Design the Future (Lindsay Baker & Kira Gould)

“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.” 

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.”

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.”

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.”

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. 

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 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. 

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. 

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.”

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.”

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.” 

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. 

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.”

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.”

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.” 

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.” 

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.” 

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. 

Davida Herzl is co-founder and CEO of Aclima, where she leads a team pioneering a new way to diagnose the health of our air and track pollution. A Public Benefit Corporation, Aclima measures air pollution and greenhouse gasses with block-by-block resolution. The company's enterprise software, Aclima Pro, translates billions of scientific measurements into analytics for companies, governments, and communities to reduce emissions and improve public health. 

Aclima has been driven by two questions: Where is pollution coming from and who is it impacting? Today the company operates the largest mobile sensor network on Earth, creating datasets of hyperlocal greenhouse gas levels and air pollution never before available. 

David is proud of the work that the Aclima team is doing. “Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time,” she says. “And there are so many intersecting problems -- environmental justice, infrastructure, and more. Our data is a critical part of the solution because transparency ensures accountability and also enables actors across society to take informed climate action.”

Marnese Jackson is an environmental and climate justice activist, advocate, trainer, and educator in Pontiac, Michigan. This mother of two is the co-director of the Midwest Building Decarbonization Coalition, which focuses on inspiring and educating Midwesterners to end new installations of fossil fuel equipment in residential and commercial buildings by 2030, and to achieve zero emissions from these buildings by 2050, with integration of equity and labor justice. 

Marnese started her her career doing energy audits in homes, learned about poor air quality in certain areas, and became a regional organizer with the NAACP’s environmental justice program. She worked with Mothers Out Front, a moms' group focused on working toward a livable climate, and then transitioned back to the buildings realm at the Coalition. “I am part of a movement,” she says, “but I am also just an ordinary person. I can relate to anyone," which she says is important in her role.

"I am a connector,” she adds. “Being a missionary is not the thing. We are trying to empower self confidence.” Marnese is especially proud of the Coalition’s Equity Summits; last year’s was focused on Self Determination. 

Stephanie Greene has just stepped down from a role as managing director at RMI, where she led the Buildings Program. She also helped launch RMI's building electrification initiative, which is focused on enabling a cost-effective, sustainable, and equitable path to building decarbonization, with work spanning the U.S., China, and India. We talked to her about this work, her previous work at PG&E, building teams, and about how crucial systems thinking is to working on climate issues and the built environment. 

“I feel like buildings are the center of all the other topics I have worked on,” she says. “It’s exciting to work on buildings because they interact with everything -- utilities, energy, site, transit. And there is a whole human health component, too.” Stephanie says she feels like she is part of a building decarbonization movement “Like many of us, I think, I alternate between frustration and despair and hope and optimism. But that is to be expected -- this is a tough industry. The movement context means that what any one person or team does can have a ripple effect -- and we are seeing more and more of that.” 

Fiona Cousins, a mechanical engineer by training, is the Americas Chair for Arup, guiding a 1,900-person engineering, design, consulting, and planning firm with a focus on collaborating and innovating to shape a better world. Fiona and her teams take a broad view as they pursue value for clients, considering climate change, social equity, and biodiversity. 

As a longtime leader in the field, Fiona has a keen perspective on the arc of progress. She says that the market transformation that has occurred in the past 30 years means that it feels a bit less like a movement now. “The floor has been raised, through codes and other policy and market work,” she says. “Buildings have to work harder now. But at the leading edge, it still feels like a movement. And now we are asking harder questions, such as: What does it mean for a building to have a biodiversity net gain?” 

As for what’s next, Fiona is inspired by growing dialogue around water, both as a human rights issue and a technical issue. “I think this topic is far more visceral to people than questions of energy or carbon ever can be,” she says. “And I think it could be the topic that really connects us to the subject of planetary boundaries in a meaningful, actionable way.” 

Renée Cheng is an architect and dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. She pioneered research surrounding the intersection of design and emerging technologies and is a leader in the American Institute of Architects around equity in the profession and practice. She led the research effort for AIA guides for equitable practice. She  sees students as partners, and notes that the practice environment they face is radically different from the one their teachers experienced. 

“We need to be teaching more about collaborating across disciplines,” she says. “And we need to help our students think about agency and knowing their roles. Many architects don’t feel well trained for the ‘conductor’ roles that we need to address complex issues. For a project today, a design team might need to talk to an oceanographer and a native community that is relocating.”

Of her work on the AIA practice guides, Renée says that she now understands why some things are slow to change and that she has more respect for the role of culture and the importance of alignment and trust. And of evolving practice within conventional economics, she says: “We are a values-based movement and we are also a capitalism-based industry. But there are different ways to think about ROI -- in terms of prosperity or wellness or life expectancy or collective benefit.” 

Sarah Ichioka is an urbanist, strategist, curator, and writer currently based in Singapore. She leads Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy. Her latest book, Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, co-authored with Michael Pawlyn, proposes a bold set of regenerative design principles for addressing environmental and social challenges. We talked to her about the book and related podcast, her wide-ranging career, and her abiding interest in cities, which was first piqued in her eighth grade year through the Future City competition. 

She and Pawlyn started working on the book when they perceived tension between  evolution in the built environment community and growing awareness that such progress was not nearly sufficient for the necessary transformation. They sought to tangibly and meaningfully integrate perspectives from outside the built environment, such as Kate Raworth on (doughnut) economics.  

“We wanted to craft clear examples of the mindset shifts -- we identify five as new or rediscovered -- to move away from degenerative thinking,” Sarah says. ”We wanted to be direct about the need for a cultural shift, not just technological- or innovation-based change.” She says the book is the beginning of the conversation, which now includes collecting stories of regenerative practice. “The scale of the challenge can feel overwhelming. We need relationships where we can be ourselves and be honest … and then channel them constructively.”

Mary Ann Piette is the Interim Associate Lab Director of the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She manages a research enterprise comprised of 700 staff and affiliates, including 120 principal investigators working across a broad set of technology R&D programs to accelerate decarbonization ranging from demand-side energy efficiency and grid integration to hydrogen technologies, energy storage, and renewable energy systems. 

We had a terrific time talking to Mary Ann about her mechanical engineering background and how she thinks about buildings, energy, comfort, and grids. She’s focused on four pillars of decarbonization: energy efficiency, electrification, grid integration, and distributed energy resources.

She wrote a chapter for a new book, Women in Renewable Energy (by Katherine T. Wang and Jill S. Tietjen (Springer, 2023) about using building loads dynamically for low-carbon energy systems. “When we change our electricity system to be based on wind and solar, we need to integrate with demand side systems,” she says. “Grid-scale storage is important, but flexible demand can be much more cost effective.” And she points out that this is part of a significant gap in current built environment conditions. “If we are are going to accelerate progress, we need to understand and utilize the feedback between design and operations.” 

Ariane Laxo is Sustainability Director at HGA, an architecture and engineering firm of 1,000 people in 12 offices. We talked to Ariane about her work, what she draws on to lead, and how she finds strength in the purpose of sustainability. She advises others to listen to the curiosity that pulls them and cultivate an introspective mindset. 

In addition to stewarding projects at HGA that demonstrate a holistic approach to design and deeply integrated sustainability, Ariane is also working on change management at the firm, which includes cultivating an inclusive culture and a distributed network of intelligence around sustainability, equity, and community action. The company has prioritized transparency and and is engaged in research internally and with outside partners.

Ariane appreciates the progress she is seeing in transdisciplinary thinking and would like to see greater advancement toward a circular economy in the building industry. “I hope that 200 years from now, historians will look at this moment as the fulcrum, the moment everything changed,” she says. “We are shaping a regenerative future.”

Victoria Burrows is a manager of portfolio development and industry partnerships at Kompas, an early-stage venture capital firm backing innovations for decarbonizing the built environment and manufacturing. Decarbonization has been the focus of Victoria’s career to date (her prior role was leading Advancing Net Zero at the World Green Building Council), and she lives it, too. She is renovating her own net zero home in France. 

Victoria is  excited to be working in venture capital right now because, she says, "the market needs a suite of solutions for every part of the problem -- solutions that are cost effective and reduce emissions. I’m energized to be on the ‘how’ side of things, helping to bring these solutions to fruition.”

Through Kompas, she is advancing innovations towards decarbonization that include technology such as AI and robotics to increase efficiency throughout the value chain. “I think the private sector has a responsibility to operate well in advance of regulation to prove the possible and show it can be done,” she says. This is part of creating confidence in governments so that they can set policy roadmaps and regulations. Activating the flow of sustainable finance to the solutions is critical. I want to see all finance linked to performance outcomes.”

Through her consultancy, AIRLIT studio, Alejandra Menchaca provides expertise in mechanical engineering and building science to owners and design teams. One of her current projects will be the first performing arts facility in the US with full natural ventilation.  Ale holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and has taught at MIT and Harvard GSD, where she has mentored, she says, “several brilliant students who have become inspiring disruptors in the building simulation industry. That’s immensely rewarding.”

We talked to Ale about growing up in Mexico and her shift from aerospace engineering  to environmental stewardship and building science and her time at Payette and Thornton Tomasetti before starting her own firm. Ale co-founded Project StaSIO, a community of building performance simulators (consultants, architects, in-house building scientists) that strives to teach others how to ask the right building analytics questions and convey the results in ways that are beautiful and impactful (not tables!).

When we asked whether she feels like she’s part of a movement, Ale didn’t hesitate: “If speaking up and disagreeing with the status quo is being part of the movement, I'm definitely a member..” 

Materials maven Annie Bevan is a facilitator, consultant, and collaborator focused on creating large-scale change and leveraging sustainability as a strategic business enabler. She’s effecting this through two roles: she is CEO of SMS Collaborative and CEO of mindful MATERIALS.

The mindful MATERIALS organization began as steward of a library tool. (That tool started at HKS, which gifted the idea to the built environment community.) Today it is a nonprofit convener, aggregator, and aligner centered on the Common Materials Framework — a system for thinking about products and holistic impact.

“We want building product manufacturer to hear a consistent language," Annie says, "so they can respond. Sustainable products should be the norm, not the option.”

Her consulting firm provides staffing solutions, mostly to manufacturers who are trying to do this work and talk about it effectively. 

Annie says that she worries that we’re getting carbon tunnel vision. “We need to bear in mind how broad this challenge is,” she says. “We have to attend to social health, equity, circularity, and biodiversity. We have to -- and we can -- solve these problems at the same time.” 

Seema Bhangar is a Healthy Buildings & Communities Principal at the US Green Building Council; she focuses on research and innovation. She is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. If you are interested in the field of human health and buildings, Seema advises you to “collect data and be curious and discerning and honest. We have evaluate impact and ask what we do not know.” Seema is working with a new team to rebuild a dedicated research function at USGBC. She is fueled, she says, by the magic that happens “when we bring researchers to our communities of practice.” 

Seema is deeply proud of the network of people she has cultivated during her career so far, "people who value having a vision, who ask questions at the right scales, and who voice their opinions," she says. "In buildings and health, it’s not about the individual superstar. The nodes are people. Each one has a set of expertise and knowledge, and we really advance when we connect and share.” 

She is excited for the frontiers that are now being explored in the movement. “Health is different than energy, so we’re using different methods than we did for the other pillars,” she says. “The community today has many tools and  appreciates the need for urgency and scale.”

Dr. Veena Singla is Senior Scientist with the People & Communities Program at the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). 

She seeks to address health disparities linked to harmful environmental exposures using an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating environmental health, exposure science, public health, and policy expertise. Her research investigates how toxic chemicals and pollution related to systems of materials use, production, and disposal threaten the health of communities. 

“If you work on buildings, you're actually working on health and justice, even if you didn't think about it that way,” she says. “Green building has influenced health and justice in both positive and negative ways. I've seen the movement expand from a more narrow focus on energy and greenhouse gasses to a more holistic approach. We are now thinking about how buildings fit into our lives, and trying to better integrate health equity and justice.”

Noorie Rajvanshi is Director of Sustainability and Climate Strategy at Siemens USA, part of a multinational technology company. 

Noorie talked to us about her family’s sustainability roots, her mechanical engineering background, and how her fascination with quantifying environmental impact led to her role at Siemens. She is proud of her work on performance tools to support cities with ambitious GHG reduction goals and of her current work on carbon pricing.

Noorie calls herself a climate optimist and a climate realist. And she says that she feels part of a movement -- one that is changing for the better. “The movement is not as exclusive as it once was. Some folks might scoff about the notion that ‘everyone is a sustainability professional’ but I think that is the goal we are working towards. Sustainability is not an additional thing, it is part of our everyday work."

Noorie told us that the people who inspire her most right now are the people, such as electricians, who are changing their jobs to do more of what’s ahead because of the sustainability movement. “They are becoming experts on heat pumps and EV chargers and more -- and that’s inspiring to me.”

Laurie Schoeman is the Director of Climate for Enterprise Community Investment and has served as senior advisor at the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Her aim is to develop and implement innovative policies and solutions that enhance the climate adaptation and physical resilience of communities across the nation, especially those that are vulnerable and underserved. 

“When we talk about climate adaptation, I want people to point to built systems all over the country that are rooted in nature-based solutions,” she says. “It's time we move out of the textbooks and into our streets and communities and build these systems.” 

Reducing risk, she points out, is a whole slate of activities. “Insurance should not be our first line of defense,” she says. “It should be a complement to a property or a facility or an infrastructure project that has risk reduction baked in.” She adds that communications is critical, and we’re still lagging in that area. “We need to break all these topics down. We need to talk about how to communicate in way that everyone can understand.” 

Paula Melton is the Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, which supports the international sustainable building movement with learning resources, community building, and other services. She works with editorial teams to develop and deliver webcasts, long-form analysis, and other guidance on BuildingGreen.com and LEEDuser.com. 

“We have problems that are caused by people being in silos,” Paula says, “and not being able or willing to communicate. We need to be thinking about people skills and processes in new ways.” She adds that progress in the movement really demands a lot of soft skills. “We are all engaged in change management as much as we are engaged in the mechanics of our specific discipline or sector.”  

Besides bringing deep knowledge and humor to the table, Paula is optimistic, despite being rooted firmly in a lot of data about the reality of the climate imperative and the challenges that face the built environment community. “We are asking the right questions and beginning to break down those barriers that have given us 75 different net zero standards,” she says. “We're having the right conversations, and I'm excited about that.”

Dr. Janice Barnes is founder of Climate Adaptation Partners, a NYC-based partnership that focuses on climate adaptation. With technical training in architecture and organizational behavior, she helps clients to understand risks and evaluate adaptation pathways and link these to design and financing options. She works at the intersection of climate change, design, and public health and uses the question "how might we?" to frame her work. 

We talked with Janice about her advocacy and education work, her current client and project work, and more. She insists that “climate adaptation is part of design. We have a professional obligation to consider climate projections, explore what those mean, and then decide what you are going to do about that.” 

Janice uses a musical metaphor to talk about team collaboration. She says that she plays rhythm guitar -- and takes responsibility for bringing a lot of unconventional bandmates to the session. “In this way, I have found that I can contribute design thinking and bring climate science experts and epidemiologists to the table. What we come up with together is so much better -- a richer, more rooted system of solutions that do multiple things for stakeholders, ecosystem, and community.”

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons designs environmentally conscious, energy-efficient, and resilient architecture that reflects a deep reverence for nature and human interconnectedness with the world. She has degrees in structural engineering and architecture and specializes in Building Information Modelling. She also works as an advisor for the Spinnaker Group, a division of SOCOTEC, focusing on sustainable certification of buildings in hot and humid climates. 

Her affinity for hot and humid stems from her home: Alyssa-Amor is from Barbados, an island nation, and she lives and works there now. She thinks that growing up with an acute understanding of human’s and human settlements’ vulnerability to nature and weather cycles has framed her thinking about design. 

She is exploring how best to leverage her cultural and design knowledge in an age of warming. “People say ‘build back better,’ but I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says. “I want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.” Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. “We are inviting people -- everyone! -- to engage, via VR, AI, and other ways. We are asking, can you code/build a city of the collective imagination?”

Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundation’s Ethical Materials Director. She works to advance the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the built environment. For the past two decades, Nora has been dedicated to creating change in the built environment through sustainability, resilience, and social equity work. 

Nora described the traction around the Design for Freedom work, and shared her excitement about a new public exhibit at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut. “With Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. “This exhibit is focused on the idea of ethical decarbonization," Riszzo said. "It  is exploring the link between the climate crisis and the embodied suffering that is happening in our built environment.”

Sandeep Ahuja is co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an AI-first consulting platform that aims to break down barriers in the design and construction cycle, creating a new network of shared information, interoperability, and accountability across projects and teams.

In addition to running cove.tool, Sandeep has recently co-authored a book with Patrick Chopson. Build Like It’s the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction is due out from Wiley by the end of 2024.

Sandeep is passionate about transforming the AEC industry with intelligent and innovative solutions to reduce risk and boost transparency. “We are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,” she says, “and put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.”

Stephanie Phillips leads the City of San Antonio's Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program. Housed in the Office of Historic Preservation, the program prioritizes building material reuse as a tool for affordable housing repair, traditional trades revival, economic innovation, equitable access to high-quality resources, and cultural and community resilience. 

Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio and is a 2023 J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize awardee.

Her work aims to foster collaborative partnerships that get us closer to creating a regenerative built environment. Part of Stephanie’s story is about how she came to think that “design is everything” and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. “What we are doing can happen anywhere,” Stephanie says. “It requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.”

Cristina Gamboa is CEO of the World Green Building Council, an influential local-regional-global network focused on “the transformation to sustainable and decarbonized built environments for everyone, everywhere.” She is an economist with a background in sustainability, policy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships; as such, she is a trusted convener in international settings such as UN Climate Change summits and the World Economic Forum. Cristina is from Colombia and lives in London. Before she came to this work, she was an academic economist with a focus on international affairs and a passion for communicating. 

“Collectively, we’ve had a huge win, getting buildings on the global climate agenda. But with visibility comes responsibility,” Cristina says. “Now we have to make sure that the private sector is empowered to deliver progress.” 

She says that the finance community understands that buildings are the largest global asset class, and this is an opportunity. “If we get this right, they can invest in better assets,” she says. “If we work with the finance community and we find ways to delink emissions from growth and, for example, make sure that the retrofit economy really lifts off, we could unlock the benefits of a carbon-free and circular economy.”

Great strides have been made, she says, but there is work to do: “We still don’t have aggregated data to show change at scale. This is a gap that makes our movement vulnerable. The sooner we can quantify benefits, the better.” 

Lu Salinas has been working in the green building industry since 2006 -- with firms and on projects in the US, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, where she works today. Her consulting firm, THREE Environmental Consulting, has worked on everything from small affordable housing projects to large infrastructure projects such as the New International Mexico City Airport in Texcoco. 

She grew up in Mexico in a family of civil engineers, and happened upon the James Wines book, Sustainable Architecture, in the early 2000s, which sparked her awareness of and interest in the field. 

She sees the international green building industry from Mexico and has built THREE to help advance the level of the work in that region. “I am especially proud of our company’s rule,” she says. “We always do what’s right. I think we have held to this -- doing what is right for the most people.”

Salins is proud to be a part of the movement, which she sees as “an infinite one -- in which people are passing the baton to others.” Salinas takes issue, however, with the idea that the next generation will be the one to address climate change. “The responsibility is with every generation that is currently living,” she says. “We all need to be doing something.” 

Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd., in Accra, Ghana. 

As an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. This year, she joined the board of the International Living Future Institute.

She references the importance of breaking boundaries between silos and communities because, she says, “the materials that we work with surely do.” She is proud of her many collaborations across and between academic, industry, and communities: “We are are advancing top-down and bottom-up approaches to getting these biobased materials not just known but normalized” in the AEC community. Throughout her work, Mae-ling is inspired by the stories of how biobased materials were used over long periods of time in different societies, “which offer us clues for how they could be used today and in the future.”

For our latest podcast, we talked to Myrrh Caplan, who is Senior VP for Sustainability at Skanska and leads the construction company’s national sustainability team. 

Since joining Skanska as a Project Manager in 2005, Myrrh has helped shape Skanska’s national approach to sustainable building. She established the company’s first national Green Construction program and chaired Skanska’s first National Green Council. Myrrh has advised on nearly 300 certified projects and projects seeking LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL, Envision, and other certifications. She sits on the board of mindfulMaterials, serves on several industry committees, and participates in research with key partners. 

We heard from Myrrh about her passion for weaving a positive legacy through the work, and how she brings that to the projects and to the overall enterprise. She speaks about her team as a family that is “in it together” and she is proud of how shared success, to this group of people, “comes before egos.”  

She told us about a recent accomplishment, her work on the Associated General Contractors Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in construction (https://www.agc.org/climate-change-playbook). And we couldn’t resist asking Myrrh to talk about some notable recent projects, including PDX (the new airport in Portland, Ore., designed by ZGF) and the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station (in New York City, designed by SOM). 

Efrie Escott is the Decarbonization Technical Program Leader for Digital Energy at Schneider Electric. As a licensed architect and life cycle assessment practitioner, Efrie’s previous experience in reducing carbon in the built environment was as an environmental researcher within the KieranTimberlake Research Group, where she was a core member of the development team for Tally, an award-winning BIM-integrated life cycle assessment tool.

We had a lively conversation with Efrie about research in the built environment field, Tally, her leap to Schneider Electric, and what kind of impact she is having in that context (including a recently launched internal tool). We also got a little nerdy about ASHRAE standards and others and how they are addressing (and tabulating) whole life carbon. 

She celebrated the immense gains on technology and knowledge, but she also acknowledged her disappointment that we have not yet hit peak emissions. And she voiced a concern that seemed poignant this season, about how we need to bring more people along in the movement and the industry. 

“We are doing a great job accelerating the front end, but we need to work on the middle more," she said. "We need to spend more time talking to other people -- not just each other. This pains me, because I love spending time with people in this community. But if we are serious about really scaling the progress, we need to do a much better job bringing in others. The science tells us that we need to sprint the distance of a marathon. This means we need to carry each other, and we need to be intentional about who we are bringing into the work.”

Joel Todd has been working in the green building field for more than 30 years, most recently as a USGBC Senior Fellow focused on social equity. Her career focused on green building methods and metrics development; she contributed significantly to LEED’s earliest versions and co-founded the LEED Society Equity Working Group (an effort for which she was recognized with USGBC's prestigious Malcolm Lewis Impact Award). 

She describes how she came to work in this movement and how the people made her stay: “That’s really the key to finding your path, I think: Find people you respect and enjoy working with and then keep learning from them.” 

Joel has a long view on the arc of progress and some pointed opinions about both the progress so far and what may be ahead. She notes, for example, that the deep knowledge in the industry has had some unintended consequences. She urges the community to “get out of our detailed, speciality comfort zones to have those conversations about the whole and how it all fits together. Otherwise, instead of working synergistically, things are going to start clashing.”

Billie Faircloth, FAIA, is a design leader and educator who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. 

Billie was a partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake, where she guided the collaborative development of award-winning studies, technology, and architecture. As co-founder and research director of Built Buildings Lab, Faircloth represents the value of existing buildings in the public consciousness, global sustainability practice, and policymaking. She recently joined Cornell University as an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. 

We talked to Billie about the value and benefits of shifting platforms and about the richness of working across realms -- practice, policy, and academia. We asked her about the communities of which she is a part. “When I look at the green building industry, I see a whole range of communities engaging in movements,” she said. “They are advocating for decarbonization and energy transition or reducing emissions with embodied carbon, or advocating for supply chain equity or carbon neutral design or regenerative design. I see a movement of movements.” 

Meghan Lewis is the Program Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), where she leads strategy, research and resource development to execute CLF’s mission to eliminate embodied carbon in buildings, materials, and infrastructure to create a just and thriving future. 

Meghan joined CLF in 2020 to lead their efforts to inform public policies targeting embodied carbon, from Buy Clean to building codes and beyond. Previous to joining CLF, Meghan was an architect and launched a global supply chain sustainability program at WeWork. 

We talked to her about embodied carbon (of course), changing practice, the realities of research, and translating knowledge to meaningful policy. “It's really important for people to remember that a lot of the progress that has been made was led by states and cities, and will continue to be led by states and cities,” she said. “Progress is not going to stop, but now there's an even bigger opportunity for local action. I recommend that people think about the groups they're a part of as part of how you think about policy in the next four years.” 

We talked about books, too. Meghan shared how reading science fiction fantasy helps her bring optimism to her work. 

Jonsara Ruth is co-founder and Design Director of Healthy Materials Lab (HML) at Parsons School of Design, where she is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the MFA Interior Design program. Alison Mears is Associate Professor of Architecture, Director and Co-Founder of HML and Director/Co-Founder of HML EU. 

Alison and Jonsara published “Material Health:Design Frontiers” exploring the intersectional and complex nature of material health. They also co-authored a chapter of The Regenerative Materials Movement (Living Future/Ecotone, 2024). 

This year is the Healthy Materials Lab’s tenth in operation. Alison and Jonsara’s close collaboration has been central to the Lab’s development and to its success in engaging people and changing minds and practices.

“Jonsara and I have a lot in common,” Alison says, “including a drive to use our design skills in the service of a higher goal to produce place for people that meet all their needs. We want to raise the bar. And we want to invite people in to do this work.”

Jonsara says their partnership works well because they have complementary skill sets and they’ve always been willing to hear one another out. “We value intuition and we respect each other’s experience. We are both committed to always learning and evolving,” she says. 

Shannon Goodman is the Executive Director of the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta, which has redirected nearly 13 million pounds of usable materials away from landfills and generated over $6 million in community savings, including 450 in-kind material grants to nonprofits. Shannon also serves as Board President for the nonprofit Build Reuse, representing reuse-focused organizations across the U.S. 

We talked to her about running a nonprofit and about the changes afoot in the AEC field. “We are in the midst of a massive mind shift,” she says. “It's only going to work if people actually see that there is value. We have to stop thinking about these materials as waste. They are resources.”

Shannon’s vision for the reuse work is that “the entire process of what we do gets really sexy for people,” she says. “I look forward to a time when people are compelled by the stories they are hearing of what has been saved and reused. They will think, ‘I want a piece of that for my work.’ That is only going to happen if we make it really easy to tell those stories.”

Dr. Upali Nanda is Partner and Executive Vice President at HKS. As the firm’s Global Sector Director, Innovation, she oversees HKS’s Research, Advisory, Sustainable Design and Cities & Communities services. Based in Ann Arbor, Upali has extensive experience leading research projects in design practice with a focus on the impact of design on human health and perception. 

Upali believes that the big problems will be solved by getting many disciplines together in conversation. One example, the FDA Home as a Health Hub Idea Lab, brought together housing designers, developers, technology developers, investors, healthcare providers, and others. 

All such work is rooted in Upali’s deep commitment to the integration of research into practice. That commitment has prompted to her to ask deep questions about people and place. “How can we design for humans without knowing how humans are designed?” she asks. “That question got me interested in how humans perceive and behave, and then over time, that evolved into this interest in human health itself.” 

In our kick-off episode, meet hosts Lindsay Baker  and Kira Gould, who discuss their interest in exploring and sharing the amazing work being done in sustainability by women across the country and beyond.

Lindsay and Kira have worked in a number of capacities in the sustainable design field: Lindsay worked at USGBC, Google, and WeWork, in between which she started and ran Comfy. Kira was an editor at Metropolis magazine, worked at architecture firms, and now runs a communications consultancy; she also co-authored Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design.

Lindsay and Kira believe that there are connections between sustainability and women's leadership strengths, and that women talking about their paths can help other women who are seeking to chart or optimize their own. Starting this podcast in 2020, a year that has long been discussed as a milestone year for climate action and sustainability progress, seems appropriate. Starting it amid the first round of stay-at-home orders amid the COVID-19 pandemic added a layer of awareness to discussions about human health, what we design and build, and the health of our planet. 

Our first guest, Sara Neff, Senior Vice President for Sustainability for Kilroy Realty, has brought that organization to a leadership position in sustainability within the real estate market. She talks about her career journey, advances being made in the real estate sector, why the business case matters (and isn’t everything), and what commitments to carbon neutrality mean in her sector. We discuss what’s ahead, including work in supply chains and efforts to quantify climate risk. She also tells us about the Neffletter (sign up at SaraNeff.com), her email newsletter that talks about her reasons for optimism.  

Sarah Golden is the Senior Energy Analyst and Conference Chair, VERGE Energy with GreenBiz Group. We talk about the importance of storytelling and how stories can advance the movement. Sarah also shares her perspective on energy markets in the context of the pandemic and economic disruption, including insight about the fight for the shape of what will come next. We discuss feminine leadership traits -- crucial for handling the pandemic and climate change. 

Mary Curtiss is the head of sustainability for HP operations, which includes 120 sites around the world. For her, this is a mandate about buildings and people. She explains why storytelling and empathy are as important as the technical side of buildings. She describes how she sees sustainability as something that engages everyone who enters a building, and how she thinks about that experience along with efficiency, renewables, and other specific sustainability factors. She also shares thoughts about the promise of (and challenges around) renewables today in the U.S. and globally, and how cities are helping to advance progress and innovation with regulation. 

Rosa Sheng is an architect and Principal with SmithGroup and the firm’s Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. We discuss how intersectionality plays out in architecture, pushing us to eliminate conventional silos and explore how sustainability, justice, diversity, equity and inclusion are interrelated. We talk about the diversity and gender pay equity issues behind the American Institute of Architecture’s Equity by Design initiative, founded at AIA San Francisco, and how that group’s research has spotlighted patterns across firms.

Gail Vittori, the co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas, has been a change agent in the green building movement for many years. She says that she brought a “beginner’s mind” to the industry. She saw a gap, early on, when green building was not addressing health (and the healthcare sector), and took steps to address that; today, the human health dimension is widely understood as a key driver. At a certain point, she says, we have to realize that we are either creating the conditions that are conducive to health -- or we are not.  

Liz Ogbu is a designer, urbanist, and social innovator. Her multidisciplinary consultancy, Studio O, works with communities in need to leverage the power of design to catalyze sustained social impact. Which is not, strictly speaking, what most people learn in architecture school...but Liz has been redefining things since she decided to study architecture. Liz is finding ways to use design to embrace spatial justice; she sees this as a way to create cities where people can thrive. Instead of building places, she asks, what if we were helping build a capacity to stay?  In tackling inequity, we can look for ingredients that allow us to step forward. 

Perhaps it was her summer manufacturing job that seeded her interest in resource cycles. After studying architecture, Amanda Kaminsky worked in real estate at the Durst Organization in New York, then founded Building Products Ecosystems (BPE) with a mission to evolve the systemic health of building material flows. (Her daughter once described Amanda’s job this way: “She takes trash out of the garbage.”) She works with all the stakeholders in the vast (and often recalcitrant) construction industry. BPE focuses on transparent data and industry signaling through research, job site piloting, and then standardization, which, Amanda says, is the key to scaling impact. 

Architect Mara Baum leads global health and wellness design practice, which includes a number of large projects for large health organizations. Human health had been an interest of Mara’s for years, though during her education, it was not at all a focus of the architecture community. Our conversation touched on a number of things including what healthcare design can teach other building types, the value of “cheerful persistence,” and how being a part of a movement helps keep her moving forward day by day.

Andréa Traber is an architect and managing principal at Integral, an engineering/consulting firm aimed at accelerating positive change. Amid fast-paced change brought on by the pandemic, Integral is looking at new ways of shaping teams and serving clients. Andréa is inspired by the openness and creativity of multi-generational teams. In the green building movement, she suggests that great progress has been made. But there is a long way to go on the Herculean effort to get off fossil fuels -- “let us not forget, climate change is more pressing than the pandemic,” she says -- and also around equity and social issues.

In the course of architect Eden Brukman’s career, she has touched and shaped a number of critical aspects of the sustainable building industry. Today, she is the Senior Green Building Coordinator for the City of San Francisco. We talked to her about accountability, working at the city scale, decarbonization, material banks, and about why mentoring is so important. Eden touched on how systems thinking is so crucial to solving the big challenges; she cited the classic Donella Meadows essay, Leverage Points in a System, as an enduring reference point.

Elaine Hsieh is co-founder and head of Corporate Partnerships/Marketing for
Third Derivative, a new organization focused on success and speed to market for climate innovation efforts. Throughout her career, Elaine has followed her curiosity and instinct and sought out value alignment and growth potential. Today, she is passionate about the need to bend the emissions curve precipitously; that urgency is driving her (and Third Derivative) to bring startups, investors, corporations, and market, regulatory, and energy policy insights into one program as a path to much faster market readiness. 

Architect Carlie Bullock-Jones runs Ecoworks Studio in Atlanta and her firm touches many buildings whose owners seek green building certifications including LEED, WELL, and others. This includes very large-scale projects such as professional sports facilities, and she talks about why sustainability-driven design and planning moves in those venues can become a public teaching tool and a community benefit. (Carlie gives a shout out to the late Gail Lindsey, a force-of-nature pioneer who touched many people in the green building movement.)

Master communicator Marge Anderson works at the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Slipstream, Inc., where she shapes education to drive behavior change around energy. She chaired the US Green Building Council in 2015, and was in Paris for the climate talks. She says that her working-class upbringing did not suggest a path to sustainability but it has informed her leadership in the field. She is an optimist (and cites British environmental leader Tony Juniper on this: “it’s too late for pessimism”), but she feels great urgency and is startlingly succinct: “On climate, we’ve got nine and a half years left. On equity, we’re 400 years too late.” 

Kimberly Lewis is SVP for market transformation and development at the US Green Building Council, where she has centered people and healing in her work. This movement builder is responsible for GBC’s Equity Summit, its Women in Green leadership platform, Sheroes, and more.  Kimberly talks about what it means to live your values in your work, the buzzwords in the sustainable buildings industry, and how we cannot equity-wash what’s next.

Stacy Smedley started her career in architecture and has worked with global construction company Skanska for the past seven years. She co-conceived the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool last year, and is on loan from Skanska to launch the nonprofit Building Transparency to share and scale EC3. She’s also a songwriter/singer, a parent, and writes children’s books. She talks about aligning personal passions and skill sets with the potential for impact and how we can all be energized by the positive things happening in climate response. 

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.” 

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.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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. 

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.

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). 

Architect, affordable housing expert, and leadership cultivator Katie Swenson joined MASS Design Group early this year, after years at Enterprise Community Partners, where she expanded the Rose Fellowship, bringing design expertise into collaboration with communities. While Katie was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard GSD, she asked: “What role do love and kindness play in urban design?” Love is also at the core of Katie’s two new books (Schiffer Publishing, 2020). In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness, which Katie wrote following the death of her partner, is also about architecture, history, and home. Design with Love: At Home in America, chronicles the work of the Rose Fellowship, uplifting these collaborations. 

Heather Rosenberg has an ecology background and has made a career of systems thinking applied to climate change; she currently leads Arup’s resilience discipline in the Americas. “To me, the most fascinating aspects of this work is the fitting together of the economic, social, and environmental systems.” We talked about how she got into the green buildings industry and started exploring questions (with Joel Todd and others) about how buildings and communities can help people thrive. If we are serious about the triple bottom line, she says, we have a lot to do on the equity front: “It’s not just bringing people to our table, it’s also showing up at their tables, too.” 

Vivian Loftness is a professor in the architecture school at Carnegie Mellon University who also serves on the board of the AIA and ILFI, among others. We talked about the value of standards, as goals and metrics, and the critical pull they provide for industry. We talked about improvements to architecture education, including making sure that all studios address environmental and equity issues, inherent as they are to design, and involve metrics. She also talked about using the Triple Bottom Line to cost justify better buildings (and encourage owners to think about net present value). And if she’s in charge for a day, one of her edicts would be that all buildings be designed for “environmental surfing.”

Lynn Simon is head of Real Estate and Workplace Services Sustainability at Google, a role that includes health, wellness, food, transportation, placemaking, amenities, and more. The built environment is central to her work, but it also includes all the systems that connect people to place. Recently, Lynn convened the Regen Lab to address what they called “radical resilience beyond the perimeter.” Lynn points out that “think global, act local” is still true, and for Google, which is in 54 countries and 648 buildings, that means considering equity in many places and in many ways. There is so much to learn, she says, by engaging the disenfranchised and indigenous communities.”I think we have to be intentional about all aspects of our lives and our work to bring in diverse voices.”

Dr. Whitney Austin Gray is Senior VP of Research at the International Well Building Institute and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown School of Urban and Regional Planning and the School of Nursing and Health Studies. Whitney was captivated early on in her studies by the notion that buildings can promote health, productivity, and wellness, which inspired her to create a career path that combines public health and design. This cross pollination is more important than ever right now, when we can see so clearly how buildings and climate change are impacting health. 

Architect Michelle Amt is Director of Sustainability at VMDO Architects and previously worked at William McDonough + Partners. She is serving on the jury for the AIA COTE Top Ten Awards in 2021, and cites that program with merging design with high performance in a way that no other does. Michelle says she feels like she’s part of a movement within an industry. The industry is baseline, championing things that we should all be doing whereas the movement is trying to make a much bigger change. “Let’s not lose the sense that the world can be reinvented,” she says. “When COVID-19 hit, it made us all think about what we really needed, what was meaningful, and how things could change. There has been suffering, too, but we did shift quickly. The planet mobilized for a solution. That could work for climate, too.” 

Architect Anica Landreneau leads HOK’s global sustainable design practice and serves on the firm’s board of directors and design board. Anica has been involved at the local and Federal level with policy and advocacy, including providing Congressional testimony. As Anica says, “We need those who are doing the work to come to these hearings and bring our experience and expertise to the table. Code changes, and other changes, are needed. Who do we think will do this?” In those words, Anica articulates a question that is, perhaps, lurking for many active in this realm. “If not us, then who?” 

Architect and educator Wanda Dalla Costa is a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation, the Principal of Tawaw Architecture Collective, and a Professor at Arizona State University, where she is also Director/Founder of the Indigenous Design Collaborative. Her approach to architecture is rooted in her perspective on how communities support people and their cultural lifeways. “We integrate a full indigenous research paradigm in our work. We explore place and purpose through epistemology, or ways of knowing; ontology, or ways of being; methodology, or ways of doing; and axiology, which is about value systems.” Wanda notes that architecture -- practice and education -- may be on the cusp of significant changes. “We need to build multiple knowledges into our work … to create create an Earth-centered architecture.” 

Daniele Horton is passionate about the role of real estate in tackling climate change. Trained as an architect, she is an influential sustainability leader; her company, Verdani Partners, manages sustainability for portfolios totaling more than 720 million square feet. 

Daniele grew up in Brazil with an appreciation for the natural world. In the work world, she shifted from architecture to real estate because she saw the possibility to scale sustainability solutions. She is committed to reaching net zero, for new and existing buildings, and warns that commercial real estate firms that do not move toward this will not be ready for the risks ahead. The time for incremental improvements is behind us, she says, “now is the time for for bold, aggressive action.” 

Adrienne Johnson is a mechanical engineer with Point Energy Innovations, where she focuses on helping clients realize high performance buildings, including net zero projects. Her interest in sustainability is broad; she has researched water and energy issues and won the USGBC’s Malcom Lewis IMPACT! award in 2017 for her work on a school in Parkwood, outside of Capetown. That experience has informed how she brings social justice to her work today, including working on what the industry looks like and also who is benefitting from sustainable infrastructure. She hopes to see net zero energy buildings gain momentum and buildings become part of an overall just energy transition. 

Jasmin Moore serves as the Sustainability Director for Douglas County, Kansas, and the City of Lawrence, Kansas. This role encompasses everything from energy systems to food policy, and she recently led the integration of sustainability and equity into funding criteria for the Lawrence Capital Improvements Plan, a first in the state. 

Jasmin is pleased that, as she puts it, “equity has finally come to the sustainability party. Particularly in local government, sustainability and equity are closely tied.” We discussed the language of sustainability and the importance of working with communities to define terms locally. For the Douglas County and Lawrence community, she says, “we talk about sustainability as living today like you believe there will be a tomorrow -- the next day and the next generation. This is about quality of life for all.”

Jennifer Leitsch is VP of Corporate Responsibility at CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm. Jennifer has an engineering degree and became captivated by the notion of business as a force for good. Under her leadership, CBRE recently announced a new set of emissions reduction goals with science based targets. “As the largest commercial real estate firm, we are committed to leading on this front,” Jennifer says. CBRE is also thinking about risk, including transition risks that will be significant to companies in the coming years. “The industry is in the midst of major mindset shift,” she says. 

Kirsten Ritchie is a Global Resilience Leader and principal at Gensler, where she brings her civil engineering background to big discussions about innovation, wellbeing, and high-performance design. 

Being a trailblazer throughout her career has given Kirsten a confidence that’s crucial for the persuading that is part of that role. She points out that advancing sustainability in the AEC industry depends on collaboration. “I am really proud of the work we are doing,” she says. “We are making places better for people and better for the planet.” Gensler has recently committed to taking all projects to net zero carbon by 2030, and Kirsten is also proud of that step. “We have shifted the focus to carbon and climate, away from just efficiency,” she says. “I think we will see much faster movement in the coming five to ten years.” 

Renée Lertzman is a researcher, educator, and strategist who uses psychological insight to change our approach to the environmental crisis. She works with organizations to harness the creativity needed to solve big problems.  

We spoke with Renée about her work, including Project Inside Out, which she created to help people in all sectors explore psychological concepts and expand changemaking potential. “In the built environment sector and others, the baseline is understanding that climate action and sustainability work is fundamentally change management,” she says. “It is also upsetting and charged. Recognizing these qualities of the work can help position us to understand all stakeholders as we try to advance change.” 

Chandra Farley is the Just Energy Director at the Partnership for Southern Equity where she leads a team developing local and regional strategies to advance energy equity. “Activism is about trust, respect, and partnership,” she says, “This is personal work.” 

While some of the activity around utilities and how they are regulated can seem wonky, the influence is significant. PSE focuses on how equity-centered energy and utility policies can improve household economic stability and quality of air, water, and other resources that affect health and well-being. The organization’s theory of change is that people drive it. Chandra points out that this work “is all about strengthening civic engagement -- that’s a muscle. It’s through that that we can get to systems transformation.” 

Michelle Moore is a social entrepreneur, former White House official, and current CEO of Groundswell, a nonprofit that builds community power by connecting clean energy with economic development, affordability, and quality of life.

Reflecting on 25 years in the sustainability space, including a stint at the USGBC, Michelle notes that the focus on metrics and goals has fostered is a very technocratic culture. Yet her drive and purpose is centered on the idea that sustainability is fundamentally about loving people and place. Michelle believes in aligning value with values. This gives her a discerning perspective and inspires her commitment to ensuring that policy is oriented toward lasting change. Michelle has roots in rural Georgia and her work is anchored in her faith and the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Architect and structural engineer Kate Simonen is a leader, teacher, researcher, and convener -- and a big believer in the collective impact model. She is also executive director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (a network of 25 regional hubs and thousands of practitioners) and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington.

She has been a force behind collaborative initiatives such as the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator and the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment. After practicing for years, Kate is an educator because she sees the role as ”part of my climate action responsibility.” Kate is thrilled to see all the different ways that embodied carbon is coming into policy -- from codes that call for low-carbon concrete to policy levers that address industrial decarbonization. Under Kate’s leadership, a consortium (CLF at UW, in partnership with Endeavour Center, University of Colorado-Boulder, and Building Transparency) is a finalist for the Lever for Change program with a project that proposes to convert buildings to carbon sinks by storing carbon in buildings using biogenic materials.

Landscape architect Pamela Conrad is a principal at CMG Landscape Architecture and founder of Climate Positive Design. She grew up in rural Missouri, has a background in plant science and regenerative design, and today is focused on climate mitigation and resilient design in the public realm. 

The role of landscape architects in  carbon sequestration is something she explored as a Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellow, which led to Climate Positive Design’s challenge and Pathfinder tool. “I wanted to understand the impacts of my projects, so I built a landscape carbon calculator. But the the real challenge is to reach positive,” she says, “to offset footprint as soon as possible and then shift to taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” The way she sees it, if landscape architects worldwide shifted to using the targets that the Climate Positive Design defines, “we could sequester more than we emit by 2030 and remove even more by 2050. We can begin to reverse global warming.” 

Martha Campbell is a Principal in RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings Practice, focused on decarbonizing the U.S. building stock using standardized, affordable, attractive building construction methods and innovative business models. 

Martha has worked in the ski industry and for Goldman Sachs and doing field organizing in Northern New Mexico. A stay at an off-the-grid hostel in Australia prompted her to wonder, “Why don’t we build everything this way?” At RMI now, she is working to decarbonize the  economy using market based approaches. And that early question still drives her. “I want to move to a place where this is just how you build things.” And, she points out, it’s not just about decarbonizing: “It’s about making sure that buildings are healthy and safe places to live. We need to build resilience, too.” Some of the biggest challenges relate to a recalcitrant industry’s stakeholders who are scared of change. Campbell and RMI are trying to prove that a new model can benefit many. 

Johanna Partin is Deputy Director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, which works to help electrify California with clean energy. “We are not going to be able to counteract emissions or have healthy cities without getting off fossil gas,” she says. 

Johanna studied microfinance abroad but migrated from international development to a hyper local focus, working with San Francisco Mayors Newsom and Lee, and then to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group; she founded and directed the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. “Cities tend to be more ambitious than their state or national counterparts,” Johanna says, “because they are on the front lines of climate change, and in cities, the climate issues are clearly about people and their lives.” 

“We are energy social workers,” says Daphany Rose Sanchez. She founded Kinetic Communities, which advocates and implements strategic energy equity market transformations for New York communities, to respond to a representation gap in the energy sector. 

She got interested in this as she studied sustainable urban environments and redlining and other policies. “I started to see a correlation between the opportunity for generational wealth, sustainable housing, and climate response,” she says. “I wanted my career to be an intersection of housing, climate, and economic mobility.” These days, she works on pathways to electrification that involve workforce development, housing, and financial security.  “Transitioning off of fossils fuels is important, but we have to understand that our buildings are filled with people, so our climate solutions must address the social and cultural fabric of the community.” 

Dana Bourland is committed to solving our housing and climate crises in ways that advance justice. Dana led the creation of the environment program at The JPB Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the US. Before that, she helped create the Green Communities program (at Enterprise Community Partners), a set of criteria now required by 27 states.

Dana is also the author of a new book, Gray to Green Communities: A Call to Action on the Housing and Climate Crises, published this year by Island Press. Dana conceived it as a thank you to the imaginative, committed people working in affordable housing, but the call to action is clear, and it is for us all. 

“Mainstream America doesn’t know what’s going on in affordable housing on the green building and equity front,” Dana says. “It is within our grasp to fundamentally change the course of human history -- if we address these two crises together. We can provide housing at the rate and scale we need and address climate action.” We can do this, she says, if we all show up in a way that is accountable to communities who have never gotten the resources that they deserve.

This week, we turn the spotlight on host Lindsay Baker who has just been named CEO of the International Living Future Institute. Lindsay is a building scientist, market mover, and climate activist focused on transforming the built environment to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis. Most recently, she was Global Head of Sustainability and Impact at WeWork; before that, she grew a smart buildings software startup, Comfy, to acquisition, and held roles at the US Green Building Council and Google. 

Linday is excited to be transitioning back to the non-profit world after being in the private sector for a decade, and thrilled to work with ILFI team and community. “I think ILFI is perfect to be instigating some of the needed changes in our movement and industries. It is already a leading-edge and progressive voice,” she says. “I think we need more urgency, more action, and less equivocation about what can be done.”  

Marta Schantz is senior vice president at the Urban Land Institute, where she has been building ULI's Greenprint Center for Building Performance -- a community of practice -- into a vanguard of real estate sustainability. 

ULI is tackling transformational initiatives including net zero and decarbonization. “I’m proud that a real estate industry group is declaring decarbonization a priority," Marta says. ULI recently released an electrification report because, she says, “most of real estate hasn’t yet realized that buildings need to electrify to be truly zero carbon. Our report is the business case for new buildings and retrofits.”