The people who will design, plan and construct the future of Boston are brainstorming ideas that will eventually shape the look of the city.
They came to Tufts Monday to begin ArchFest 2005, a six day conference that includes tours and seminars with residents, workers, public officials, designers and builders at venues around the city including the Boston Public Library and the North End.
The program's keynote speech was given by architect Ed Mazria in the ASEAN Auditorium in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Mazria spoke about the need for environmentally friendly architecture as a way to address global warming. His speech was hosted by the Tufts Climate Initiative.
The lecture was titled "Meeting Humanity's Global Challenge." Mazria began by presenting an overview of the problems facing the global climate.
"We burn globally about 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually," he said. Two billion tons are absorbed by vegetation and eight billion are absorbed the oceans, leaving ten billion tons in the atmosphere. "It's impossible to plant our way out of this," he said.
If the global temperature increases by two degrees Celsius by 2050, both polar bears and salmon will be extinct and the number of forest fires and the strength of hurricanes will increase, Mazria said.
Mazria is the principal architect at Mazria Odems Dzurec, Inc., the firm he founded in 1978 in Santa Fe, N.M.
About 40 people attended the lecture, the only event of the week at a university.
He said a change in how the role of architecture is conceived can help lead efforts to combat global warning.
Buildings account for 48 percent of U.S. energy consumption, compared to 25 percent consumed in the industrial sector and 27 percent from transportation. They are responsible for 76 percent of U.S. electricity consumption.
"The building sector is going to drive global warming," he said.
Mazria said architects should consider what materials and how much energy their plans require. "There is no time to have this thing evolve," he said. "We need an architectural revolution."
He proposed an agenda that includes new building and major renovation projects. Under the plan, by the year 2025, three quarters of all buildings will be new.
His new buildings would meet a "fossil fuel energy-consumption performance standard" of one-half the regional average for that building type.
Every five years, the standard should increase by ten percent, he said, so that in 2010, new buildings should use 40 percent of current energy levels. By 2015, this should be down to 30 percent of current levels, and by 2030, new buildings should be carbon neutral.
In order to accomplish this long-term goal, Mazria suggested changes to architecture educations. He said half of American architecture schools do not address environmental issues, and most of the ones that do have only one expert.
"We need in undergraduate programs a full year devoted to the relationship between environment and design," he said. "We need to integrate sustainability in all core classes."
Current computer programs used to monitor environmental effects of design are highly sophisticated and difficult to use. Mazria said there needs to be new software to generate thermo-models, which show a building's energy consumption.
The field of architecture, Mazria said, is inherently focused on problem-solving, and architects should be presented with the global warming challenge like any other architectural hurdle. "You have to give them this problem to solve," he said. "Otherwise, they won't deal with it as an issue."
Focusing on other issues like automobile transmissions and clean coal technology will not solve the problem of global warming. "There's just not enough oil and gas left to fuel global warming," Mazria said. "The economics of oil are going to shift the automobile industry."
Mazria criticized the George W. Bush Administration for attempting to discredit the scientific proof of global warming. "Whenever the president speaks, it goes all over," he said. "When the scientists speak, it gets buried in the back pages."
