What does it mean to build a regenerative practice?

Many architects and design professionals know the basics of regenerative design. The outcomes of these efforts strive to restore the living systems they touch, enhance water and carbon cycles, and empower communities to make positive choices for themselves.

“You are engaged in regeneration when it starts to work outside your intentions,” Living Future CEO Lindsay Baker recently told Wanda Lau for AIA Architect. But what happens when this paradigm informs a company’s business plan, professional development practices, or employee benefits? What does it mean when a company decides to live and operate by the tenets it promotes in its built work?

Practicing beyond projects  

To begin to answer that question, a good starting point for firms is to quantify and qualify their value beyond the contents of their project portfolio. Drew Lavine, AIA, design director with Re:Vision, encourages firm leaders to ask themselves: “What about all the operational stuff? Are you training your people to be regenerative and creating communities to be regenerative?”  

Lavine cites his own company’s efforts to “decarbonize” their finances, move towards employee ownership, and implement a volunteer policy that encourages real community engagement over sitting in design and planning committees, among other intentional acts. “That’s the foundational stuff [to building] a regenerative practice,” he says.  

All things being equal, Lavine and his colleagues don’t presume their practice has achieved this status. But as a founding B Corporation with a reputation for practicing sustainable design as its baseline, it’s fair to say Re:Vision is further along than most. Like any enterprise worth chasing, the real value may lie more in the journey than the destination.

Change from the bottom up

Another firm that has charted a course on this path is Miller Hull Partnership, whose catalog of high-performance projects—Living Building, WELL-certified, or otherwise—is impressive by any metric. Chris Hellstern, AIA, Miller Hull’s director of regenerative design and climate policy, humbly calls those “one-off projects.”  

Still, as those “one-offs” multiply, the replicable experience of solving unique problems begins to “transform” their practice from within.

“One of the things that’s not often talked about is the culture of traditional architectural design,” Hellstern says. “At Miller Hull, there’s no ‘black cape’ architect at the top. Design ideas sometimes come from our youngest staff members. We have a culture of curiosity in the firm, and that allows young staff to be part of those discussions and drive the sustainability performance of our projects.”  

Achieving this level of corporate democracy, if such a thing exists, is easier said than done, especially for established practices with long-term clients. For Miller Hull, a mid-size firm founded almost 50 years ago, it was baked in from the start. Hellstern cites a favored term of co-founder David Miller, AIA, who says the firm seeks out “projects of consequence.” This ethos nurtures transparency and dialogue, and “helps us chase the projects that influence everyday lives,” Hellstern says, like water treatment plants and other civic infrastructure projects “that won’t make the cover of Architectural Record.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee that such lofty principles will endure when confronted by economic recession, executive turnover, and other ruptures. A plant in fertile soil still needs tending. Re:Vision’s founding partner Scott Kelly, AIA, says the key is “natural generational attrition.”

“Start with the youngest generations, teach them how to think in a regenerative way, and let them move up!” he says. “In the bigger firms, it’s so hard to make change happen from the top down, but it’s so easy from the bottom up.”  

Walking the talk

Perhaps one of the more obvious ways to build a regenerative practice is for firms to demonstrate their values within their own company, and in effect, live by the same principles they sell to clients. A range of actions may comprise such efforts, including small gestures like installing low-flow fixtures at the office and starting a company-wide composting program to grander efforts like getting off fossil fuels, joining the 1% pro bono design program, and pursuing B Corp certification. The blueprint is malleable.  

Lake Flato started pursuing such a path a few years ago. In 2019, the firm—already well-known for its sustainable design work—earned their Just label. Some years later, near the tail end of the pandemic, the firm earned B Corp status, further demonstrating its commitment to creating an equitable, inclusive, and economically regenerative workplace. For its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, a three-story building that the firm has owned since its founding, Lake Flato recently earned WELL Platinum certification and is pursuing Zero Carbon certification. Collectively, these efforts are emblematic of a firm making health and wellbeing core tenets of their daily operations.  

“It's been a real learning experience. We’ve been pretty transparent in the office about what our shortcomings have been. … It’s a journey we’re still on,” says Heather Holdridge, Assoc. AIA, Lake Flato’s director of design performance. “All these things are in the same spirit that we aspire to on projects for clients.”  

Adaptability and flexibility

When it comes to building a regenerative practice, there are numerous design and social health frameworks for firms to reference in their respective journeys. Along with the AIA Framework for Design Excellence and Living Building Challenge (LBC), notable examples  include the Design for Freedom Toolkit and the Common Materials Framework, which supports the AIA Materials Pledge. All have merit, and any earnest efforts to abide by their guiding principles will measurably enhance one’s practice. Still, there is some concern that the industry’s purview of regenerative design and, by extension, regenerative practice, remains too limited.  

“Everything that’s on the LEED checklist starts from the presumption that you’re working on a building in the Global North,” says Carl Elefante, FAIA, 2018 AIA President. He concedes that frameworks like Design for Freedom, LBC, and others are cognizant of this shortcoming and “are trying to get beyond that,” but in the interim remain mired in a world that’s content with mediocrity.  

The status quo, according to Elefante, is an economic system that invites excess and building codes that conflate resiliency with permanence, rather than pushing for adaptability and flexibility. He also argues that externalities like carbon accounting and energy performance benchmarks have effectively “usurped the movement” and made it harder for architects to build things that are truly regenerative and yield net benefits in perpetuity. “Our definition of good is only half good,” he says.

Indeed, raising the standard of practice in every facet of the architecture profession will broaden our definition of regenerative design and help us qualify tangible value as well as intangible returns on investment that such a practice brings. But until the rubber meets the road, a lot of firms will need to ask themselves some tough questions about how they’re doing business and what needs to change.  

“If you can build a system that creates stronger succession, if you can develop and train a strong staff, then by the time you’re ready to retire, they’ve been the ones increasing the regenerative value of the company,” says Lavine of Re:Vision. “If you can find a way to nurture that from within, maybe that’s the best way to change perspective.”  

Justin R. Wolf is a freelance writer covering architecture and design. He lives in Maine.