Episode 6 on August 21, 2020

Young People Get Sustainable Design Better Than You Do

In case you missed it, the Youth Environmental Movement is really a thing. From marches and UN speeches, to community projects and meetup groups: young people are concerned, motivated, and passionate about addressing climate change NOW. We need to empower young people so they can carry sustainable design into the future for everyone. Please join our guests Drew Lavine and Erin Loch as they discuss their Project Based Learning approach for high school students who worked to meet the Living Building Challenge (LBC). Their work is inspiring our youth, and also the sustainable design professionals who volunteered to help.

Episode 5 on July 24, 2020

Engineered Timber Housing: 
Modernizing the Construction Industry

While construction sector growth is often good, efficiency is not. Unlike many other large sector industries such as agriculture, automotive, or electronics, productivity gains in construction have been almost flat for more than 50 years. In this HolzChat, we talk with Peter Rose and Florian Meier about engineered timber construction, modularization, and mass timber as strategies for simultaneously modernizing the how and where of housing construction, along with why mass timber construction can be a large win for the environment.

Episode 4 on July 10, 2020

Biophilic Design
Well-Being through Architecture by Nature

Biophilic Design integrates ecology, biology, neuroscience, instinct, sense of place and space, appreciation for natural beauty, and social and architectural patterns into a framework for improving human health and the natural environment when and where humans build. Watch our chat with guest Helena van Vliet as she educates us about the ways humans respond to natural patterns, and how this can help us build healthier spaces for living, working, and learning.

Episode 3 on June 26, 2020

Drawdown Buildings: Converting Villains into Heroes Carbon Captains tell us how

In this HolzChat, we spoke with guests Chris Magwood and Jacob Deva Racusin from Builders for Climate Action about embodied carbon and how we can turn our new buildings and existing renovations into carbon sinks by making better materials choices. Our guests have extensively studied embodied carbon calculation and carbon-storage materials, but they have also built real-world projects using these ideas. 

Episode 2 on June 4, 2020

Future Wooden Building Systems

During our first episode of HolzChat, we talked about some engineered timber products and systems offering solutions for the abundant but unused small diameter timber supply in the US. In this HolzChat we dive into the details of these versatile and cost effective precision wood products. We use a case study to explore the use of CLT and related technologies.

Episode 1 on May 14, 2020

Demystifying Sustainable Forestry in North America

Our first HolzChat webcast with Pat Clark and Paul McKenzie was a blast and we are super grateful to everyone who joined the live Q&A session that followed the interview.  The discussion generated some great questions that we are already digging into and have even generated another idea for an episode!