Design the Future

Architect Liz York is senior advisor for buildings and facilities strategy and innovation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She talks about how buildings impact people -- their lives, health, and mental health. Liz has been a leader in making those connections. She helped create a best practice paper for AIA about lactation rooms that is still circulated widely today. She talks about how triple bottom line thinking has transformed how buildings and real estate are discussed today. Increasingly, she says, we include issues of equity, mobility, and many other “beyond the building” considerations that are relevant to the public health attributes of the built environment. 

Erin Meezan sought a career that would help protect the natural world. That led to an environmental law degree, and today she is VP and Chief of Sustainability at Interface, the global commercial flooring company. She and Interface are focused on defining the next jump toward decarbonization of the built environment. Erin says that depends on driving accountability for delivering on progress, both in the company and in the industry. Interface has a strong commitment to education and to sharing tools, which Erin sees as inherent to “being part of the movement.” 

Gail Brager is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and associate director of the Center for the Built Environment, a model for collaborative research dedicated to transformational change in the building industry. She describes her research into thermal adaptive comfort and points to ASHRAE as the first organization where she found her leadership footing -- and how her work changed the standard. Gail reminds us that feminine leadership skills can be a role model for men and women. We get a sneak peek at the book she is working on about how design for experiential delight can support human wellbeing, with an emphasis on enhancing the positive, rather than reducing the negative. 

Stacy Smedley started her career in architecture and has worked with global construction company Skanska for the past seven years. She co-conceived the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool last year, and is on loan from Skanska to launch the nonprofit Building Transparency to share and scale EC3. She’s also a songwriter/singer, a parent, and writes children’s books. She talks about aligning personal passions and skill sets with the potential for impact and how we can all be energized by the positive things happening in climate response. 

Master communicator Marge Anderson works at the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Slipstream, Inc., where she shapes education to drive behavior change around energy. She chaired the US Green Building Council in 2015, and was in Paris for the climate talks. She says that her working-class upbringing did not suggest a path to sustainability but it has informed her leadership in the field. She is an optimist (and cites British environmental leader Tony Juniper on this: “it’s too late for pessimism”), but she feels great urgency and is startlingly succinct: “On climate, we’ve got nine and a half years left. On equity, we’re 400 years too late.” 

Architect Carlie Bullock-Jones runs Ecoworks Studio in Atlanta and her firm touches many buildings whose owners seek green building certifications including LEED, WELL, and others. This includes very large-scale projects such as professional sports facilities, and she talks about why sustainability-driven design and planning moves in those venues can become a public teaching tool and a community benefit. (Carlie gives a shout out to the late Gail Lindsey, a force-of-nature pioneer who touched many people in the green building movement.)

Kimberly Lewis is SVP for market transformation and development at the US Green Building Council, where she has centered people and healing in her work. This movement builder is responsible for GBC’s Equity Summit, its Women in Green leadership platform, Sheroes, and more.  Kimberly talks about what it means to live your values in your work, the buzzwords in the sustainable buildings industry, and how we cannot equity-wash what’s next.

In the course of architect Eden Brukman’s career, she has touched and shaped a number of critical aspects of the sustainable building industry. Today, she is the Senior Green Building Coordinator for the City of San Francisco. We talked to her about accountability, working at the city scale, decarbonization, material banks, and about why mentoring is so important. Eden touched on how systems thinking is so crucial to solving the big challenges; she cited the classic Donella Meadows essay, Leverage Points in a System, as an enduring reference point.

Architect Mara Baum leads global health and wellness design practice, which includes a number of large projects for large health organizations. Human health had been an interest of Mara’s for years, though during her education, it was not at all a focus of the architecture community. Our conversation touched on a number of things including what healthcare design can teach other building types, the value of “cheerful persistence,” and how being a part of a movement helps keep her moving forward day by day.

Elaine Hsieh is co-founder and head of Corporate Partnerships/Marketing for Third Derivative, a new organization focused on success and speed to market for climate innovation efforts. Throughout her career, Elaine has followed her curiosity and instinct and sought out value alignment and growth potential. Today, she is passionate about the need to bend the emissions curve precipitously; that urgency is driving her (and Third Derivative) to bring startups, investors, corporations, and market, regulatory, and energy policy insights into one program as a path to much faster market readiness.