Vincent Martinez

Decarbonizing the Built Environment

Vincent Martinez, President and COO of Architecture 2030, will deliver a lecture organized by Associate Professor David Benjamin as part of his Spring 2023 seminar Footprint: Carbon and Design.

This event is open to Columbia GSAPP students.

Architecture 2030 is recognized as the trusted source for insight, information, and actions on climate change and the built environment. Based on their expertise and unique perspective, they set carbon goals and targets, offer guidance, develop tools and roadmaps, and influence and inspire the professional community and governments worldwide to act. This extraordinary capacity allows Architecture 2030 to set the pace for the built environment sector’s decarbonization.

A paradigm shift in built environment design and material selection can accelerate manufacturing industries to significantly reduce the embodied carbon of their products. Policies that reduce the embodied carbon of building and infrastructure construction in neighborhoods, cities, and regions have the potential to reshape patterns of consumption and waste. Through practice and policy, the design, planning, and building community must rapidly transform urban development and the built environment from the major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions to a central part of the solution to the climate crisis.