Design the Future

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?”

Architect Arathi Gowda leads ZGF's East Coast Sustainability Practice. She is an advocate for collective climate action and is the current co-chair of US Architects Declare and a member of the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment Leadership Group. Arathi was at SOM for 20 years in Chicago before moving recently to her new role, and her move to DC reflects her ambitions around climate and advocacy as part of architecture. Arathi is a keen observer of the architecture profession and the real estate and financial realms in which it functions. She notes that following the persistence of NIMBY-ism for years, “we are finally getting to a moment when there is no more Someone Else’s Backyard. Those of us who have some political power and institutional capacity need to do whatever we can to amplify that.” She  points out that designers, as the optimists in the house, need to be rendering a post apocalyptic future that is beautiful and beneficial. “We need to show how positive the solutions for the collective good can be,” she says. 

As VP of Sustainability Consulting at Stok, Devon advises clients on sustainability for their building portfolios, consulting with major organizations on carbon, ESG, and more. She recently authored Stok’s Sustainable Real Estate Program Handbook, a multi-year, collaborative effort focused on driving faster change. “This work can be heavy,” she says. “You have to stay hopeful and be curious.” She is encouraged by growing awareness about embodied carbon and increasing collaboration across the industry at this critical time. “We need more transparency and more advocacy and policy," she says. “Data collection is still a struggle. We are just beginning to recognize the impact of the supply chain.”Devon suggests that art and poetry nurture the introspection and creativity we need to tackle daunting challenges. Here’s the opening line from a David Whyte poem she shared with us: “Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.”

When we think about conservation and historic preservation, we often think first of land and buildings. But Juli Polanco’s work is putting people, culture, and climate at the center of those topics. We talked to Juli about her work as State Historic Preservation Officer for California, her role founding and leading the Climate Heritage Network, and her involvement with the Urban Land Institute’s Sustainable Development Council. Her mission, she says, is to help build resilient communities. Part of that is making sure that people see themselves in history. “We can use history as a binding agent for communities,” she says. “Part of the work is asking people -- everyone -- ‘how do you value this site?’ We can learn so much from the answers to that question. That has to do with what we save, how we build, and how we give hope and context to the youth in our community.”

Gina Ciganik is CEO of the Healthy Building Network, which is known for research and guidance around products and green chemistry. Gina is recognized as a national leader in transforming human and environmental health through strategic partnerships, innovative business practices, capacity building, and novel approaches. Having jumped from one career (affordable housing development) to another (public health and toxicology), Gina has become a “chief translator” about chemicals and health -- it has become a passion for her. “As soon as I understood the depth of the health challenge around products and materials," she says, “I knew I had to get involved to address it.” She acknowledges that progress has been made on transparency and disclosures, but she sees the need for acceleration. Whether seeing her role as part of the green building movement, or the industry it has spawned, Gina thinks in very direct terms. “It seems to me that, given all that we know now, you are either proactively working on solutions to these big things -- climate, toxics, racism -- or you are harming. I like to think that I am working on design and healing on a large scale.”

“I have always seen sustainability and social concerns as part of design,” says architect Angie Brooks. This perspective is rooted, in part, in her undegrad architectural studies that emphasized regionalism. And since her early days in practice, Angie has felt that architects should shape the framework within which they work. Her career and practice, with partner Larry Scarpa, shows how architects can be proactive agents of change. Angie's passion for communities has led to advocacy and policy work and a commitment to tackling tough topics. This manifests in a number of ways, including the recent Density for Quality of Life and Social Capital exhibit and grant funding for affordable housing pilots and a toolkit for developers, community groups, and architects. “We have to continue to think beyond the building,” she says. “Our profession can do so much good if we reject traditional silos and respond to the community.” 

Lotte Schlegel is the Executive Director of the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT), a national nonprofit organization focused on equitably decarbonizing buildings through policies and programs that increase demand and action for high-performing buildings. She’s also a co-founder and board member of ecountabl, which helps people support causes they care about when they bank and shop.Lotte described how she came to the built environment space because it is where issues of energy and health intersect. She talked about IMT's work on building performance standards with cities and states and the important trend of putting frontline communities at the center of the policy process. “We need to renovate a lot of our buildings a lot faster than we do today if we’re going to address and adapt to climate change,” she says. “We need to focus on systemic change in how we invest in and regulate the built environment to focus on performance and long term benefits.” 

Susan Szenasy is one of the best known design critics and editors of the past four decades; she served as editor of Metropolis magazine from the mid 1980s until a few years ago. In 2017, she was the winner of a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. During her tenure, Metropolis became one of the most expansive design publications in the American media landscape -- covering all disciplines and tackling sustainability as part of design early and deeply. We talked to her about ethics, Trombe walls, why the disciplines don’t talk to one another much, and how the “architects pollute” cover story in 2003 spotlighted built environment emissions. Susan’s view on design is all encompassing. She has the appreciation of a historian and the the gravity of a pragmatist (perhaps rooted in her childhood in Communist Hungary). She showed how a media platform could elevate voices and ideas -- about who design is for, how it relates to ecology and planet, how we teach design and ethics for designers, and how design is valued and funded. A collection of her writing and talks is available in Szenasy: Design Advocate (Metropolis Books, 2014).