Teaching
ARCH 732: Embodied Carbon and Architecture
University of Pennsylvania School of Design | Architecture
Stephanie Carlisle, Spring 2020, 2021
The environmental impacts of the built environment are staggering. Buildings are currently responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions, when both operational and embodied carbon are taken into account. Architects have a vital role to play in responding to the current climate emergency, but we can only make substantial progress when we are equipped to evaluate decarbonization strategies and the effects of design decisions.
This course brings together an introduction to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the industry-standard method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a building over its whole life cycle, paired with discussion on broader industry trends and technologies aimed at radically decarbonizing the built environment. In the course, students will receive hands-on experience building comparative LCA models, while also exploring material life cycles, industrial processes, supply chain dynamics and political and economic dimensions of environmental impact data. We will also discuss current innovations in materials manufacturing and policy changes that focus on embodied carbon, which will transform construction practices. The overall goal of the course is to increase carbon literacy and to empower students with a working understanding of climate change, life cycle assessment, and the many strategies by which designers can immediately reduce the carbon footprint of their projects.
LARP 761: Urban Ecology
University of Pennsylvania School of Design | Landscape Architecture
Stephanie Carlisle + Nicholas Pevzner, Fall 2011-present
The Urban Ecology class is the 2nd-year LARP students’ introduction to the core concepts, ecological mechanisms, and vocabulary of contemporary urban ecology. The class aims to introduce and expose students to various methods of studying urban systems, to build students’ facility and comfort with accessing and reading scientific literature, to ground students in some of the fundamental ecological mechanisms that underlie and control ecosystem function in urban environments, and introduce them to contemporary modes of environmental management strategies that aim to steer ecological function towards desired outcomes.
The class covers topics from contemporary ecological theory to applied strategies and techniques. It starts with basic landscape ecology (patterns and the processes that shape those patterns), moves to vegetation community dynamics (stress, disturbance, competition, succession), then the fundamentals of ecosystem ecology, (basic biogeochemical cycling, the Nitrogen Cycle, the Carbon Cycle, and the role of various landscapes, land uses, activities, and strategies in mediating and altering these interlinked biogeochemical processes). Lastly, it integrates some more applied topics, bringing in guest speakers from a variety of disciplines, from applied restoration ecology, long-term ecological research in cities, urban forestry & urban forest research, and remediation.
Field Stations: New Futures for Rural Landscapes
Wright Ingram Institute & Fundación Amazonas | Medellín and Rio Claro, Colombia
Stephanie Carlisle + Nicholas Pevzner, Summer 2019
Field Stations is an immersive educational workshop at ecologically-critical places facing rapid change. The program is based in Bogotá, Medellín, and in the tropical rain forest of the Rio Claro Valley in Colombia. This project brings together scholar and students of environmental planning, design, ecology, forest management, cultural landscape studies, and environmental communication.
The workshop aimed, through intense on-site immersion, to expose participants to an understanding and deepened appreciation of the complex inter-relatedness of natural and cultural phenomena as exhibited by a particular landscape and ecosystem. Field-based, cross-cultural, place-based learning pulls the study of sustainability out of a purely academic context and engages in living the experience of communities and the unique issues and conditions of surrounding ecosystems, bio-regions and watersheds. The program encouraged understanding of the natural world through experimentation, data collection, drawing, photography, digital visualization, reviewing of historical records and exchanges with the community.
The month-long, field-based program brought together a diverse group of participants form design, planning, anthropology, sociology, media, environmental science and engineering. The curriculum used a socio-ecological framework to examine layered histories of urban and rural landscapes of Antioquia. The program was funded by the Wright Ingram Foundation and benefited greatly from the generous support of the Fundación Amazonas and an incredible community of Colombian researchers, scholars and artists.
Shaping Impact: Landscapes of Extraction in the great Smokey Mountains | Applied Urban Ecology Workshops
University of Knoxville College of Architecture and Design
Stephanie Carlisle, with Billie Faircloth and Scottie McDaniel, Spring 2019
This interdisciplinary studio, led by Billie Faircloth and Scottie McDaniel, brought together students from Architecture and Landscape to explore the ways in which buildings can support an understanding of landscape and culture, and also the ways in which the act of construction directly causes environmental damage and disturbance. Students were asked to work on two paired landscapes: one a site for the construction of a new Center for Ecological Interpretation and Land Use History on the southern edge of Great Smokey Mountain National Park, the other a site of extraction just across the Calderwood Lake, located with Cherokee National Forest from with all the raw materials for their proposed project must be extracted or harvested.
These paired sites were located in Calderwood, a long-abandoned worker’s camp originally founded to support construction of the Calderwood Dam by the Alcoa Company, and later, the TVA. The site was owned in turn by native communities, timber wildcatters, the Alcoa Corporation, the TVA, and two departments of the federal government – the National Parks Service (NPS) and the US Forest Service – all with diverse notions of how the land ought to be managed and to whom it was in service.
Over the course of the studio, I led a series of urban ecology workshops that introduced students to fundamental concepts in landscape ecology, to basic techniques of site analysis, silviculture and forestry. Within the ecology workshops, students were also exposed to techniques for rapidly working through land management scenarios and diagraming stress, disturbance and landscape transformation. Students also explored the fundamentals of life cycle analysis (LCA) and life cycle thinking as a means of exploring environmental impacts of building materials, manufacturing processes, and the connection between building construction and landscapes of extraction that often go unseen and unconsidered.
These ecology workshops urged students to grapple with the potential for positive transformation, but also the reality of environmental disturbance and harm caused by building construction and the complex legacies of their proposed projects.
Crafting Impact: Reimagining Architecture by Reimagining Construction | Applied Urban Ecology Workshops
Georgia Institute of Technology
Stephanie Carlisle, with studio critics: Billie Faircloth, Jennifer Pindyck, Sonit Bafna, Mark Cottle, and George Johnston. Spring 2018
This core studio investigated the fundamental relationships between sites of extraction, manufacturing, and construction. The studio asked students to explore the interface between ecology and architecture by looking deeply at land use transformation, site history, and cultural meaning embedded in building materials. Students were asked to design a Center for Land Use History in Amiacalola State Park in Northern Georgia, just miles from the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. All building materials for the center had to be extracted from a second site – a 40-acre parcel owned by the US Forest Service, located in the Chattahoochee National Forest. The students used life cycle analysis (LCA) and environmental management plans as frameworks for thinking about long-term ecological impacts of material extraction and the full life cycle of building materials.
Over the course of the studio, I led a series of urban ecology workshops that introduced students to fundamental concepts in landscape ecology and to basic techniques of site analysis, silviculture and forestry. Within the ecology workshops, students were also exposed to techniques for rapidly working through land management scenarios and diagraming stress, disturbance and landscape transformation. I also worked with the students to develop site histories that brought together an understanding of how ecological communities, technology and politics, and culture shaped these dynamic landscapes and the various entities that have claimed ownership of this forest over time: Native American tribes, white settlers, escaped slaves, civil war soldiers, private landowners, industry, and the federal government.