From process to practice: Sustainability in El Paso, Texas

Mitchell is the 2026 chair of the Committee on the Environment. This first-person article is part of a series that she hopes will bring more voices to the sustainability conversation.

Texas is too large—and too environmentally varied—for a single sustainability narrative to make sense. The questions that shape design in Austin or Houston aren’t as useful in El Paso, where the landscape is desert, the time zone is Mountain, and the proximity is closer to Phoenix than to Dallas.

This fact became apparent when I spoke with Laura Foster, an architect practicing in El Paso. Foster’s job is unusual in a way that changed the conversation. She is the resident architect at El Paso Water, the regional water utility. As such, she brought two perspectives to the conversation: that of an architect and that of a client in charge of civic infrastructure and facility projects, including the design and construction of the utility’s new corporate headquarters.

When language becomes a barrier—and a tool

Architects and designers have our own vocabulary. We use words that feel warm and familiar inside the profession: sustainability, resilience, regenerative design, well-being, climate action. Those words carry meaning for us. They can even feel like a shared promise—an assurance that we’re doing the right thing.

But Foster’s day-to-day work happens in a different reality.

At El Paso Water, she’s often talking to engineers, operations staff, project managers, and board members who aren’t fluent in architecture’s internal language. And she has learned something that feels obvious once you hear it: When the word sustainability enters the room, it doesn’t always land with clarity. Sometimes it lands as a question mark.

For many, it’s simply vague—an umbrella term that could mean anything from solar panels to vegetable gardens. For others, it’s politically loaded. Foster avoids using the term sustainability in board meetings and with bosses not because she doesn’t value it but because she has learned that it can come with a “partisan bite” or may feel meaningless outside of the profession.

That distinction matters. If a term is perceived as partisan—or even just abstract—it changes the emotional temperature of the conversation. People stop listening for substance and start searching for subtext.

Instead, Foster does something simple yet profound: She changes the vocabulary. She replaces architecture’s broad, values-driven language with words that are actionable. Instead of asking a room full of engineers to sign onto an idea that might feel amorphous, she anchors the conversation in things they care about: durability, operational savings, lifecycle cost, and long-term reliability. She’s not watering down the ambition; she’s making it legible.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Foster isn’t trying to win an argument. She’s trying to get a building built—one that works, lasts, and supports a mission that matters.

Design that responds to place

Foster’s definition of sustainable design isn’t about a single technology or perfect solution. For her, great design means creating a building that responds to its location—not just aesthetically or culturally but down to the ecosystem level.

She described the design of El Paso Water’s new headquarters, a building located in what she calls El Paso’s new geographic center, surrounded by a sea of pavement and suburban commercial sprawl. It was in this context that they introduced the concept of “rewilding” the four-acre plot. That meant imagining a site that could support a native habitat, bringing back birds and wildlife that had long since left the area.

That detail stood out to me because it’s not the stereotypical version of sustainability. It’s not a gadget. It’s not a headline. It’s a reminder that even in the middle of a highly developed area, you can still ask: What was this place before the pavement—and what might it become again?

She also talked about the building form as a fundamental climate response. A courtyard layout, she noted, is a key strategy for a place like El Paso—an architectural move that shapes comfort and performance, not just appearance. In Foster’s framing, better design isn’t something you bolt on at the end. It starts at the beginning: how a building sits, how it breathes, how it lasts.

An architect embedded among engineers

One of the most fascinating parts of Foster’s interview was simply hearing what it’s like to be the lone architect inside a water utility. She described it as empowering—an opportunity to be in the trenches of true interdisciplinary work and a chance to learn why teams so often fail to integrate.

In her role, she’s managing projects, reviewing plans, and providing subject matter expertise across the utility’s building portfolio. She also worked with the board to choose the site for the headquarters project, write the RFQ, and participate in the selection of the design team.

The larger point here feels important, especially for architects who care about climate action: Sometimes progress isn’t about persuading a client to “care more.” Sometimes it’s about putting design leadership in the right place inside an organization so that they can ask the right questions early enough to matter.

Foster described how her presence has expanded the kinds of projects the utility is willing to pursue. She’s working on an adaptive reuse of an outdated cold storage warehouse and is in negotiations for a historic 1916 courtyard building that will be redeveloped into offices—projects that wouldn’t have happened without an architect on staff.

That’s a different kind of leverage: not louder, just earlier.

Turning design excellence into decision criteria

Another thing I appreciated in Foster’s approach is that she doesn’t treat sustainability as a banner. She treats it as a set of decisions.

She described using the AIA Framework for Design Excellence not as a marketing tool but as a way to turn design excellence into criteria that could guide the headquarters project—criteria that made sense to engineers, operations staff, leadership, and board members alike.

Instead of arguing for sustainability as a value statement, she’s building shared alignment around questions like: How will this building perform? How will it respond to the weather? How will it support the people who work here and serve the utility’s long-term mission?

The framework didn’t just guide the design. It changed who could meaningfully participate in shaping it.

“Cheap and basic is not durable”

One of the most vivid moments in our conversation came when Foster described resistance to the headquarters building’s form. Early design concepts included a courtyard strategy that curled inward, responsive to prevailing breezes and sun angles. But there was hesitance. Some stakeholders saw it as impractical or assumed it would be more expensive than a basic rectangular building.

Foster pushed back firmly. She reframed the conversation: A cheap and basic structure is not durable, not adaptable, and therefore not sensible. Thoughtful design, she argued, saves money over time by reducing the churn of expensive renovations and tenant improvements.

And then she shared something architects rarely get to say: At 80% completion, the project still has a large contingency left. That detail matters because it’s proof that climate-responsive design doesn’t have to mean runaway cost. It can mean discipline, integration, and long-term thinking.

What I’m taking forward

After my conversation with Foster, I kept returning to a simple idea: If we want sustainability to be durable, we must operationalize it.

Foster’s work in El Paso is deeply environmental. It’s tied to water, land, heat, and long-term stewardship. But her perspective is unique because of where she sits: inside the organization, with the ability to influence not just a single project but the processes that shape all projects.

She’s able to change what “business as usual” looks like by embedding better criteria into the work—into the RFQ language, into the decision-making frameworks, and into the questions teams ask before they ever put pencil to paper.

Foster’s perspective reminded me that the future of sustainable design may depend less on persuasion and more on who gets to shape the process before the work begins.

Ellen Mitchell, AIA, is the director of sustainability & applied research at LPA Design Studios. Earlier in this article series, she interviewed architects about sustainability in Texoma and the Texas Hill Country.