Insights from applied simulation

I think we are, and I think we're live. Excellent. Hello everyone. Welcome to Infrared City Community Talks, volume two. I am delighted to host Giovanni Betti, Head of Sustainability at HEN, plus a lot of other things. Hi Giovanni, how are you? Hi, Angelos, I'm very good, so it's very nice to be here with you today. Thanks for and thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for spending the time to talk to us and give us your insights. Before I start with anything else, you're the second Italian on the show, so I have to ask again, how do you drink your coffee? the invite. I make every morning, that's the very first thing I do in the morning, I have a nice espresso machine at home and I make espresso for me and cappuccino for my wife. Lovely, home barista, my type of people. Lovely, lovely, excellent. Thank you, thank you very much. So from my side, I would say, well, we go way back. We've sat next to each other for a few years at Foster and Partners Yeah. with, when you were SMG, I was SMG and then ARD and whatever. Very, very nice time together. So I have a lot of stories I'm not gonna share, but I'd love to hear from you, you know, how do you describe yourself? What are you proud of? How do you define yourself in this context? Maybe your own introduction. Thank I really found myself here a bit by chance because I thought as architects, one should be, we should all be responsible for the impact that our buildings have on the climate, for the amount of energy consumed, for the amount of material it uses. So just out of the fact that not many people were looking at those topics when I started, I found myself with the head of a specialist, but just because I thought there was a sort of responsibility and a bit of surprise that not everybody was looking into those topics of energy and emissions. But yeah. Yeah. Common line at Yeah, I love that intro. Starting with responsibility is, I think, where we should all start. Having spent some time on this field as well... Like, a bit less than you, but I think more than anything, there are still Masterbed figures and answers to people asking for recommendations, coming from your point of view. So tell us, would been different What we very often do is we talk with pride about the work that we've done, but we are still 40% of the emissions of the whole world. So I think that we definitely need to solve that problem. Okay, but then I would go then next to perhaps ask you from your own sort of like experience, your own history of dealing with this space to give us perhaps an overview of the history of simulation. I remember you starting with radiance, when radiance was sort of like a command C++ prompt from some windows or something, building interfaces for Bentley's microstation or whatever. I remember you coming up with screens that are very, very new to everyone else. Comand line, at the beginning. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the idea of simulating in architecture the way we understand it now is kind of born in the States after World War II. About in the, when there was a lot of work that was done, so for instance I think that the first publication of meteorological data of an EIA of an American Institute of Architects bulletin was something like 1954 or something like that. And then the work of the Olgi brother that also one of the last podcasts was mentioning. So I think it's born with this idea of the modernity of the international style that was developing and I think it's connected to the fact that a buildings were getting more complex, larger in scale. But also with the fact that there is also a moment where there is a disconnection between traditional ways of building and architecture. I think when the international style where the modern movement comes to the fore, where mechanical system become widespread, all of a sudden we had buildings that we were maybe building in places that we didn't know, or yeah. Yeah, always been built in the place where you would be. So, and then yeah and then of course the computer came and we could start putting numbers to things and we start quantifying the different aspects and we could start understanding the physics that happens in our buildings in terms of light, energy, airflow, all of those things with different levels of precision. But it's always a way of trying to make more and more educated are making more educated, like way more educated guesses this this time of history, like, do you feel we've, we've gone on a leap of like being able to actually know, more or less, you know, ladybug game about, you know, I remember, like, the way you also describe it. I remember when I was looking at, I was also saying this to Emanuel at the Department of Energy's sort of like DOE page of simulation tools, and half of them were like, you know, it's impossible to even try them because they're a command prompt, as you say, and they're like, very difficult to connect. I remember I've said about this, I've talked about this many times in my talks on, you know, the cost of the business sort of a connection between ecotech and generative components that like, you know, dreadful DLL business that was going on the back. I don't know if you remember that that was like, you know, it's not that, that all is like maybe 17. Say again. I suffered that pain. Exactly. Yeah, and we were there and then like now you know you've got, I mean, Mustafa's incredible work. Ladybug you've got like other things that you know you got lots of tools that are available infrared city being one of them we hope to make it even more easy for produce. I think like, you know, an architect today can make an educated guess. So, yeah, I think I think that there are a couple of aspects to this that there is the part of the tools that definitely got easier and more user friendly and faster and better integrated I think now the stuff that you guys are doing with infrared is absolutely brilliant, you know, that's instant CFD results on a city scale. Wonderful. I think so that there is this issue, the barriers to entry on the technical side, they just become lower and lower. There is more, I think that to me that the question is that the way I look at this is more like all models are wrong but some are useful, which I think is a cause from some statistician I love that. Excellent. and if the answer is relevant. I think we have seen a period in time, some maybe 10 years ago, it peaked, where we were really getting enthralled in this topic of making always more complex simulation and really trying to fine tune the buildings as if they were race cars. And the reality is that our buildings are not race cars, so buildings are kind of wild beings that have a lifespan that we hope it's going to be as long as possible, at least 50 years, maybe 100 years, they are going to accommodate a variety of uses, a variety of functions. So I think that the important thing when we're talking about buildings or when we're talking about urban space is not that they are super fine tuned for one specific case, I think it's more to design things that are very robust and can accommodate a variety of uses, a variety of situations. Also talking about climate change and all of that, so it's a lot more about from, I think for me the emphasis has shifted a little bit from the topic of performance to the topic of robustness and resilience. And then of course we're talking about robustness, you're less interested in the decimal points or in the fine differences, you're really interested in making sure that you're getting the fundamentals right. And that reflects also in the way a are wrong. There are some useful. Actually this this is exactly you know when I was doing my CFD, I was trying to build my own solver you remember those days, and I was like you know what am I doing, I'm an architect, how can I even like remotely build a solver I was reading Lomax is a sort of like expert on computer dynamics for aerospace engineering, and he was essentially saying the same thing like the model is always wrong the model is always inaccurate. The question makes the model relevant or not it's your questions are sometimes wrong, not your models like you're only make models you only make models to answer a question. If that question is wrong from the beginning, you know, then then the model won't help the number will help. But yeah, I love, I love the alignment there and again, not trying to make this a commercial talk but like you know we're trying to do that with infrared city. We're trying to, you know, really focus on the questions rather than on the, you know, the accuracy of the models but I'm going to go in a different sort of direction because I, you know, one of the things I really admire about you I've told you many times is you've worked on actual, you know, there's buildings around the world, you can look at them and say, I have made this building more sustainable I have actually put the effort to make this building more sustainable and I know I know quite a few buildings like that. So I want to hear from you, you know your insights from actual projects like actual buildings that were simulations had a significant impact where you, you said, look, we're going to test this, you know whether it's Bloomberg whether it's whatever like doesn't matter. I'm going to test this, and I'm going to, you know, run a simulation I'm going to actually help design with the simulation and it will, and you think it has actually made the building, but it's good that Salman Craig is not here so we don't have this discussion, you know on the post occupancy bodies of Mazda or whatever, but like anyway let's let's just talk about you know your own experience. Yeah. Thank you. whether it's a private person that wants a new house built or it's a company that needs a new headquarters for those people, it's always a lot of money. And they hope that they will have something built in one, two, three, four, five years in the future and you have your drawings and the whole business is really about how do you build trust, build certainty for yourself as a responsible designer and how do you risk the project. So the simulation in that sense is something like that and when you try to do things that have not been done very often before, you need to do more simulations to the risk and then there is always the point where you say well you get closer and closer to the limit of what is possible to simulate with certainty and then you also need to run tests. And then if you are lucky enough you also go back to the site and check that actually everything is working. So I think that there are a lot of buildings that have small or little impacts. I don't know, I think it's difficult to name projects now but I mean like of course a couple of projects that worked on at Foster and Partners when we were working together that for me are very personal and important, spent a lot of hours on those. It's both Apple campus in California, in Cupertino and the Bloomberg headquarters in London which are naturally ventilated buildings and they have a lot of, you have to overcome a lot of hurdles to prove that they can be naturally ventilated because that's not what is normally done. So you go from doing simulations to testing and developing that. And you have the lack of having very forward thinking clients that also have the financial means to support all that risk taking, all those additional activities that go next to the project. But this is something that we do in kind of every project. You always have the same concerns of allowing enough daylight, providing enough shading, minimizing the energy so enabling natural ventilation whenever that might be possible. The climate and the function allows and that can result in large gestures and small details. So in the buildings, I don't know, like a building that is nearing completion right now here in Berlin that we've designed with HEN is the third building of a small Zalando campus here next to the Mercedes-Benz Arena East Side Gallery for those who come visiting Berlin. And then, for example, that building has two atria on two corners and then offices that dock onto that and the facade responds to that. So it's fully glazed on the atrium because it works on the point of view of having a large volume of air, a lot of space that is essentially not very densely occupied because it's an atrium full height. So you can have a lot of glass and the building can take that amount of solar load and also the losses in winter are not so important because essentially it's a transitional space between inside and outside. And then on the other corners where it goes towards the offices, then you have the corner situation that it's more loaded from solar, from heat losses and so on. So we have this gradient that goes from a fully glazed atrium to a quite closed facade and then it morphs again and it creates, based on very simple principle, it creates a little bit of an image and a different look for the building, but it's based on very simple principles. Then, of course, we did the simulation to understand how open could open be, what were the glass details there, how closed could close be and still allowing good daylight and views out. So I think every project at every stage, you have this sort of hypothesis. You start with the first principles. You say, well, corners, if it's empty, I can have more glass. If it's densely occupied, I need less. And then you play with this and the simulation helps you refine this kind of aspects. No, I is it 10 or is it nine or is it. don't know. I started first time in 2015. Yeah, I think that's I had two years hiatus Yeah. Yeah. at Berkeley and then I'm back since September 2022. Thank you. people like in, you know, for me it's, it's all about sort of like, you got knowledge you got your own sort of like, you know, empirical empirical and practical knowledge of years and years of working with these projects, but then you'll have to, you know, instill that knowledge to a whole team so I would like from you to give me like 10 guidelines, like very simple guidelines on, you know, anybody who wants to make you know these sort of like, sort of like make buildings more sustainable to make to use simulation to make buildings more sustainable what would you advise them what are the 10 more important most important things that one should have in mind, let's say, your team member new team member comes in Monday morning you say listen, this is, these are the 10 these are like the, you know, the there is something that unfortunately is still prevalent in a lot of the architectural aesthetic that again is the leftover of the modernity that we really need to overcome, this idea of the fully glazed transparent building. I think that for how much I love many of the work of Mies van der Rohe, for example, he has done untold damage to the profession and to the world with those Okay. the world. And I think that there is still this aesthetic very often. I think we need to learn how to design learning from the past and learning to design with less glass, less more solid walls, deeper facades. And then we will realize that we can still have actual transparency where we want it and where we need it and actually we can have glass that is actually transparent and not that is with all the coatings that are needed to make it work. So I think that's one thing. Think about the envelope is really where one should start as an architect. The form of the building in terms of how compact it is, how does it balance the fact of being compact? Like the glue pieces, minimum heat loss with the most compact shape that you can have in a dome. But also how do you balance that with making daylight and views out available to everybody in the office? So I think those are the basic tensions. And then I think that the other points relate a little bit more to not just so much about the operational carbon, like the energy and the emissions that are related to run in the building, but really relate a lot to the materials. I think that's where now the next frontier of what we have to tackle is how do both is right. we reduce the amount of carbon that goes into building our buildings? Yeah, absolutely including carbon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ground and don't extend too much below ground. And I think a lot of the principles are pretty simple. And I mean, we always start from our human hunch and understanding of what makes sense. And I think simulation then helps us to quantify that and prove it or disprove it. Are we on the right track? Are we not on the right track? Is that something that really makes a difference to the overall comfort or cost or carbon cost of the building or is something that is not so relevant and we need to focus somewhere else? a little bit out of scale because for me personally one of the things that always bothered me was like, you know, was working at, you know, high end projects high end offices high end sort of like, you know, educational institutions, even, you know, you've got these tools, right, and they're applied to the top of the top of the architecture of the world right so like, you can make, you know, new airports and new. So like stadia and make them more sustainable and you can have like landmarks in the city but the 99.99% of architecture is not that and it's sort of like buildings that get produced fast, efficiently for economic reasons and other reasons as well. They're also like done in parts of the world where like, you know, there's very little access to data, etc. So, one of the things we're trying to do within for it really is, you know, opening up simulation capabilities to really the bulk of architecture and planning, which actually is the 47 from the software from the 47% of carbon emissions or 37% I is then how do we go from, you know, cutting edge tools, advanced technology, like, sort of like data driven design which allows us to fine tune glazing mass materials, just I need to do like you know, 20 villas per year, 1000 sort of like houses per year etc. Like, you know, like, to the bulk. Maybe, I'd like you to, I'd like to put you in a position of like, you know, if you were to, if you had a magic wand, you could actually start, you know, changing things like delivering tools, of course, sorry about that. Thank pushed on them for decades from wherever it came, but that is not fundamentally sustainable. Like, again, going back to the international style and the sameness that we see around the city, around the globe, regardless of climate, regardless of the local historical heritage, there is just a lot of sameness. And that comes from a failure of our imagination because we want a building that looks like something else that we've seen somewhere else. That's the model that we have. And the models that often are around are not inherently sustainable. So that is a problem. I think this is kind of the challenge. We need to come up with a new collective vision for buildings that are aspirational and in their own appearance, in their own aesthetics, they are fundamentally sustainable and attuned to climate resources and whatnot. Then I think that there is, of course, the topic that a lot of the buildings are not even done by architects, without architects. But then on the topic of the tools, I think that the main key is really about making, lowering the barriers to entry. So I think, again, what you guys are doing with infrared goes in the right direction of using artificial intelligence to make all of this really simple and sort of a game. Thank Tartarini and others that have helped with documentation and the many parts of it. But essentially, it's just a website. You go on there, you can look at the weather data from about 30,000 locations worldwide. It costs you nothing. You need to have just an internet connection. You get all sorts of graphics that are interactive, that helps you understand. You also have the documentation that explains why those graphics might be relevant and why, how they might be used. So CB, Klima. we're, we're posting the, we're posting the link on the, on the chat. We're already doing that. And it is, and it is part of mine. Sorry to interrupt you. It's part of my next question. So, we'll go there for sure. But yeah, continue. The nice thing is that you see that this is really used worldwide. We have done very little advertisement. This is probably the most advertisement I've done in a single time. But it's a small website, but we see every year, every month, we have 5,000 to 6,000 unique users. And the nice thing is that you see that it's from all the world regions. So it's not only from the global north. It's not only from Europe and U.S. or China or Australia, but you have a lot of users everywhere in Russia and India and South America and Africa. And that's really nice because you think that hopefully that does a little bit of a exactly that. So I think, you know, that, that tool that you've done, you know, I know we've talked about it before, but I think it's very important to discuss. It is essentially exposing what a climate, like, you know, whether a weather file already holds as information about the location and without even like, and I remember like, you know, ecotech was half of it was just that, right? Like you could just look at the other weather tool. And essentially there was this sort of like thing, which was like the, the, the simplest optimization I've seen in my, in my, in my life, which was like, just put a plane, right? And then just click on a button and then it tells you where to, where that plane will get the most solar radiation. You know, from, from the whole, it's like a very simple geometric calculation. And the, the sort of like this tool, this sort of tools, I think, they're not, they're not even, you know, they're like very simple, but they're still not exposed to a lot of architects cannot access very easily. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There are great solutions here and there, and we need more of those. But no, it's always about this desktop based, proprietary based software and just having, we're seeing now a bit of open source that is coming along. But the fact it's nice to see just to do a resource, which essentially Klima was what I, climate analysis that I've been doing hundreds of times in my career that I've instructed colleagues how to do. And yeah, I think we could automate and package that little bit. And I still use it because it makes my life easier. So I'm the first user of it. And it's nice to see that other people find it interesting, either for teaching or for designing know, heat of like delivering a project, you know, you need to just put that window there, right? Like you could move that window half a meter. And you would like perhaps save, I don't know how much energy you would probably make, you know, you could cut life of the life expectancy of people by moving the window half a meter, to be honest. But at that moment, you don't have that information and that's the problem. And then that's why we keep talking about accessibility of these tools, accessibility of these sort of like, of this knowledge. But I want to focus a little bit more on this sort of like, you know, climate data, like what I hear very often when I present infrared also to people who are not part of our field is what do you get the data, how accurate is the data, like what about the weather, et cetera, et cetera. So like, you know, everybody knows you can't predict the weather, but still like, you know, if I want to go tomorrow out, like I'll just check the weather and if it says it's going to probably rain, I'm just going to get an umbrella. And this is, I think, the type of information we also need in architecture. But I'm going to, I want to talk about the umbrella, the general umbrella we'll need in 2050 and 2070 or whatever. So there's two points for me that are really, really important when we're talking about, you know, weather files or climate data. One is climate data, like, you know, the way we understand it, typical meteorological years, TMYs, EPWs, all of those come from, you know, statistical analysis of like 30 years or 40 years, 50 years of data coming from the nearest airport, most probably or the nearest sort of like weather station that has enough data for like 30, 40, 50 years. I actually went through the process of creating my own weather file back in 2007. So I remember how painful it was because I wanted, I was designing something in the University of Patras where I was studying and I took the weather data. Like there was a weather station that was running for like at least 10 years at the university and I took all the data and I was looking at it and I was like, what on earth is going on here? I can't make sense of it. So my questions are two essentially. First of all, how can we localize that climate data? So if you're at the center of Berlin and you have like, you know, the Berlin airport as sort of like input data, you know, exactly at the same place, right? If you're next to Hyde Park in London, or if you are in the middle of the city of London, you're like, you know, mass density, city sort of like conditions change a lot, like, you know, these weather files. And then that's one thing is locality. And the other thing is temporality, which is essentially that weather file is irrelevant today. This is the 12th consecutive month where we've broken every record. This is the 12th consecutive hottest month on earth. And we have to talk about this. And we've already gone past the 1.5 degrees. I think people are not talking about it openly. But we're like, you know, there's consensus among sort of like, at least the climate scientists that we're in uncharted, uncharted ground. And like, we're talking about 2050, you're designing the building today. The building is going to be built in a couple of years, perhaps, hopefully, it depends on when you are on earth. And then in 2050, it will definitely be operative and those temperatures are not going to be the same. Those wind speeds are not going to be the same. So I sort of like expanded my question a little bit, but I just want to essentially bring you to these sort of like these topics of locality and temporality. How do we go about those? Deutsche Wetterdienst has available on really, I don't know what is the resolution of this grid, but it's sub zip code, hyper local weather file for most of Germany. And, and when you, they don't come in the APW format, they come in their own format, but it can be easily converted is essentially the same data. And when you download that you can really go onto your block. And you, you can, you get six files. So you get a typical, typical summer and winter case for 2015 and typical summer and winter case for 2045. So that's pretty amazing. There are some other You You in 1960, that's really not relevant for what we're experiencing today. There are a couple of really nice tools, for example, and this is something that we use more and more as well when you go out in Germany. There we have those, this pretty comprehensive data sets that also is due for an update, but pretty comprehensive. There are a lot of You You You means that then you have not only it's a few degrees warmer, it's also maybe sunnier in summer. Or it's not only a bit colder, but it's also windier because the word is getting windier because wind is just solar energy that heats up the air in regular forms. And then hot air wants to, cold air pushes away hot air. And then you have the winds that happen. So the wind is not only getting, the word is not only getting hotter, it's getting wetter because you have more evaporation, it's getting windier because you have more energy overall in the atmosphere. So those effect compounds and then you can, especially for the outdoor climate, I think this is really important to design spaces that can be safe to use for the weaker population, like elderly and children, also during peak summer and peak winter times. I think that's where you really see a lot of difference in the way you design outdoor spaces. And I think that's when it's important to not use old data, but to try to stay as current as possible. So I think this resource, there are a few websites that sell future data. This NASA resource is a free resource and covers pretty much the whole globe. I think that's fantastic, very useful to get reference points that are closer in time, even if there may not be a statistically representative I find this very, very useful. We'll get those links and we'll post them alongside the blog post. I'm just repeating for the AI summary, like I'm just talking to the AI right now. That, you know, the climate will become not just hotter, but it will become wetter, it will become windier because, you know, more precipitation will lead to more winds will lead to more sort of like currents of movement of air in the atmosphere. It's more energy in the atmosphere. Exactly. And I'm just repeating that because I think it will be very, very interesting, you know, because it's very, very often you're trying to explain to the world. It's not just like, you know, okay, I'm going to increase by 1.5 degrees, all my temperatures in the weather fire is quite more difficult to understand than that. And also locality matters also in what you're describing. You You you have increasing the risk for stroke in older people and diseases and all these nice things. And we have to think that also that I think that is happening at least here in Europe is that our population is getting on average older. And then all of a sudden you have a space that was designed quite okay 50 years back. Then now because of the compounding effects of urban heat island and climate change, it becomes a public health hazard. So I think this is all about building So like to find the accurate numbers, like, you know, 30 million people displaced every year, and you know, how many people die, how many people are like, you know, affected, how many people end up with disease, sort of like, you know, with long term illnesses. Not to mention, like, you know, even costs because people still understand, you know, impact with economic terms. And I say, many times, you know, 16 billions per hour is, I think the cost of like what I found at least to be the cost climate change. So like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, it's not like, converting these sort of like expected changes to value to impact to actual sort of like value for users for designers for developers is actually what I think is one of the most important. If you were talking about that image of the world, like, you know, that, you know, architects, we have this sort of like image or theory and sort of like fundamental values that drive our profession like we build, we're building slowly the sort of like new you. the time and I would like to take some of the questions because I've seen some of them that are very interesting to just get your, your sort of like, let's say, input on those. One of them, you know, the rising temperature, how do we make sure the buildings are future proof to combat heat and other environmental factors like more or less what you were discussing about like, perhaps, moving it into the simulation and an actual sort of like what do I do when I design, right? What should I really do to make? You You You matter as well a lot. So if you're inside a concrete building and then you cover all the ceiling, for instance, with acoustic insulation or you have a drop ceiling, then you're losing a lot of that You heat without really raising in temperature just because the heat capacity of construction materials is very high. The heat capacity of the air is by comparison orders of magnitude lower. So if I don't have access to the mass of the building to store that heat, the temperature inside the room will spike immediately as soon as the sun hits the floor. So I think also really thinking about this very basic principles of thermal mass, well insulated envelope, well shaded fenestration, so that there is a way of deciding whether you want contact with the outdoor environment or it's a moment where it's better to have a higher degree of separation. and the audience from Naz essentially, you know, back in the days we were focused on energy and now, you know, we're focusing on embodied carbon. I'd say, you know, also the change we design and simulate comes to, it's not just about how much embodied carbon goes into a cubic ton of, a cubic meter or a ton of concrete, but it's also what sort of thermal mass, what sort of capacity, what sort of performance that that concrete or that wood would bring to the building. So many times wood is used as an example, even for high rise and like, you know, sort of like new, new, there's a new trend of like reusing wood. I'm not sure how you feel about that. But like, essentially, it's not just how much carbon went into this cubic meter of material is what can it do for your building in the next 50, Yeah, I mean, I think that when we're looking at the emissions of our buildings we of course we need to look at it holistically over the whole lifecycle that's that's that's a lot of what we do in my team at the moment with a lot of lifecycle assessments when you're doing the lifecycle assessments. There is a beautiful complex standard that tells you how to do that for a building but in principle you just have to look at the amount of carbon that it's emitted or stored in the structure to build it to procure the material to bring them to the site to configure them to put together so that it's a building. Then to maintain them over time because different lifespans to get rid of it at the end of the lifecycle and then the operational energy is what it takes once the building is working to have it to function. And I think that we have in I mean at least in the in the almost 20 years that I've been working. I think we've seen a radical change in the balance of those two things. And I think that because I mean like if you just think at the technology that the way that's changed now so even without looking at all the good things that we can do as architects, just from a purely technological point of view. Lighting uses a lot less energy today because LED is ubiquitous while 20 years ago we're still debating it's incandescent or it's fluorescent lighting. So now you have LED which is 16 times more efficient than a light bulb. So you can light the space by using a sixteenth of the energy that you needed before and you don't have to cool all the excess energy either. And same thing goes for the heating systems. Now we're building, we can build buildings with us as kind of standard. We build buildings that are fully electric because we don't need to have a gas boiler or an oil boiler that we used to have a few years back. But we can use heat pumps. So on the overall balance, I think that for the operational and then also all the standards that we have that when it relates to the energy of the buildings, they relate to the operational energy. So they look at the consumption and they look at the emissions associated with running the buildings. And this is absolutely right because again, that's over the whole life cycle of the building. Typically you have that the majority of the energy goes and the emissions are associated with running the building. But we have done all of this work so in the past 20 years the balance has shifted. And now before it was maybe 80 percent operational and 20 percent embodied emission. Now with all this regulation, technology advancement, it's typically 50-50. And then if you have a very high efficient building, you might even see that if you still build conventional like concrete, reinforced concrete, you might have that actually is more the embodied carbon than the operational carbon. And then the other thing that so we're shifting the relative importance of the embodied carbon is growing. And I think that the other point about the growth in importance of embodied carbon is also that the carbon emissions, as I said, there isn't the carbonization path because the moment that you have a fully electric building and the grid decarbonizes, the building will decarbonize with it. Of course, you want to be faster than the grid and all of that, but there is a path there. And also those emissions happen over the lifetime of the building. Instead, when you build the building, those emissions happen in the year, the two years that you're on the construction site. So if we're talking about the urgency of climate change and we look at the shrinking number of years that we have until we cross for good the 1.5, which we have already temporarily crossed in the past 12 months. Then they impact despite this carbon spike that we have now, it's all the more important. And then the other thing that I think really for me is speaks to working on the embodied carbon. It's not only that there is this urgency, but also like there is an immediacy because very often the operational carbon is difficult to see in my plan drawing of an architect. But if I'm drawing a concrete column or a concrete slab, or if I'm drawing a timber system, the difference is there. It's just in the drawing is exactly the drawing that I'm doing. And then we can again go to the simulation and do the fine calculation of how much the difference is and and understand how do we calibrate the timber system so that it still does all the function that we need to do. And there are a lot of fine points in there, but there is an immediacy as an architect. Sometimes you say, well, I don't see the operational carbon, think the embodied carbon, you see it in your drawings. So I think we even have more responsibility there. and then I'll ask you sort of like last closing one from my side. I saw a question there about where do we download these, these sort of like weather files, future weather files, and you mentioned NASA's tool. And I think we will just essentially post that link on when we post the podcast on that note for everyone who's watching us. We will post a blog post about this. We will summarize the talk using, of course, artificial intelligence, and we will also post the whole sort of the whole podcast and the links, the relevant links. But I want to go also to another question which relates to what tools are you using specifically at hand? People, I think, are looking for practical advice. So what sustainable tools are you primarily using at hand? And I would also expand this to your teaching at Berlin University of the Arts or perhaps, you know, what you did at Berkeley. Maybe more practically, what are you using? And, of course, you can say inferiority if you want, but you can also just say anything else. was a lot of fun using a very early version of infrared city. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, know, I know, I think we use a lot of Rhino and grasshopper with Ladybug climate studio for daylight and basic energy analysis know, get more and more into the ice, which is another thermal know. I know, wind simulations here. There is a business case that sometimes it's difficult to justify the cost. And I think that's where maybe you can help. I hope so. And as I said, what we do more and more is the is the whole topic of carbon accounting. I think also the question is what do we do in-house and what do we do with our consultants? Now, because I'm lucky that I work at a large architectural firm and we have 400 people globally. We have on every project, we have very good consultants. So everything that is covered by the regulation, we know that we have definitely aspiring partner in building physics in the MEP side. That they can help with that. And we do the more what I call environmental form-finding. Not like kind of really trying to use the idea of how you use the sun and the wind to really shape a building or come up with a facade pattern or with a shading device. This is more what we do, but the bulk of things we can outsource and we are aspiring partners. What is not covered by the regulation here in Germany, in other countries, it's already the case. Like in Denmark and France is the whole topic of embodied carbon. And this is something that, as I said, there is an urgency. And this is something that we do a lot using commercial tools like one click LCA, using online tools like ELCA, which is sometimes required by certain certification systems. And also we are trying to develop our own Thank to get to everybody in the office. So you might have heard sometimes the word carbonitor. That's the short end for carbon monitor. And it's a sort of system that we're developing to have within Revit, within Rhino an easy interface or an easy insight into the amount of carbon that is associated with the things that we draw. The plan is to make open source most of it. The bit I'm going to attempt to ask the devil's question here, whether that tool will be open to use outside the office because, you know, one of the reasons I left the place where we were together is because I couldn't really, you know, get my tools out to the world. So, is it something we're going to see? To that we may not make open source is what relates to not to the computational part, but to the your own designs. Of course. the designs. But the idea is to make it as soon as it's in a presentable state to put it out there open source. And it's also something that we're not developing in a vacuum. But the idea of it was born in a workshop together with your Apple, the C-Lab with my colleague, Chiara Schulle, and Emiliano Lugo, which is also one of the main developer of the carbonitor, is in constant contact with our colleagues in other architectural offices to exchange ideas, exchange work. We use open source components like LCAX to develop our work. So I think, of, like, curiosity in the room. So, like, now we need to follow up with several links. Again, I would say, you know, keep following us, like, go on LinkedIn and follow us because we'll post everything there also on our website. And, yeah, I'm going to close with one question because I think we're a little bit over time. I think that this podcast will be a bit longer. But I have to ask this question from our own Vasiliki. Essentially, you know, when we started, we talked about sort of like performance versus resilience, right? How can we shift the focus from, like, really these high accurate models to questions that are relevant and which is, I think, really important. Your vision about the role of architecture education, I think that for me is key. Like, I've been involved in a few programs, academic programs, you know, developing curricula for architects of the future. And it always bothers me quite a lot. What are we putting there? I see this week, Emanuele and Aboni and Jonathan and Natania are at Foster's, Norman Foster Institute, the program that I designed, essentially quite, spent quite a lot of time in designing. And then, you know, I'm thinking, what do we put in the hands of architects? So I am really, really curious to hear your thoughts on that. topic of responsibility. So here, if in Germany, because that's where I'm based, if I build 10 square meters, just building them and 10 square meters is really not much. It's less than the room that I'm in. It's a small, single bedroom. Those 10 square meters would be equivalent to the carbon emission just to build it, not to operate it, not to do anything. If I build it with conventional material, that would be equivalent to the carbon emission of the average German person over a whole year. Right. So all their eating, traveling, going out, working, commuting, anything. So that's a lot. So as architects, we have a big responsibility and we have a big lever in our hands. So I think what is that we want to change? I think very often with the simulation, we have been guilty of this. One spends time optimizing shading device because option two is different from option three. And then before you know it, there are option 47. But all of that has an impact of changing the energy intensity by one percent. So while there are other things that not always are the sexy ones, but that can have a very, very big impact on our projects. Simple decisions. Do we have a drop ceiling or do we figure out a way of having exposed slabs in an office? That has a big impact on your resiliency and on your robustness. And then the other thing is like really stress testing the building, not to perform fine tune, but to perform in a wide range of situation. Does your optimized results stop being optimal if the occupancy doubles or halves? Because that's something that you have really no control over. So that's something to change and to play with. Yeah. offer you one one advice for the future, sunscreen would be it. And I think it was like a very, very well known song. Right. And I was always like, you know, thinking about the song, you know, it's a bit of a bit of a joke. But at the end of the day, you know, with the with the sort of like heat solar, you know, catastrophe that we're facing, sunscreen was a very good advice. So what's your sunscreen advice for architects, planners and anybody in our field for the future if you could make it a song? Thank And they decide not to buy a car, they decide not to eat meat, they decide to cycle. Some people even decide not to have children because of that. Because a lot of people feel powerless in the situation of climate change. If you are an architect, you can every day that you go into the office, every day that you design a building, you can decide if you want to be an oil and gas executive or somebody that brings a different way of doing things in this planet. couldn't I couldn't I couldn't think of a better end to this podcast. Thank you, Giovanni, so much for taking the time. Thank you indeed. It was really I mean, for me, it was very insightful. I mean, I see the comments. Also, people say we should do a part two, part three. We'll definitely do that at some point. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for all the insights. Everybody else, please follow our social media like LinkedIn. You can also do for Facebook, Instagram, any any flavor you like. So essentially, you'll get the podcast as a you know, the transcript of the podcast as well as a sort of like overview of it as a blog post very soon. We'll post it also on Spotify. So keep you know, keep watching this space. It's very we're very new to this, but we really love talking to people like Giovanni. And and the conversation is very interesting for all of us. Thank you, Giovanni. Thank you, everybody else for for being here. Lovely to talk to you. It's it's it's been a delight. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye bye. Bye, everyone.

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