climate, air, water), be economically feasible, and socially beneficial, Levitt says. These goals are simple to articulate, but meeting them will require research on problems as diverse as innovative building materials, imaginative financing methods, and creative laws and building codes. The SBE vision has been multidisciplinary from the start. Levitt’s main partner in advocating for the new focus is Douglas McAdam, a sociology professor who directs Stanford’s Urban Studies Program.

“Ray and Doug have been articulate and forceful advocates, from day one, for the inclusion of the Built Environment as a major focal area in the Initiative on the Environment and Sustainability,” said Jeffrey Koseff, Perry L. McCarty co-Director of the Woods Institute. “Now with the dedication of the Y2E2 building their vision has become very compelling and very real. Not only will Y2E2 become the hub and centerpiece for activities in SBE but the building itself will be a research tool and a teacher of what is possible and what we need to achieve to become more sustainable.”

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2), dedicated March 4, is only the beginning, of course. Ultimately the SBE program aims to achieve a global reach. To get it started, Woods will provide planning grants this summer to faculty teams so they can develop research proposals. Then the institute will lead the fundraising efforts to launch the most promising of these projects.

There are many opportunities for multidisciplinary teams of researchers to collaborate on challenges in the sustainable built environment, Levitt says. In some cases these linkages have begun to form, but the new program within Woods could greatly accelerate the process, facilitate entirely new collaborations, and, just as important, help establish new undergraduate and graduate teaching curricula in existing departments and interdepartmental teaching programs. In Winter Quarter, Woods also began hosting an ongoing SBE seminar series.

Research potential

One potential area for new research with the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, for example, would be to overcome a barrier that keeps solar panels off the roofs of homes and office buildings, Levitt says. A typical homeowner only owns a particular house for seven years so there is no incentive to buy a system with a 10-year break-even, Levitt says. Office developers, meanwhile, pass along utility costs to their tenants, who typically pay little heed to how much their energy costs. The result of these conditions is that no single party owns the life-cycle costs and benefits—the people who’d have to pay the upfront capital costs for energy savings are in no position to reap their eventual rewards.

Economists and engineers, however, could find a way to turn solar installations into a viable investment vehicle where third parties might build systems for the long haul and reap the value along the way, Levitt says. Perhaps such investors would be betting on continued increases in fossil fuel prices. Or maybe such investments would take off if the U.S. adopted a European-style carbon market that attaches an explicit economic value for not emitting pollution.

In a related fashion, through the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects that Levitt directs, researchers from engineering, law, and the humanities study ways to effectively finance and manage construction projects in areas of the world where traditional taxpayer financing is untenable. As state budget deficits mount in the U.S., such as in California, such models may become increasingly attractive in the developed as well as the developing world.

Other opportunities exist across seemingly far-flung offices on campus. Medical and social science researchers can team up to look at how sociological factors contribute to public health hazards in the built environment—a preponderance of fast food restaurants near schools, for instance. In 2006, medical school professor Abby King illustrated the connection between the built environment and health when she published a study showing that the amount of exercise that people get depends on their perception of the “walkability” of their neighborhood.

In a more technical vein, several Stanford Engineers recently teamed up (with support from the Woods Institute Environmental Ventures Program and the Precourt Institute) across three departments—civil and environmental, aeronautics and astronautics, and chemical engineering—to experiment with creating a fully recyclable substitute for wood as a building material. When it biodegrades, the natural fiber-reinforced “biocomposite” material produces methane that can be used either to make more of the material, or as an energy source. Further research is needed, but the material could save trees, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and keep tons of building materials out of landfills.

A uniquely Stanford effort

The first major step toward unifying such projects under the SBE banner was a “town hall” meeting last fall. The most important indicator of the idea’s success was the audience that turned out to hear about it. More than 50 scholars from all of Stanford's Schools presented and discussed ideas for cross-disciplinary SBE research. “There was just a really exciting degree of interest in this topic across the campus,” Levitt says.

Stanford is uniquely good at bringing together such diverse groups of researchers and can therefore be a particularly effective launching pad of new ideas for reshaping how people build, Levitt says. The University has developed an instinctual culture of collaboration. Stanford doctoral students, for example, frequently search out multidisciplinary groups of faculty to assemble the best advisory committees for their dissertations. Recent civil and environmental engineering thesis committees have included psychologists, sociologists, or economists.