Curious about embodied carbon and toxics in design and construction?
Designers and architects continually seek to make healthier choices and reduce carbon emissions in their projects.
Martha Lewis, Architect and Head of Materials at Henning Larsen, and Pelle Much-Peterson, creator of The Construction Material Pyramid, discuss the intersectional impacts of embodied carbon and chemicals found in building materials as they present a new interactive tool to visualize and calculate carbon in materials.
The Construction Material Pyramid came out of Pelle Munch-Petersen’s Ph.D. when he began to explore what material health issues mean to the practice of architects and engineers. The Material Pyramid is an invitation to take ownership of the carbon emissions of products in construction.
About Martha Lewis
Martha Lewis is Head of Materials at Henning Larsen, where she promotes holistic strategies focusing on healthy, ethical, and environmentally tenable materials. Martha is currently involved in establishing a Danish building material passport and was a member of the Buildings as Material Banks shareholders network, investigating potential for an EU material passport. In 2016, she participated in the advisory group for the Danish Environmental protection Agency’s “Undesirable Substances in Sustainable Buildings” and has since published papers on hazardous content in Danish and Nordic building products. Martha holds a MArch from Washington University and a BA from Vassar College.
About Pelle Munch-Petersen, MAA, PhD
Pelle Munch-Petersen, MAA, PhD, is a researcher from the Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation / IBT / Cinark. His research is firmly rooted in his role as teacher and his past in practice and revolves around finding strategies and tools for operationalizing circular economy to achieve a sustainable building culture. As such, it is the problems and potentials in dealing with the sustainable technologies and materials of architecture that is central to the research and how circular economy and ecology challenged the existing methods of architectural design.