Mae-Ling Lokko

Assistant Professor, Yale

Population increase, urban growth, densification and climate change will place unprecedented pressures on energy resources that will impact future qualities of life beyond regional boundaries. In the face of contemporary environmental challenges in hot-humid climates, prevalent high-embodied energy building technologies have proven to be increasingly costly and energy inefficient in dealing with critically high latent loads, often serving as repositories for pathogenic activity and leading to the formation of urban heat islands. Recent developments in the field of material science and industrial research have provided opportunities to alleviate the costly mechanical modulation of environmental loads, through the use of high-performance bio-based material systems. Along the hot-humid tropical belt, the large scale availability of renewable biopolymer resources in the form of coconut agricultural by-products, offer significant opportunities for low-energy, non-toxic processing conditions to yield a range of high performance building products. Mae-ling's research proposes a design framework for the development of local knowledge economies that activate the potential for post-agricultural waste to propel local industrial development of low-carbon products and become global models for driving metrics in building material life cycles. Through an integrated understanding of performance criteria for agricultural by-products, the metrics for the development of 21st century building technologies is expanded beyond quantitative criteria concerned with energy reduction and efficiency towards context-responsive technologies that interact with climatic resources at the building boundary and engage the sociocultural context through context-responsive design.