www.buildingsandcities.org/about/niklaus-kohler.html
Niklaus Kohler
Dr Niklaus Kohler is an architect and researcher. He worked in R&D in both the building industry and academe. His PhD was on Global Energy Consumption of Buildings during their Life Cycle. From 1978 to 1992 he directed research projects in the material science department (performance of materials) and the physics department (energy simulation) at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He was member of the steering committee of three national technology transfer programs (Impulsprogramme).
He is an Emeritus Professor and past-Director of the Institute of Industrial Building Production (ifib) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (formerly University of Karlsruhe). After retirement, he was a senior lecturer at ETH Zurich and a guest professor at Tianjin University, China. He was President of the Scientific Council of the CSTB (France) and member of steering committees of research programs and scientific institutions in Germany, France, Switzerland, UK, Sweden, Austria, China. His main research domains are:
- Life cycle analysis of buildings and building stocks
- Application of Information Technologies in comprehensive, distributed design
Latest Commentaries
Cities-Scale Research to Address Climate Change
Gerald Mills (University College Dublin) considers the big challenges for cities amid global climate change (GCC) and discusses the need for an inter-disciplinary approach among urban climate sciences to overcome obstacles. A distinction is made between global climate science, which focusses on Earth-scale outcomes, and urban climate science, which refers to processes and impacts at city-scales, including buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.
Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities
William E. Rees (University of British Columbia) explains why urbanisation has been a significant contributor to ecological overshoot (when human consumption and waste generation exceeds the regenerative capacity of supporting ecosystems) and climate change.1 Civil society needs to begin designing a truly viable future involving a ‘Plan B’ for orderly local degrowth of large cities.