Imagine a life without cars, cell phones or laptops. Olin and Uris Libraries closing as soon as the sun sets, while rough drafts for freshman writing seminars fill up the trash cans with their paper, ink and lead. While such a disaster will clearly not happen tomorrow, unsustainable rates of production and waste have professionals from agriculture to architecture concerned.

Asst. Prof. Kevin Pratt, architecture, teaches a class on thermal and environmental systems. He is currently involved in two research projects — Vibro Wind Power and Sustain — both of which are focused on improving the energy efficiency of buildings.

Vibro Wind Power is a technology, studied in conjunction with several mechanical and aerospace engineering professors, that aims to harvest energy from the wind as it flows around commercial and residential buildings.

“The project uses vibration rather than rotational motion to harvest energy from the wind. Practically this means that we have different little [particles] that oscillate [to produce] kinetic energy, [which] then is turned into electricity using piezo-electric materials,” Pratt explained. These materials generate an electric potential in response to the applied mechanical stress.

Vibro Wind Power targets the buildings in urban settings, where windmills fail to generate energy due to low winds. Although the power densities are low, the team believes said the technology will be economically competitive because of its relatively low cost.

Pratt’s other project, known as Sustain, is software that rapidly analyzes building energy usage.

“We are trying to enable architects to get an analysis of building energy use at the early stages of the design process. Usually,” he said, “analysis happens late in the process after it’s too late to really make significant changes”. Pratt believes the software’s unprecedented speed will encourage architects to consider energy use during the design phase.

“I personally think that we will have a hard time designing really sustainable buildings without these kinds of tools,” Pratt said.

Pratt is now a researcher, professor, director and a contributing writer for Artforum, among various other design and general interest publications. But Pratt got his start like any other architect.

In fact, he worked for more than a decade as a project architect for many consulting firms after college, but during the late 90s, he became more interested in the issue of sustainability and the science of architecture.

When he sought to incorporate sustainability into the field of architecture, however, he found it very difficult given the traditional architecture training in the United States. As a result, he decided to go to graduate school in England to receive a Master’s in the Environment and Energy Program at the Architectural Association in London.

Afterwards, Pratt worked for a firm called Kieran Timberlake Associates LLP in Philadelphia as director of research for about three years, but once again he realized that many architects lacked a basic understanding of sustainability or computational process.

“I was always trying to hire people, but I could never hire anybody, [because many] didn’t know what the hell they were doing [due to] the way they were educated,” he said. “They lacked particular skill sets for dealing with this kind of problem ... because it requires a different set of tools to deal with than what are traditionally seen as architectural tools,” he said.

“So my last thought was that I can sit here and design sustainable buildings, which I have done, but it’s probably a better idea to sort of try and change the way profession thinks about this in a kind of academic sense by really researching the problem more profoundly. And by also working with students so that when they get out there and design buildings themselves, they can have some clue as to what the point of doing [sustainable] building is,” he said.

Pratt is careful to note, however, that technological advances may not be a cure-all for problems concerning sustainability.

“Sustainability is not purely a technical problem. It’s essentially a cultural problem. The technologies we deploy are a product of our culture and how we choose to deploy them are products of our culture,” he said.

Pratt asked, “Is it technology, or is it us?” He said he hopes that the rates of energy generation and waste can maintain a level that technological advances will be able to catch up to.