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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces architectural and engineering experiments with low- or carbon-storing materials, showing how they reflect tensions between technocratic and vernacular traditions of imagining ecological futures in an era of capitalist degradation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sketches the landscape of “green building” in North America (and beyond), in particular the sometimes-contradictory imaginaries that have emerged around the use of low carbon materials. As solar power and high-performance design standards like the “passivhaus” create the possibility of buildings with net zero "operational energy," the new frontier is in reducing “embodied carbon”—the "upfront" emissions generated by extracting, processing and transporting the materials themselves. Cementitious alternatives like fly ash create possibilities for a less energy intensive concrete, while biogenic materials like wood, algae, and hemp may even act as temporary but crucial stopgap carbon sinks. Industry stakeholders are developing sophisticated auditing tools and standards to calculate the net embodied carbon of buildings, while companies, some funded by venture capital and even the US Military, are developing modular construction systems and other commercial applications. These high-tech interventions contrast with the equally swelling “natural building” movement, which involves vernacular construction using straw bale, cob, adobe, and that foregrounds sensory affects and overall experience of dwelling as an experiment in counter-culture. Such divides between technocratic and vernacular modes of low carbon building recapitulate deeper tensions in the history of ecological design, and resonate with contemporary debates surrounding eco-modernism and small-scale localism. Questions of race, degrowth, and environmental justice cross-cut this dialectic.