New Ideas CityHello Museum

Embodied Energy Pilot Project

Embodied energy—defined as the sum of all energy required to produce, transport, assemble, and dispose of any product or building element—is an important feature of architecture, but it is currently not well documented or easy to act upon. It is a layer of The Invisible City.

The Embodied Energy Pilot Project—led by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope®, and operating out of the GSAPP Incubator at NEW INC—aims to uncover key questions, issues, and opportunities for architectural design in the context of embodied energy.

This exhibition for IDEAS CITY will feature two large drawings for the glass facade of the New Museum: a zoomed-out embodied energy map of New York City buildings, and a zoomed-in embodied energy view of the intersection of the Bowery and Houston Street.

Project Team: David Benjamin (Director), Carlo Bailey, Bingyu Guan, Nishant Jacob, Sharon Leung, Nabila Morales-Perez, Jeffrey Montes, Catherine Qi, Alexander Rosenthal, Lorenzo Villaggi, Xiaoyu Wang, Thomas Wegener, Ronald Yeung