Design the Future

Joel Todd has been working in the green building field for more than 30 years, most recently as a USGBC Senior Fellow focused on social equity. Her career focused on green building methods and metrics development; she contributed significantly to LEED’s earliest versions and co-founded the LEED Society Equity Working Group (an effort for which she was recognized with USGBC's prestigious Malcolm Lewis Impact Award). She describes how she came to work in this movement and how the people made her stay: “That’s really the key to finding your path, I think: Find people you respect and enjoy working with and then keep learning from them.” Joel has a long view on the arc of progress and some pointed opinions about both the progress so far and what may be ahead. She notes, for example, that the deep knowledge in the industry has had some unintended consequences. She urges the community to “get out of our detailed, speciality comfort zones to have those conversations about the whole and how it all fits together. Otherwise, instead of working synergistically, things are going to start clashing.”

Efrie Escott is the Decarbonization Technical Program Leader for Digital Energy at Schneider Electric. As a licensed architect and life cycle assessment practitioner, Efrie’s previous experience in reducing carbon in the built environment was as an environmental researcher within the KieranTimberlake Research Group, where she was a core member of the development team for Tally, an award-winning BIM-integrated life cycle assessment tool.We had a lively conversation with Efrie about research in the built environment field, Tally, her leap to Schneider Electric, and what kind of impact she is having in that context (including a recently launched internal tool). We also got a little nerdy about ASHRAE standards and others and how they are addressing (and tabulating) whole life carbon. She celebrated the immense gains on technology and knowledge, but she also acknowledged her disappointment that we have not yet hit peak emissions. And she voiced a concern that seemed poignant this season, about how we need to bring more people along in the movement and the industry. “We are doing a great job accelerating the front end, but we need to work on the middle more," she said. "We need to spend more time talking to other people -- not just each other. This pains me, because I love spending time with people in this community. But if we are serious about really scaling the progress, we need to do a much better job bringing in others. The science tells us that we need to sprint the distance of a marathon. This means we need to carry each other, and we need to be intentional about who we are bringing into the work.”

For our latest podcast, we talked to Myrrh Caplan, who is Senior VP for Sustainability at Skanska and leads the construction company’s national sustainability team. Since joining Skanska as a Project Manager in 2005, Myrrh has helped shape Skanska’s national approach to sustainable building. She established the company’s first national Green Construction program and chaired Skanska’s first National Green Council. Myrrh has advised on nearly 300 certified projects and projects seeking LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL, Envision, and other certifications. She sits on the board of mindfulMaterials, serves on several industry committees, and participates in research with key partners. We heard from Myrrh about her passion for weaving a positive legacy through the work, and how she brings that to the projects and to the overall enterprise. She speaks about her team as a family that is “in it together” and she is proud of how shared success, to this group of people, “comes before egos.”  She told us about a recent accomplishment, her work on the Associated General Contractors Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in construction (https://www.agc.org/climate-change-playbook). And we couldn’t resist asking Myrrh to talk about some notable recent projects, including PDX (the new airport in Portland, Ore., designed by ZGF) and the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station (in New York City, designed by SOM). 

Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd., in Accra, Ghana. As an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. This year, she joined the board of the International Living Future Institute.She references the importance of breaking boundaries between silos and communities because, she says, “the materials that we work with surely do.” She is proud of her many collaborations across and between academic, industry, and communities: “We are are advancing top-down and bottom-up approaches to getting these biobased materials not just known but normalized” in the AEC community. Throughout her work, Mae-ling is inspired by the stories of how biobased materials were used over long periods of time in different societies, “which offer us clues for how they could be used today and in the future.”

Lu Salinas has been working in the green building industry since 2006 -- with firms and on projects in the US, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, where she works today. Her consulting firm, THREE Environmental Consulting, has worked on everything from small affordable housing projects to large infrastructure projects such as the New International Mexico City Airport in Texcoco. She grew up in Mexico in a family of civil engineers, and happened upon the James Wines book, Sustainable Architecture, in the early 2000s, which sparked her awareness of and interest in the field. She sees the international green building industry from Mexico and has built THREE to help advance the level of the work in that region. “I am especially proud of our company’s rule,” she says. “We always do what’s right. I think we have held to this -- doing what is right for the most people.”Salins is proud to be a part of the movement, which she sees as “an infinite one -- in which people are passing the baton to others.” Salinas takes issue, however, with the idea that the next generation will be the one to address climate change. “The responsibility is with every generation that is currently living,” she says. “We all need to be doing something.” 

Cristina Gamboa is CEO of the World Green Building Council, an influential local-regional-global network focused on “the transformation to sustainable and decarbonized built environments for everyone, everywhere.” She is an economist with a background in sustainability, policy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships; as such, she is a trusted convener in international settings such as UN Climate Change summits and the World Economic Forum. Cristina is from Colombia and lives in London. Before she came to this work, she was an academic economist with a focus on international affairs and a passion for communicating. “Collectively, we’ve had a huge win, getting buildings on the global climate agenda. But with visibility comes responsibility,” Cristina says. “Now we have to make sure that the private sector is empowered to deliver progress.” She says that the finance community understands that buildings are the largest global asset class, and this is an opportunity. “If we get this right, they can invest in better assets,” she says. “If we work with the finance community and we find ways to delink emissions from growth and, for example, make sure that the retrofit economy really lifts off, we could unlock the benefits of a carbon-free and circular economy.”Great strides have been made, she says, but there is work to do: “We still don’t have aggregated data to show change at scale. This is a gap that makes our movement vulnerable. The sooner we can quantify benefits, the better.” 

Stephanie Phillips leads the City of San Antonio's Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program. Housed in the Office of Historic Preservation, the program prioritizes building material reuse as a tool for affordable housing repair, traditional trades revival, economic innovation, equitable access to high-quality resources, and cultural and community resilience. Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio and is a 2023 J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize awardee.Her work aims to foster collaborative partnerships that get us closer to creating a regenerative built environment. Part of Stephanie’s story is about how she came to think that “design is everything” and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. “What we are doing can happen anywhere,” Stephanie says. “It requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.”

Sandeep Ahuja is co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an AI-first consulting platform that aims to break down barriers in the design and construction cycle, creating a new network of shared information, interoperability, and accountability across projects and teams.In addition to running cove.tool, Sandeep has recently co-authored a book with Patrick Chopson. Build Like It’s the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction is due out from Wiley by the end of 2024.Sandeep is passionate about transforming the AEC industry with intelligent and innovative solutions to reduce risk and boost transparency. “We are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,” she says, “and put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.”

Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundation’s Ethical Materials Director. She works to advance the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the built environment. For the past two decades, Nora has been dedicated to creating change in the built environment through sustainability, resilience, and social equity work. Nora described the traction around the Design for Freedom work, and shared her excitement about a new public exhibit at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut. “With Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. “This exhibit is focused on the idea of ethical decarbonization," Riszzo said. "It  is exploring the link between the climate crisis and the embodied suffering that is happening in our built environment.”

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons designs environmentally conscious, energy-efficient, and resilient architecture that reflects a deep reverence for nature and human interconnectedness with the world. She has degrees in structural engineering and architecture and specializes in Building Information Modelling. She also works as an advisor for the Spinnaker Group, a division of SOCOTEC, focusing on sustainable certification of buildings in hot and humid climates. Her affinity for hot and humid stems from her home: Alyssa-Amor is from Barbados, an island nation, and she lives and works there now. She thinks that growing up with an acute understanding of human’s and human settlements’ vulnerability to nature and weather cycles has framed her thinking about design. She is exploring how best to leverage her cultural and design knowledge in an age of warming. “People say ‘build back better,’ but I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says. “I want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.” Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. “We are inviting people -- everyone! -- to engage, via VR, AI, and other ways. We are asking, can you code/build a city of the collective imagination?”