[Teaching] 🏗️ Building Technology Under Carbon Constraints: Fall Semester 2026

A new semester is approaching, and I have been reworking our Building Technology teaching material at ULiège around a question that is becoming impossible to avoid:

How should we teach construction when carbon becomes a design constraint?

The figure summarizes part of the shift. Two houses can provide essentially the same function and architectural program, yet the decisions we make about foundations, structure, and envelope can lead to very different embodied-carbon outcomes. For students, this changes the meaning of a construction detail. A wall section is no longer only about how to build it. Students need to understand what it is made of, why its layers are there, how they work together, how it can be assembled and eventually disassembled, and what environmental burden those decisions entail. 🌲 From learning components to understanding systems

This semester, our course Techniques de construction durable des bâtiments 1A will focus primarily on timber, lightweight and hybrid construction, including timber frames and OSB, CLT, post-and-beam systems, timber floors, and combinations of timber with concrete, steel or masonry where these make technical sense. Students will repeatedly return to three fundamental interfaces:

foundation + wall → wall + window → wall + roof

At every interface, they will ask whether the solution simultaneously addresses:

A. Structure: Can it carry the loads?

B. Water: Can it keep water out?

C. Heat: Is the insulation continuous?

D. Air + moisture: Are airtightness and vapor transfer properly controlled?

E. Carbon + materials Could the same function be achieved with lower-impact, bio-based, recycled or more circular materials?

These five requirements form the backbone of the semester.

🧱 Timber does not mean forgetting masonry

This is important. Students still need to understand brick, concrete blocks, concrete slabs, mineral insulation and conventional Belgian construction. But increasingly, we want them to be able to compare systems rather than reproduce the system they already know.

1. What happens if a concrete or masonry structure becomes timber?

2. What happens if conventional insulation becomes cellulose, wood fiber, hemp or straw?

3. Where are the carbon savings actually coming from?

4. And where does a low-carbon solution create new challenges for moisture, fire, acoustics, durability, detailing, or constructability?

The goal is not to teach students that timber is good and concrete is bad. The goal is to give them enough building science to make informed choices.

📐 New course material, new book

We are therefore developing a new generation of teaching material, together with work toward our new book on construction and circularity. The material connects construction drawings, 3D assemblies, physical models, building science, and environmental impact rather than treating them as separate subjects. Students will work with four practical assignments, moving through structure and load paths, construction systems, envelope and openings, and physical/model-based representation. We are also introducing the critical and transparent use of generative AI. Students will be able to take a corrected construction detail, describe its layers and materials, and use image generation to explore how that technical solution can be communicated visually. The prompt and method must be documented.

AI should not replace knowing how a wall works. It should make it even more important to know when an apparently convincing image is technically wrong.

👷 And construction cannot be learned only from slides

This semester we will also connect the classroom more closely with the construction sector through practical work, case studies, and visits. This educational question has interested me for a long time. Since my studies in the United States, I have been a member of the Society of Building Science Educators (SBSE), a community that brings together educators concerned with how environmental science and building performance are taught in architecture and the built environment. Society of Building Science Educators (SBSE)

We need to teach not only operational energy, but also embodied carbon, material choices, circularity, adaptability, and construction logic.

🎓 The educational challenge

Our students graduating around 2030 may still be practicing architecture and engineering in 2060 or 2070. So teaching them only today's standard construction details is not enough. They need the fundamentals that allow them to understand why a detail works, and the critical capacity to redesign it when materials, regulations, climate conditions, and carbon limits change. For me, that is increasingly what building technology education should be about:

not teaching students one correct way to build, but teaching them how to make technically sound construction decisions in a carbon-constrained world.

I would be very interested to hear from fellow building science and construction educators:

What have you changed in your construction curriculum because of embodied carbon and circularity?

📚 Learn more about the 101 Building Technology course: https://www.programmes.uliege.be/cocoon/20262027/en/cours/ARCH3275-1.html

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