Ecologies of Construction
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate-level course from the Department of Architecture on the material and energy costs of building. The course applies industrial ecology, a field built around tracking resource flows through economic systems, to construction activities specifically, mapping what it actually takes to make and maintain buildings once you count materials sourcing, energy use, and waste streams. Lecture notes, readings, and assignments walk through methods for quantifying these flows and applying them to case studies of building projects. The course assumes some background in architecture or engineering and is pitched at students already working on design or planning problems who want a rigorous way to account for embodied resources. As with all MIT OCW offerings, materials are free to use and there is no certificate.