Design the Future

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?”

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.”