Design the Future

Rachel Gutter is CEO/President of the International Well Building Institute. Her journey is full of persistence and passion, but she points to the benefits of “wandering until you find what makes your heart sing.” We talked about IWBI’s Health Safety Rating for buildings and the opportunity that exists to demonstrate the ROI related to wellbeing in ESG ratings. And we talked about the public’s role in market transformation. A public newly attuned to health is ready to demand verifiably healthy spaces, which can drive change (even in sectors previously agnostic on sustainability). 

Building a climate responsive and just future is happening, many would argue, most meaningfully at the local level, due in part to the vision and persistent hard work of people like Lucia Athens. Lucia, trained in landscape architecture, talks about the need for design- and systems-minded people in government roles; writing green building policy, which she has done in both Seattle and Austin; and about some of the public buildings that resulted. We also talked about how equity informs Austin’s climate plan and the Austin Civilian Conservation Corps,  turning climate action into jobs.

Alyssa Lyon is the Sustainable Communities Director at Pittsburgh's Green Building Alliance and Mandy Lee is the manager of the NAACP’s Centering Equity in the Sustainable Building Sector initiative. We talked to Lee and Lyon about promises the green building industry has made about social equity, and the CESBS’s efforts to make good on those in a broad, collective way. This is thanks to Jacqui Patterson, who founded the NAACP’s Environmental Justice program. The work is local, regional, and national, and it focuses on how the industry can bring, as Lyon puts it, “light and resources” to the movement and to people and communities. 

Chicago-based Jenny Carney works with WSP’s Sustainability, Energy and Climate team supporting corporate sustainability teams and project work. Her ecology/field science background keeps her grounded in empirical data (and wishing the building industry could get more rigorous about that data). She works on the emissions profiles of existing buildings (which, she points out, the people who use them call “buildings”) and is deeply involved in a workforce development program that seeks to bring public housing residents into jobs related to building use and maintenance. Jenny has found satisfaction, she says, in helping to facilitate mashups of people and perspectives that result in better outcomes. 

Leith Sharp studies and teaches leadership for sustainability in organizations and teams; she directs Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health. We had a fascinating discussion with her about human engagement, the limits of formal power, and fostering change through stakeholder ecosystems. Leith led Harvard’s green campus transformation in the early 2000s and has deep insights about project and movement dynamics. Big picture, Leith reminds us that we are a young organism facing an evolutionary challenge and that we need to turn to biology as the frame for the systems and cultural changes ahead. 

At the 20-episode mark of this podcast, we took this one to talk about some of the topics that have come up and about how we will shape this conversation going forward. The urgency of the climate crisis in the context of the pandemic and the intersecting social and justice reckoning have our guests thinking about how to accelerate and scale impact -- in communities and on emissions. We are thinking about these endeavors as a unified whole.  

Psychologist Judith “Judi” Heerwagen focuses on the behavioral and health impacts of building design and operations; she works with the U.S. General Services Administration and is on the architecture faculty at the University of Washington. She describes the serendipity of her path, which began with an E.O. Wilson book that led to her studying zoology and behavioral ecology, and then a PhD in psychology. Her early training in journalism taught her to always look for connections and she was once quoted as saying that we are doing better jobs with zoos for animals than buildings for people. The exploration around that observation led to her work in recent years on biophilia -- the human tendency to connect with other forms of life in nature.  

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.