Design the Future

Carrie Meinberg Burke is an architect, designer, artist, and inventor whose work is infused with research into light, ecology, health, human sensory perception, and biomimicry. She runs Parabola Architecture with her husband, Kevin Burke. They work at all scales, and one recent workplace project was described, by its Google owners, as “a building with a soul.” Carrie is co-developing an innovative heating and cooling unit that applies biomimicry principles to optimize form for thermal comfort and energy efficiency. Carrie is a believer that you have to design the design process itself, in order to give any project the space and time for analysis-synthesis resonance. The home that she designed for her family in Charlottesville, Virginia -- Timepiece -- is a manifestation of her work in grad school exploring the tension between structure and light.  “I did not actually draw or conjure the roof form,” Carrie says. “It is a mapping of natural forces.” The entire process was transformative, she says: “The ability to take a theoretical idea and not only build it but live in it has been the greatest learning experience. It has deeply informed my point of view about nature and our place in it.” 

Marsha Maytum is a founding principal at Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects. Her career is steeped in a passionate belief in the value and power of architecture and design. With her husband, Bill Leddy, and their partner, Richard Stacy, Marsha has created a teaching practice structured to focus on mission-driven work. They are co-authors of Practice with Purpose: A Field Guide to Mission-Driven Design (ORO Editions). At the heart of the matter, Marsha says, “Sustainability and equity are embedded in good design.” She was a key player in the 2019 resolution that helped establish the American Institute of Architects’ holistic Framework for Design Excellence and cement climate action as part of the AIA’s mission and Strategic Plan. “Everything is all linked together under the climate crisis,” she says. “The pressures on every issue are greater in the context of climate. We need to understand the power we have. Focus on good design -- reconnecting to the natural world, making places that are healthy, beautiful, and safe. This is important for continuing to have a civil and equitable society. Also, we need everyone involved -- all hands on deck right now.”

Nakita Reed is an architect with experience in preservation, restoration, and adaptive reuse of historic buildings with a focus on sustainable strategies; she is an Associate with Quinn Evans Architecture and works from their Baltimore office. She is also the host of Tangible Remnants, a podcast exploring the intersection of architecture, preservation, sustainability, race, and gender.For Nakita, preservation and architecture have always gone hand in hand. “Just like I can’t say I’m more black or more female, I am not more preservationist or more architect.” But those silos, and others, are everywhere in our industry, and Nakita has been trying to dissolve them throughout her career. Nakita is co-chair of the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for Existing and Historic Buildings, known as ZNCC. These collaborations are critical, she says, to advancing the industry. “It’s time we recognized that we are not going to build our way to net zero,” she says.Nakita observes that we have gotten a bit better at realizing that sustainability is part of good design. She feels she is apart of a movement, too. “But in the future, I hope that it will be like breathing. It will feel normal and natural to make something sustainable and beautiful, and the impulse will be to reuse and restore, not tear down.”

Chandra Robinson is a principal at LEVER Architecture, a Portland, Oregon-based design practice recognized for material innovation. She came to architecture by way of geology, physics, and kayaking. She is passionate about creating beautiful spaces that are accessible for everyone and enjoys working closely with clients to create designs that express their values -- and we had a great time talking with her about access, equity, and identity. 

Bomee Jung is co-founder/co-CEO of Cadence OneFive, a public benefit corporation with a climate justice mission. They are developing, Momentum, a software to enable city-scale acceleration of existing building decarbonization. Before this role, Bomee was the first VP for Energy and Sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and before that she led the climate mitigation and adaptation programs of the New York office of Enterprise Community Partners. She serves on the board of the Institute for Market Transformation and the loan committee of Capital For Change. With Momentum, Bomee and her co-founder and team are focused on change at scale. “We deliver a way for owners to understand their options around climate response, using building science and climate data,” she says. Instead of the bespoke consulting service model, the Momentum team proposes that many owners with conventional properties can benefit from a dataset-empowered playbook. “There are lots of options for doing climate responsive construction today. This is a way for people to understand methods and technologies, not just about emissions but also about housing quality and other factors.” Bomee suggests that the industry is facing a traditional tragedy of the commons problem. Sharing information could generate broad positive impact. With construction pricing, for example, sharing fresh information widely could rapidly reduce risks for many. This is where software has a unique role: “These are known problems and we offer transparency to help solve them.” 

Frances Yang is a Structures and Sustainability Specialist at Arup. In addition to her work on projects defining embodied carbon leadership, she has been a mobilizer and leader in the movement, serving on the Carbon Leadership Forum Board, vice chairing the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment, and co-founding the All for Reuse Initiative, among a host of other advocacy work. Frances talked about the importance of collaboration across disciplines. “No single profession can tackle climate change alone,” she says. She is dedicated to setting ambitious and achievable targets and frameworks to help disciplines meet them. She sees potential for cultural change around waste associated with construction. Frances cites the intelligence in the community and points to Bruce King as an inspiration (he and Chris Magwood have a new book out: Build Beyond Zero). “I am also very inspired by the young people -- they want purpose-driven careers. Seeing more and more of this gives me hope.”

Jane Abernethy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Humanscale, started as an industrial designer. As such, she has always thought about sustainability, which she sees as part of the inherent challenge of design at all scales. Jane has spent a lot of time thinking about how to evolve a company from within. She prefers to talk about results rather than aspirations; in this era of hyperbole and greenwash, that gives Jane a restrained profile and it helps her keep Humanscale honest.We had a fascinating discussion about the complexities of supply chain management including the challenges of what to measure. We touched on circularity, which Jane about the complexities of supply chain management including the challenges of what to measure. We touched on circularity, which Jane says that she has long found compelling. But right now, Jane says, “We are not adapting our systems to accommodate faster progress and more effective collaboration, both of which are needed. And we also need to shift from thinking about how we ‘preserve’ our way of life to thinking about how we can adapt our way of life.”

Claire Maxfield directs Atelier Ten’s San Francisco office, which works, as a consultant to architects or owners, on an incredible range of large, complex, and environmentally ambitious projects —  buildings, landscapes, and master plans. She has been integral to many significant green building milestones in the US and beyond. We talked to her about what it is like to be a full-time green building nerd. She described how she uses a broad range of skills — analytical, technical, artistic, communications, and even persuasion — in the work. Her teams are leading the big decisions around leading-edge projects. And the woman-led office that she started (in a global recession) is growing and thriving. Claire sees that significant changes have transpired and the potential of emissions impact in the built environment sector. “We have all the technology that we need,” she says. “Where we are lacking progress, it is a lack of will. It’s our job to demonstrate the power of what’s possible.”Talking to Claire offers a peek into her roots in the humanities side of environmentalism; she cites William Cronon’s work as a major influence, especially the books that explore the notion of humans as a part of nature, rather than separate from it. 

Architect Adele works at the intersection of public health, climate change, and the built environment. She is co-authoring a book, Architectural Epidemiology, which lays out a methodology for designing and operating buildings that respond to the specific environmental and human health needs of people in individual neighborhoods. Adele has been working in the green building movement for years; early on she was involved in the Green Guide for Health Care. Today, she senses that there is a feeling that we’re not making the impact we wanted to. “I think that one part of the problem is that is that we are not prioritizing things enough based on site.” Her book, due out in 2023, walks through how to do health situation analysis in a smart, layered way that helps teams prioritize the top key issues that will make the most difference in that neighborhood and understand which strategies have the most co-benefits. Adele is currently doing research through an AIA Upjohn grant to test her hypothesis that if project teams had data specific to their sites and evidence based strategies, greater alignment between entities would be possible. These metrics, she suggests, would help everyone get more of what they want. 

Architect Laurie Kerr is a national leader in sustainable building and climate policy. She is Principal Climate Advisor at USGBC and the president of LK Policy Lab. She was NYC’s Deputy Director for Green Building Policy under Bloomberg, and helped develop the city's influential sustainability plan and policies. Laurie was an early advocate for the idea that “buildings matter” in terms of energy and carbon footprint, and helped create policies and framing that have stood the test of time. “We changed the conversation from cars and power plants to buildings, and existing buildings.”Laurie was full of great stories about what has happened in the green building movement, but also very pointed ideas about what needs to happen next. “We have to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We have to sharpen our pencils and see what’s large and what’s small. We have to get the math right. We have to be more nimble and hard-headed and weed out the policies and strategies that aren’t working. One example is our energy codes don’t address carbon. It’s 2022. When will they?”