The next frontier: Regenerative architecture and the argument the profession needs to make

This is the fourth installment of The Other Drawing Set, a five-part series on self-advocacy and leadership in the architecture profession. See the sidebar for previous entries.

About a year before Mississippi effectively banned LEED for public buildings, I spent two hours in a room with the state’s forestry industry pitching a compromise I thought everyone could live with. At the end of those two hours, someone across the table told me it was too complicated to work. Thanks for stopping by, Jeff. I felt the color drain out of my face. That was my first real taste of the rooms outside the room—the ones that decide what is allowed to happen in the first place.

In 2013, Mississippi passed a bill that stipulated that any green building rating system used on a state-funded project had to recognize forest certifications from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the American Tree Farm System, and the Forest Stewardship Council. That language read as inclusive, but functionally, it was a ban on the one rating system that did not recognize all three: LEED.

By then, I had been advocating for sustainable design in Mississippi for nearly a decade as a founding board member of the U.S. Green Building Council’s state chapter. After that meeting and the 2013 bill, I learned to stop using the word “sustainability” entirely. I started talking about energy independence. I started talking about buildings that were not built “just to code,” which is the bare minimum standard the law allows. I started talking about utility bills, insurance costs, and what it would mean for a state that, at the time, sat near the bottom of the country’s education rankings to have public schools with better indoor air quality.

None of those phrases set off the political tripwires that “sustainability” did. They were all true. And they all worked.

I had lived through Hurricane Katrina and seen what a changing climate does to the Gulf Coast. Saying that out loud was a political problem in Mississippi, so I learned to design around the politics. The buildings still needed to be built, and the people in them still needed to be comfortable, healthy, and not bankrupted by their power bills. It was the responsible thing to do as an architect.

That fight is mostly over now. LEED is more mainstream, though it still faces some hurdles in the Southeast. Net zero is a known concept. Resilience is a much easier conversation to have with a client than sustainability ever was, in part because hurricanes do not care about anyone’s position on climate science. Insurance premiums do not care, either. The market that once viewed sustainability as a commercial liability is now pricing climate risk into mortgages in flood zones.

Owning the win, then going further

The architecture profession should own the sustainability win. We earned it. The harder question is what we do next because the argument we won is also a ceiling. Sustainability, as the profession has been practicing it, asks how little damage a building can do. Regenerative design asks what a building can give back.

The AIA Strategic Council’s Regenerative Design Study Group, in a working draft definition submitted to the AIA Board of Directors in February, defines regenerative design as fostering “systemic healing across natural, built, and community systems.” That is not the language we used in 2013. It is also not a values statement. It is a different argument with a client and a different argument with a developer, and it requires a different kind of courage in a room where the answer is not yet obvious.

2026 AIA President Illya Azaroff, FAIA, has been making this case publicly under the banner of “leadership can’t wait.” He is not wrong. In AIA’s new report on financing regenerative design, he puts it plainly: “Capital is moving. Policy is shifting.” The snag is that traditional lenders often do not know how to underwrite something they have not seen built before.

That is not a finance problem. That is an architecture problem. Someone has to walk into the room with the drawings, the data, and the language to make the case. The profession that names the next frontier owns the next conversation. The window for architects to lead this argument rather than react to it will not be permanently open.

The market is already pricing the argument. Buildings designed without resilience and regenerative capacity are becoming harder to insure and finance over the lifetime of a mortgage. 

Architects who are not making the case for regenerative design to their clients are not being cautious. They are leaving their clients exposed to risks the market is already pricing, and they are ceding the conversation to software companies, certification bodies, and consultants who will define regenerative design for us if we do not define it first.

The new question

The question I have started asking in client meetings is this: What does this building give back? That is a different question from how much less a building uses or how it performs against code. What does it give back to the site, to the community, and to the air, water, and soil around it?

Some clients, including a few I have had in the Deep South, need that question asked more creatively. But it is the right question, and it is the next conversation. I have spent most of my career learning how to make hard arguments to clients who did not want to hear them and to industries that had already made up their minds. I can tell you the regenerative design argument is easier than sustainability was in 2013.

Our clients deserve it. So does the planet. And the profession that taught us to ask how little harm a building can do is the same profession that needs to start asking what it gives back. Either we become the ones leading this argument, or we become the ones watching someone else lead it. There is no third option.

The final article in this series will cover how architects can reclaim authority in the rooms where the decisions get made.

Jeff Seabold, FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP, is the founder of Seabold Architectural Studio in Jackson, Mississippi, and serves as an AIA at-large director for 2026–2028. The Other Drawing Set is a five-part series on leadership and the architecture profession.

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the position of AIA or the AIA Board of Directors.