University of Oregon Portland: Healthy Buildings for Everyone

Eric Corey Freed, Sustainability Disruptor and Consultant, will be presenting Healthy Buildings for Everyone: Tapping into Biology to Grow the Next Generation of Buildings at University of Oregon – Portland, White Stag Building on Wednesday, January 30th at 5:30 PM. The session is free and open to the public, registration is not required. 

Presentation Overview:

The way buildings are built today has remained relatively unchanged for nearly two hundred years. The $9 trillion a year global construction industry is responsible for nearly 60% of climate change emissions, a third of landfill waste and a shocking array of negative health effects.

Even the most advanced construction projects in the world continue to use ancient techniques of modular assembly, relying on painstaking human effort to construct dead & ancient materials of wood, steel and concrete. Construction is driven by standards and codes to ensure economy and safety, but in the process fail to protect people from larger risks.

In 2016, the XPRIZE Foundation set out to establish a “moonshot” for construction by creating the XPRIZE for Healthy Buildings. In this session, learn how one team approached this unique opportunity to develop a way to (literally) grow buildings by fusing synthetic biology, genomics, parametric modeling, and 3D printing to create a paradigm shift that could switch us from a PETROchemical world, to a BIOchemical one.