Over the past few years, a new type of building has cropped up around the world: the “climate center.” These education spaces range in use from academic centers to nonprofit research institutions and public interpretive exhibition spaces, but they share a common mission: to help save the planet. While sustainable design certainly isn’t novel, the building that so actively seeks to educate its users and catalyze a climate-focused culture shift is.
There’s a complex interplay happening within the buildings, which not only further climate science but also educate the public about the effects of climate change—and future architectural clients about sustainable design. But in some ways, these climate centers can start to feel like a paradox. While improving energy efficiency has, for a long time, been the primary means of reducing the carbon footprint of buildings and their construction, less attention has been paid to embodied carbon. Also known as embodied greenhouse gas emissions, it’s a measure of how much carbon is emitted from building a building—from the extraction of raw materials to the manufacturing and transportation of building products.
Last September, the United Nations and Yale copublished a report outlining strategies to reduce embodied carbon in buildings. The report recommended avoiding “unnecessary” production and extraction, and shifting to regenerative materials. These strategies are present in many climate centers, but these impact-oriented buildings are meant to be seductive. As these centers continue to arrive on university campuses and make new “climate tourism” destinations all on their own, we must ask: Are these centers beacons of public education or Trojan horses waiting in the wings?
Climate’s Ground Zero: The Arctic Circle
One of the most visually arresting among these new centers is the Klimatorium, located in the coastal Danish city of Lemvig and completed in 2021. Designed by 3XN, it features a dramatic jet-black, slatted-timber exterior with a concave seating area (the shape references fishing boat hulls) integrated into the facade. Inside, there are offices, conference rooms, a cafe, and a public exhibition hall. The building is intended to be a “meeting point that brings together civil society, authorities, businesses, and educational institutions to discuss lifestyle, prevention, and adaptation to the climate challenges we face,” according to the center’s “about” page. But it’s also powerful marketing intended to “help the Danish business community increase their exports by marketing and showcasing Danish solutions and increasing climateism.”
In western Greenland, the Icefjord Centre, which opened in 2021, is both a research and visitors center focused on the ways climate change is affecting the nearby Sermeq Kujalleq glacier. The building snakes across a rocky outcrop, and the architect behind the 16,000-square-foot project, Dorte Mandrup, has described its shape as being inspired by “a snowy owl’s flight through the landscape.” From the rooftop promenade, you have a front-row seat to Greenland’s receding ice sheet. Climate change becomes a site-specific spectacle. The permanent exhibition inside features core samples of ice—some dating from 124,000 BC, according to the website—held in minimalist freezer vitrines. The territory plans to build five more of these centers to boost tourism and address unemployment in the region. Like the Klimatorium, it is billed as a meeting ground to discuss climate change. It expects to receive 25,000 visitors each year.
Closer to home is the Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center on Long Island, New York: a place for environmentally focused exhibitions where “visitors learn from the building itself” on topics like energy efficiency and the coastal ecosystem. Opened in 2021, the project was a collaboration between the New York State parks department, which needed to replace a crumbling 1960s bathroom that was at risk of flooding, and the Long Island Power Authority, which planned to build an energy-focused interpretive center nearby. Instead of two new buildings, the agencies teamed up on a single project.
Designed by nARCHITECTS, the cedar-clad building is long, narrow, and surrounded by deep shade canopies on slender posts. It’s almost like a Miesian box meets a midcentury beach house. Thanks to its orientation, clerestory windows reduce the need for artificial light, and rooftop solar panels and a geothermal heat pump mean it’s net-zero. While most of the technical systems are hidden, the mechanical room is treated like an exhibit so that visitors can learn how the building saves energy. Some of the more interesting sustainability work, however, is invisible. The original foundation was reused (the new building is bigger, though) and 12 acres of parking was removed: Designers used the asphalt rubble to elevate the building 7 feet and create topography on the site, protecting it from flooding.
Overall, it’s a “primitive and fluid space,” said Eric Bunge, principal at nARCHITECTS. He explained that a limited budget meant “less products, less specifications, less stuff.” Instead, “we tried to make things, which is also a question of labor and maintaining craft,” he added. “Social resiliency is always tied to environmental resiliency.”
Institutional Knowledge: Higher Ed and the Climate Question
When you think of education and pedagogy, the first place that comes to mind may not be private exhibition spaces or viewing decks, but the hallowed halls of a university. Following this thread, Mehrdad Yazdani, an architect at CannonDesign, has been working on projects that fall into a category of building the firm calls “impact architecture,” or buildings constructed for the purpose of social good. One of them is the Resnick Sustainability Center on CalTech’s Pasadena campus, which focuses on climate science, among other fields related to sustainability.
The 80,000-square-foot building, which opened earlier this year, is LEED-Platinum and designed “to communicate and put science on display,” Yazdani said. Beyond flaunting its green-building tech (like a mass timber structure and aluminum shade fins that are tuned to let light in while protecting against heat), the building is flexible enough to accommodate whatever multidisciplinary research needs emerge. It’s the opposite of single-use academic buildings— like dedicated buildings for a chemistry, biology, or physics department—that were the norm decades ago. “Most discoveries are now made by talent coming together and collaborating,” Yazdani said. “The building should enable easy collaboration, collision, and interaction.”
To that end, the Resnick Center is flexible enough that CalTech can easily modify the interior to suit its needs. Yazdani said that “future-proofing is an integral element of our design,” and by designing buildings that foster a sense of togetherness while being able to evolve, “we can help the universities build fewer but better buildings.”
Yazdani is designing a building with a similar agenda at UC Davis: the Resnick Center for Agricultural Innovation, which is focused on researching how the farming industry can adapt in a rapidly changing climate. (Both the UC Davis and CalTech buildings are named after the Resnick family, owners of the largest agricultural empire in the U.S.)
Bridging Practice and Pedagogy
Off-campus, the climate question and urgent calls for decarbonization feel more existential and therefore perhaps deserve the most attention. But unlike the climate centers recently erected in Scandinavia, the U.S. model is a private one, reliant on huge amounts of funding—and architectural fees.
Pursuing a green agenda, Gensler completed a new headquarters for Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) in 2017, a privately owned nonprofit that “applies science to drive energy, air, water, and resilience solutions for a sustainable and equitable future,” according to its website. The building is net-positive because of its ultratight envelope, solar and geothermal power systems, and orientation. These features also help the building come back online quickly after storms.
Education was also baked into the design. There are a number of sensors that track energy use and generation, which helps teach HARC how best to operate the building. A real-time dashboard of that data is publicly available online, too, and has become a favorite bookmark of people who work in the building. Some of HARC’s teachings, however, are oriented toward future buildings.
HARC was willing to take risks with its design, which has helped Gensler convince other clients to get outside of their comfort zone in the name of sustainability. For example, not supersizing the mechanical systems for the hottest and coldest days of the year and suggesting behavioral changes instead, like simply allowing employees to wear sleeveless shirts and encouraging them to bring sweaters. “A lot of people want to be first to be second,” said Katie Mesia, Gensler’s sustainability director for projects in the Southeast and a firmwide design resilience leader. This speaks to how projects like these can actually educate current and future clients. “Being able to tour a client through a site that has done the things they’re not sure are possible breeds so much creativity and allows us to push things further.”
Defining “Climatewashing”
Despite all the benefits these buildings can bring—it’s hard to argue with something that can curb unemployment, teach the public about climate change, or mainstream energy efficiency—there’s something about them that rouses a nagging feeling of skepticism, especially when the bigger picture comes into focus. As is often the case in architecture, the money and sponsorship for the projects come from murky and powerful sources.
To wit: HARC’s founder, George P. Mitchell, who died in 2013, made his fortune from fracking, and the Resnicks have come under fire for consuming much of California’s water supply. As a 2016 Mother Jones article pointed out, their businesses use more water than every household in Los Angeles combined. Is it all just greenwashing?
New architecture, and the values it signals, is powerful marketing for corporations that want to be seen as virtuous, universities competing for bloated admissions, and cities eager to be on the global stage. When billionaires build flashy climate centers, it feels eerily reminiscent of delegates flying to climate change conferences on private jets.
Some of these issues come to a head at the New York Climate Exchange (NYCE), a 400,000-square-foot campus proposed for Governors Island. It has been at the center of a debate about how much development should be allowed on the 172-acre island just 800 yards south of Manhattan. The $700 million project—led by Stony Brook University and a 48-member consortium that includes other academic institutions, like Pratt Institute and Georgia Tech; private companies, like IBM, Boston Consulting Group, and Moody’s; and local organizations—required portions of the island to be rezoned to accommodate 230,000 square feet of new buildings, which the architects, SOM, are designing to meet Living Building Challenge requirements. The adaptive reuse of 170,000 square feet of existing structures on the island, which desperately need rehabilitation, is also part of the project.
The city plays up how the NYCE will create jobs, generate economic impact, and “cement our city as a global leader in developing solutions for climate change”—a common refrain in the language around these centers and a reminder that they are part of a lucrative economy around the export of best practices. Meanwhile, a local group called the Metro Area Governors Island Coalition described the project as a Trojan horse for the real estate industry and “necessary to sell the high-rise, high-density, largely commercial rezoning to the public.”
The scale of publicity and desire for public engagement in these buildings is also telling. Part of the NYCE’s mission is to make more visible the work its partner organizations are conducting and have the campus integrated with Governors Island as a whole.
“Part of our public-facing and interdisciplinary orientation is in the sense that the community is part of our activity and in really wanting to build climate literacy more broadly,” said Andel Koester, director of community initiatives at the NYCE. While the design of the NYCE is still in progress, plans for an exhibition space, publicly visible research labs, and large convening spaces are part of the equation. Koester added that “the research labs are not going to replace a research lab at Stony Brook or Duke or Georgia Tech; they’re meant to generate some sort of activity that can only happen here by virtue of being on Governors Island and by virtue of being connected to other spaces. Exactly how that happens is something we’re still developing, but those are some of the ways that our values and kind of vision for the organization play into the campus.”
With 96 million square feet of vacant commercial space languishing in Manhattan and such an open-ended outcome, the environmental cost of that development becomes all the more visible and perhaps one of the more telling lessons these spaces hold.
Diana Budds is a design journalist based in Brooklyn.
