Member Impact — Lloyd Rubidge

What are you and your organization doing to help reduce embodied carbon emissions?

Lloyd Rubidge
Director of Architecture, Henriquez Partners Architects

Around 2010 I designed my first rated building in South Africa under the Green Star rating system. The project was hugely ambitious and put in great effort to be sustainable in every way possible. It was one of the first buildings in the country to achieve the top Six Star rating (the equivalent of Leed Platinum), and ultimately very successful, but even so this project mostly ignored embodied carbon. At that time, embodied carbon was not seen as particularly important and was relatively ignored by the rating tools. Building codes were rapidly increasing requirements for energy savings, but there was no discussion of incorporating embodied carbon.

As I researched the topic further, I realized how little information was available, and how much regional variation there was. As a practitioner rather than an academic, I had limited access to information and no way of doing primary research. The deeper I looked the more complicated it seemed. I was relieved and grateful when I found the Carbon Leadership Forum. It was a great resource for information and a fantastic way to meet people with similar interests all over the world, especially when I started the process of setting up a CLF regional hub for South Africa.

In 2021 I moved to Canada and am grateful to be able to continue my work as Director of Architecture at Henriquez Partners Architects. Our sustainability committee plays an important role in the studio, sharing information, providing opportunities for learning, supporting projects and learning from them. Although our projects include Leed and Passive House, embodied carbon has recently been a focus for us, especially through our Tall Wood Net Zero Carbon Prototype Project, which I have been fortunate to have worked on, along with other mass timber projects.

These projects have a strong focus on embodied carbon. Whilst we provide a rational and balanced solution suitable for each project and client, embodied carbon savings will always remain an important consideration. I have also been very impressed with the effort that the City of Vancouver has put into making the city the greenest in the world, and in instituting some of the first embodied carbon legislation in North America. I am very proud to be making my contributions here.