With the acceleration of climate change, solutions are needed more than ever. Specifically, communities need to address how buildings — which account for half of human carbon emissions — are maintained and constructed. Baltimore’s , which is finding pathways to make existing buildings more efficient, is becoming a national flagbearer of sustainability.

The Carver House project is a collaborative effort to turn a longstanding rowhouse into a net-zero-emission home. Key players include , a local nonprofit, Carver Vocational-Technical High, Maryland’s oldest trade school of its kind, and the Career and Technical Education Department of Baltimore City Public Schools. Timmy Aziz, faculty in Architectural Design at ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ, is part of the team at Requity.

The idea is to augment existing vocational education at Carver with an interdisciplinary, energy-efficient building construction curriculum. With the rowhouse as a learning lab, Carver’s high school students are now able to apply building science construction skills and knowledge gained in class to hands-on renovation work at the rowhouse. Through Aziz, ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ students studying Architectural Design have been involved as well, providing drawings and architectural visualizations used as the high school students learned to build a wall and floor using passive design.

The ongoing project has been such a success already that Maryland Governor Wes Moore, along with White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi, visited the site earlier this year — it served as the backdrop when Moore announced that the state is joining President Biden’s National Building Performance Standards Coalition, a group of state and local governments committed to setting building codes that reduce emissions and improve equity.