Grid Philly - March 2009 - (Page 16) Style and Substance philly U students learn the art and science of sustainable design by judy weightman ometimes a random conversation with the person standing next to you in line leads to a new chapter in your life. That’s what happened to Rob Fleming and Chris Pastore, faculty members at Philadelphia University. “We were waiting to get our ID cards and started talking,” Pastore recalls. “It was immediately clear that we had to work together.” That work takes place at the intersection of also a disadvantage when it comes to using it two different but complementary fields: Flem- as a structural building material. To build with ing is an architect with an interest in sustain- it, therefore, you need both something to make able design and Pastore is a materials scientist the chitosan wear- and weather-resistant for who works with low-density composites and as long as several decades, and something that other green materials. Together, they started will counteract the hardening agent and set off the Engineering and Design Institute (EDI) of triggered degradation of the material when its Philadelphia University in 2000. useful life is over. Further complicating things The institute’s goal is to help architects and is the fact that these agents, like the chitosan, engineers create structures with more thought should be from renewable resources. EDI is to the environmental impact of the building in currently two years into a three-year test of a terms of its placement on the site, the materials hardener made with oxalic acid (from rhubarb) used to build it and energy consumption over and a degradation trigger made with lysozyme the life of the building. They do this in two (from egg whites). main areas: design and materials. They participate in the integrated design process known as charette (French for “little cart,” evoking the idea of people “tossing in” their contributions to the process). Charette is a form of brainstorming, a place where everyone with a stake in a building work together to sketch out solutions that they can all endorse. That includes not only the client, architect, engineer and builder, but also representatives of everyone who will be using the building, from the CEO down to the janitor, as well as the neighbors who will be affected by it. Fleming and Pastore serve as green advocates to ensure that issues like energy use are taken into account from the very earliest stages of the design process. The other main task at EDI is testing new building materials, helping small companies by determining and quantifying the performance of materials made from renewable resources. For example, EDI is currently involved in testing the properties of chitosan, a polymer made from an extract of ↗ EDI founders and chitin, the hard substance in the co-hosts of “Ecoman shells of crustaceans. The advanand the Skeptic,” tage of chitosan is that it’s biodechris Pastore (left) and rob Fleming. gradable—which is, of course, S The EDI emerged from the specific collaboration between Fleming and Pastore, but its roots are deep in long-established programs in architecture, engineering and materials science at Philadelphia University. The synthesis is coming to further fruition in a new program, the university’s M.S. in Sustainable Design. Begun in Fall 2007, the program “prepares students for leadership roles as we move from an industrial to an ecological model,” according to Fleming. The program, which emphasizes interdisciplinary cooperation, attracts young professionals from a variety of disciplines, including architecture and design, engineering, construction and business. They tackle class projects in teams that are mixed up from one project to the next, so “they learn to work cooperatively and to respect what other disciplines can contribute,” Fleming says. The process can be seen in Fall 2008’s Green Materials course, which focused on chairs. Students started by literally taking apart a typical office chair and quantifying the materials, They learn to work cooperatively and to respect what other disciplines can contribute. 16 g r i d p h i l ly. c o m march 2009 http://www.gridphilly.com
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