Environmental Augmentation

Design professionals are seeking to embrace a holistic approach for sus­tainability innovation, whereby practices and technologies are utilized not only to minimize adverse environmental and social impacts but also to regenerate urban ecologies. This is inevitably vital to mitigate the ­consequential risks involving rapid population growth, urbanization, economic uncertainty, carbon emissions and energy use, resource and ecosystem challenges, and anthropomorphic climate change.

This lecture highlighted research and practice methods toward achieving high performance urban systems. It demonstrated preeminent environmental design, building science and technology that strategize thinking to achieve low-impact responsive built environments. Such framework is relevant to master planning, building structures, systems analyses and detail assemblies. The content addressed environmental augmentation through advancing design process, concept generation, performance optimization, and coherent integrated typologies.

Some of the aforementioned topics have been available through scientific publications and others assumed the insider perspective reflecting upon progressive international landmark projects. The emphasis promotes the relationship between integral systems and their energy use to posit effec­tive plans for design typologies, emergent building methods and materials performance and human health, comfort and sensorial thresholds.