Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism for the Gulf Region

Catalog description

Ensuring a sustainable built environment in Qatar is critical to sustainable Gulf Region and indeed a sustainable world. The quality of our architecture and urban design can significantly address the challenges of heat, water, energy, mobility, material resources, waste, and health. This course is intended for non-architects to explore the potential of sustainable design for desert climates. Six weeks of explorations and presentations will introduce each student to: Climate analysis for Gulf Region countries and their 'twins' around the world; Green standards for desert climates with their embedded metrics (eg UNSDG, LEED, GreenStar, WELL); and Precedent as a precursor to innovation - a search for great sustainable examples across building types and land use. In-class and homework assignments will create a series of collaborative student slide shows each week. As possible, invited speakers and site visits will be pursued. The final week will be dedicated to a class perspective on the importance of the built environment for carbon and climate change, and student recommendations for building and infrastructure goals for a more sustainable Gulf region. CMU-Q graduates should be dedicated to a more sustainable built environment and understand the design changes needed for sustainability, the benefits to quality of life and to ecological sustainability. Every discipline is a catalyst and a stakeholder in our future - as client, as design/engineer, as consumer, as financier, as scientist.