Professor Charles J. Kibert Ph.D., P.E. passed away in a motorcar accident on 25 January 2021. Charles founded Task Group 16 (Sustainable Construction) and co-founded Task Group 39 (Deconstruction) and was an active member of W82 on the Future of Construction. He organized the 1st International Conference on Sustainable Construction held in Tampa, Florida (1994) and has been the keynote speaker and lectured on sustainable construction in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Lithuania, Finland, Italy, Canada, and the U.S. He is the author of the seminal Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Construction (John Wiley & Sons, New York, first edition in 2005 and fourth edition in 2016), the editor of Reshaping the Built Environment (Island Press, 1999) and lead editor of Construction Ecology (Spon Press, 2002). The Kibert’ s definition of sustainable construction as: “the creation and responsible management of a healthy built environment based on resource-efficient and ecological principles”, published in CIB Publication 225 (1998) can be considered the starting point for defining sustainable construction which informed the CIB Agenda 21 on Sustainable Construction. Vanessa Gomes, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator at the School of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Campinas, Brazil, wrote a personal tribute to Charles Kibert for the CIB.
On Monday, Jan. 25, the University of Florida College of Design, Construction and Planning mourned the loss of one of its outstanding and esteemed faculty. I mourned the loss of a friend and a professional reference. He was 73.
Truly, his accomplishments within the College and the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management are numerous. Charles was Holland Professor and Director of the Powell Center for Construction and Environment. He previously served as director, and was the major mastermind in delivering Rinker Hall, the first green building on the UF campus. Over more than three decades, Charles has provided leading edge research and instructional excellence to hundreds of Rinker students.
His outreach endeavors also included co-founding and chairing the Cross Creek Initiative, a non-profit industry/university joint venture seeking to implement sustainability principles in construction, and restoring the Cotton Club, a Gainesville’s African American musical landmark.
Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Charles had a physics and mechanical and nuclear engineering background. A retired colonel at the US Army, he became known globally for his expertise in Sustainable Construction and High-Performance Buildings. His areas of research ranged from built environment climate change mitigation, carbon accounting and blockchain application to enable carbon credit markets to building technologies, deconstruction and component reuse, and green buildings and materials assessment.
I first heard of Charles and his work in the mid 2000’s. His classes on sustainable construction – generously shared – inspired me while producing my own. His precious advices guide me to these days. In 2009, I invited him down to Brazil to deliver a keynote speech in a national sustainable construction symposium. As he disregarded that a certain VISA would be involved (I vividly see him facepalming reading this!), it ended up as a virtual participation in a big conference, in an era when we were not remotely as familiar with zooms and tools as we are today. That series of stressful but successful events turned into an eternal joke between us.
Finally, in 2010 – visa at hand! – Charles personally attended the SB10 Brazil: Instrumenting change held in São Paulo, as part of the conference series carried out by iiSBE, CIB and the United Nations Environment Programme. Charles brilliantly delivered a keynote speech on the role of net zero energy buildings as the next major shift in the high-performance buildings arena. To enable closer interaction with interested participants, he also generously offered a workshop on strategies for developing net zero energy buildings.
At the time, Charles was very excited about the brand new working group on the topic he led at the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE). Four years later he organized the first iiSBE Net Zero Built Environment Symposium (nZEB), in partnership with Robert Ries, a long-time colleague and the School Director at the time, and Ravi Srinivasan, who would also become a friend and collaborator. That gathering enabled my first visit to UF campus in Gainesville and to the Rinker School, in particular. There, right next to his office, Charles headed the Powell Center for Construction and Environment: a research facility filled with a vibrant and welcoming atmosphere for the students from different parts of the world gravitating around it. I was impressed by how admired and loved he was by his young team of graduates. His positive impact was confirmed by the numerous statements that followed his passing. They say a lot about Charles’ personality, and his talent to make people around him feel welcomed and valuable.
Thunder-voiced, charismatic and an unimagined prankster – who once led his academic gang on moving all offices downstairs overnight to play a trick on the school’s secretary the morning after… – Charles was also a gifted guitar player and fond of fencing and horsemanship… or horsewomanship, as his youngest daughter was the subject mostly often depicted in his posts.
Given the distance, we mostly interacted over social networks. Charles was very vocal about his political views. Over his final days and weeks, he was very happy. Happy about the recent election outcome, about getting his second vaccine dose amid the pandemic chaos. He was choosing covers for his new book and had just been elected as the chair of the Green Building initiative (GBI) Board of Directors, dedicated to reducing climate impacts and improving building performance.
Charles kindly supported and endorsed my collaboration proposals and candidacies. My last pre-pandemic trip was actually to visit him, Ravi and Robert at UF in February 2020 to start a joint research and academic exchange program. Charles took the lead in clearing bureaucratic hurdles and arranging the right meetings with the right people. Unfortunately, the pandemic put our plans on hold, but I will do my best to ensure they proceed and honor his memory and effort.
Charles passing is a devastating loss. The global sustainable construction and net zero energy communities lost one of their luminaires. His personal impact on us all will not fade. His legacy will surely live on to inspire many generations to come. In the end, we all become stories, and Charles has written a very beautiful one.
Charles is dearly missed by his wife Patricia, daughters Alina, Nicole and Charlotte, friends, colleagues, current and past students and readers, to whom I offer sincere condolences, on behalf of CIB.
Charles Kibert (1947-2021)
Vanessa Gomes, Arch, Dr, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator at the School of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Campinas, Brazil
The opening paragraph was authored by Prof Chrisna du Plessis, Chair of the School for the Built Environment, University of Pretoria, South Africa
