Design the Future

Rochelle Routman is Chief Sustainability and Impact Officer of HMTX Industries, a resilient flooring manufacturer. She has been passionate about the environment since a young age, and brought that into her work through corporate sustainability.She saw an opportunity to bring greater transparency into flooring products, helping to advance industry-wide disruption. Today, she is working on ESG; HMTX will release its first Impact report soon. The company’s new headquarters in Connecticut, designed by McLennan Design, is expected to earn Living Building petal certification later this year. “I definitely feel like I am part of a movement,” Rochelle says. “I see sustainability as an activist career. Thinking about the arc of progress, I had hoped we’d be farther ahead on responding to climate change by now. But I am inspired by progress on many fronts, such as the growing understanding of biophilia.” Rochelle was recognized with a Women in Sustainability Leadership Award in 2014 and is now President and chair of the board of that network. 

Sandy Mendler is an architect, planner, and researcher focused on creating new models for healthy, sustainable living. She is a design industry thought leader and dynamic project leader; at Gensler, she is a principal, studio director, and regional practice leader for education. She previously worked at Mithun (where she was part of a Bay Area Resilient by Design team in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund competition) and HOK (where she led the influential EPA HQ project and co-authored the HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design). Throughout her career, Sandy has been asking big questions about complex topics and developing solutions that demonstrate the value of sustainable, equitable design, which she calls “prototypes for the positive future.” She is dedicated to research and deep collaborations. “We are systems thinkers,” she says. “We work as teams to create solutions that do many things at once -- and have positive, ongoing impact. Part of this is that we can -- and must -- co-create with communities. We have to catalyze investment in under invested areas because it’s the right thing to do but also because it’s part of the equation around emissions and healthy places.” 

Lakisha Ann Woods is the executive vice president and CEO of the American Institute of Architects, a network of 94,000 architects and design professionals (in 200 chapters) who are committed to enhancing the built environment. Woods previously served as president/CEO of the National Institute of Building Sciences and as senior VP/CMO at the National Association of Home Builders. Architects are naturals at addressing complex or multifaceted issues, Lakisha says, and she points out that today that means addressing climate and equity as interconnected issues. She also talked about the AIA’s  renovation of its HQ in Washington, a reuse project that involves numerous teams and high aspirations around embodied carbon, materials, and healthy workspaces. Lakisha is inspired by architects and their passion -- and the profession's increasing agency around climate and equity. Some of that comes from advocacy, she points out: “If we want our initiatives to move forward, we have to be an active voice in codes and on the Hill.” 

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.”