Theme: Countdown - Building reuse is climate action

This TEDx is linked to the TED Countdown events and looks at how continuing to use and re-using our existing buildings is a solution to improving sustainability of the construction industry.

Zoom Webinar
346 Queen St
Fredericton, New Brunswick, E3B 1B2
Canada

Jennifer O'Connor

President of Athena Sustainable Materials Institute

Jennifer O’Connor is the President of the Athena Sustainable materials Institute. She has been working in construction-sector sustainability since 1983, with diverse multidisciplinary roles in research, design, analysis, and education in Canada and the U.S. Her work experience has an emphasis on energy efficiency, sustainable design, and overall building performance, and her background in both architecture and HVAC engineering provides a strong technical foundation in many building systems. She has been President of the Athena Institute since 2011.

Kevin Bates

Developer

Kevin graduated from Stanford University and has 36 years of experience in commercial real estate, and has owned SHARP Development for the past 25 years. He handles all aspects of the development process and has completed more than 50 buildings totaling over 2.5 million square feet of space. Over the past 6 years Kevin has concentrated on retrofitting older buildings to be carbon neutral, have a net zero energy bill as well as a strong emphasis on the health and wellness of the interior environment. The driver for Kevin is to demonstrate that this way of repurposing existing building stock can be done in a manner that is measurably more profitable for the ownership than the less expensive way of building to meet minimum code. He has successfully completed six buildings of this nature in Silicon Valley. Kevin’s net zero energy buildings have won multiple awards, including the 2017 ASHRAE Award for “The Most Innovative Sustainable Building of the Year in the United States”.

Larissa Ide

Engineer

Larissa aspires to design building systems in order to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants associated with buildings, and even start to improve the surrounding environment. She currently analyses existing and heritage buildings through energy and hydrothermal modelling to identify the most appropriate retrofits to reduce energy consumption, while also respecting the value in components of a building. She is passionate about conservation and adaptive reuse to allow a heritage building to optimally fulfill its purpose in the current time. She won the IBPSA Rome 2019 energy modelling competition with a team of students and the APT student scholarship award during her M.A.Sc. thanks to her thesis research and related work on heritage conservation and sustainability.

Mark Thompson Brandt

Conservation Architect

With over 35 years’ experience, Mark is a former Director of the Association for Preservation Technology International (APT) and former Co-Chair of APT Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation (TCSP). Brandt is a member of the International Steering Committees for EcoDistricts and of the Climate Heritage Network (ICOMOS). He is founding Co-Chair of the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for Existing & Historic Buildings (ZNCC). Brandt is also a former Director of Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and of Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC). MTBA specializes in natural and cultural conservation for architecture and urban design. Parliament Hill projects include $70M East Block Rehabilitation and $100M Sir John A. Macdonald Building, which received 7 National/International awards and 5-Green Globes rating. Brandt is co-author of the national reference “Building Resilience: Practical Guidelines for the Sustainable Rehabilitation of Buildings in Canada”.