Co-Director
Institute for Energy Solutions, Arizona Institute for Resilience
Associate Professor of Architecture & Sustainable Built Environments
College of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning
Associate Professor of Marketing
Eller College of Management
Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering
College of Engineering
The University of Arizona
Joint Appointee
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (2021-2023)
I am engaged in a range of projects that expand the built environment's potential to address climate change.
I am developing a range of climate-responsive, equity-centered courses and curricula. These projects include:
The Climate-Positive Design & Details Project: making principles of high-performance building more accessible to undergraduate students.
Policy Design: providing tools for understanding policy and advancing practical action in the context of studio-based architecture education.
Building Climate Heroes: introducing students early to the role of the built environment in climate change and empower them to take action.
Other projects provide the framework for systems-level changes:
The SunBlock Distributed District Energy System: an innovative, scalable way for neighborhoods to share carbon-neutral thermal energy.
The Climate-Positive Building Lab: providing students, faculty, and community members the tools to design and build better buildings.
The Climate-Positive Design & Details Project
I'm working with co-instructor Trevor Cordivari and a team of talented University of Arizona students to pilot a student-centered curriculum for learning high-performance building principles and for preparing for the Phius CPHC® exam.
Policy Design
During the last two years of the five-year undergraduate professional degree, architecture students at the University of Arizona join a research-oriented curriculum stream. Policy design tackles the intersection between policy and design with goal of promoting change to create a more socially and environmentally just landscape.
Policy design faculty: Bill Mackey, Courtney CrossonPolicy design partners: Kristina Currans (Planning program ), Kenneth Kokroko (Landscape), Koren Manning (City of Tucson)
Policy Design Elective: Designing Change
This course will use grounded, specific examples of designers and design work addressing necessary environmental and social change in the production of the built environment, with a series of remote guest lectures featuring architects who have engaged with policy change. Students will examine, evaluate, and formulate regulatory strategies to advance environmentally and socially just policy. Broader theories on the design of codes and regulation will be interrogated. The core text will be Steven Moore and Barbara Wilson’s book Questioning Architectural Judgment: The Problem of Codes in the United States, which uses a body of sociotechnical theory broadly aligned with Bruno Latour’s, along with case studies of an affordable housing development in Austin, Texas, to make the case for architects to address codes as an object of design. Case study investigation and role-playing by students will emphasize the comparison of different perspectives as a mode to distill general principles. Products for the class include work to be presented in a publication or exhibition.
Policy Design Elective: Solar Decathlon Design Challenge
The Solar Decathlon Studio will be tailored to align with the objectives of the Policy Design P3 track. Students will build on the work of past Solar Decathlon entries to develop designs for housing, school, or commercial buildings that support larger objectives, in particular the City of Tucson goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2030. The theoretical framework that underpins the course stresses the importance of looking at targets and goals in a broader framework, for example by evaluating different building materials and design approaches in the context of larger shifts in attention: from operational to embodied carbon, from carbon emissions to lifetime global warming potential, and from efficiency and conservation to equity. Past Solar Decathlon studios have involved aspects of this approach; for example, the student project that won second place in the 2021 competition’s Urban Single Family Division was informed by the discussions then underway to change the policy for Additional Dwelling Units in the City of Tucson. Students will produce entries for the competition that include schematic designs of specific building types, cost and carbon accounting, and analysis of the broader social context, including specific policies, that innovative architecture can reflect and inform.