Ed Mazria imagines that all new U.S. buildings will be designed to be carbon-neutral by 2030 in order to minimize the severity of the effects climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels. In order to accomplish this necessary change, architects and all the personnel in the building and construction fields must be aware of and trained in the issues and techniques related to carbon-neutral buildings and communities. Subsequently, Mazria issued the Architecture 2010 Imperative (that all schools teach carbon-neutral design by 2010) and spearheaded the February 20, 2007, emergency teach-in webcast available to students and faculty nationwide. The University of Idaho's McCall Field Campus project presented itself as an ideal vehicle for this experiment because it had a willing client eager to discover the carbon-neutral possibilities for the site, which is a wooded 11 acres on Payette Lake and is surrounded by the much larger Ponderosa State Park. Moreover, my teaching colleagues in Interior Design and Landscape Architecture were eager to enlist their graduating students in an interdisciplinary quest for solutions to the problem. This paper reports on successes and problems encountered in addressing the concept of carbon-neutral design and planning in a studio project in the context of 25 years of experience in teaching passive, low-energy, and sustainability issues in architecture studios. In general the students embraced the project and understood the concept. Their designs reflected emphasis on carbon-neutrality through frugality and innovative thinking. Informational resources that allowed computation of carbon debt for construction methods and materials were difficult to find. Beyond the success of the students' work, their projects have also served as a catalyst for university-wide discussion and interdisciplinary cooperation toward creating a more sustainable campus.
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