Starting Where You Are in the New Year

I recently had the opportunity to hear Ray Anderson, the founder of Interface and a pioneer of sustainable business practices, speak at Greenbuild in Chicago. During the question and answer session one audience member expressed frustration with the inertia in his own company and asked Ray how to make sustainability a higher priority. “You have to start where you are,” was Ray’s answer. Accomplish one new sustainable strategy on your next project, add another one on the following project, he suggested.

I often hear similar questions from young professionals who want to make a difference in their design firms, and I also hear it from practitioners who want to know how to incorporate green strategies into their projects. I think “starting where you are” is part of the answer (and is, after all, how all of us who have been doing this a while got here.) There are many books and Web sites that teach aspects of sustainable design. Part of the Committee on the Environment’s (COTE’s) efforts over the next year will be pointing our members towards some of the best of these many available resources.

As part of that process we would like to hear from you, from COTE members and from the broader AIA membership. What resources and tools do you use, and what do you still need? What COTE programs do you find useful? How can they be made more helpful? What are we not doing that would be useful to you? And now that the AIA has embraced sustainability as an integral part of design practice, how can COTE and the Institute best help practitioners educate themselves and also help educate our clients and communities?

COTE has focused on environmental leadership, education, advocacy, and communication. Here is a summary of what COTE has been doing at the national level, along with some of our plans for new efforts.

Environmental Leadership
COTE’s strongest resource is the Top Ten Green Projects awards program. This award program is unique (and, admittedly, demanding) in that it requires participants to submit performance metrics as well as narratives explaining sustainable design strategies. The happy result is a growing collection of case studies that demonstrate how architects have achieved a high level of green design on a wide variety of building types at different scales. The winners illustrate the evolution of green design over the last 12 years, and the Top Ten Measures and Metrics have evolved as well, now incorporating the AIA 2030 targets for energy reduction and carbon neutrality. We deliver case studies through the aiatopten.org Web site, PowerPoint presentations (available with a script for you to deliver locally), and written case study summaries. The program receives more entries and more media coverage every year.

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a task group working on greening all of the National Honor Awards programs. We have revised the Call for Entries and Entry Requirements to include, among other things, energy metrics that require entrants to submit their percentage energy reduction compared to the agreed-upon 2030 baseline. The AIA Board approved our suggested changes in December and they will be incorporated into the awards programs, starting in 2009.

COTE continues our commitment to point toward what’s next in sustainable design: the series of biomimicry seminars, led by the Biomimicry Guild, which we have sponsored around the country, have been part of that effort. These seminars highlight many examples of how nature designs systems and structures, and examines how we can apply lessons learned in our design practices.

Education
COTE’s report on ecological literacy in higher education, authored by Kira Gould, Lance Hosey, and others, has been a catalyst for action at the national level. COTE has participated in workshops hosted by the AIA’s Sustainable Design Discussion Group and the Educator/Practitioner Network that explored advancing sustainable design curriculum in architecture schools. One immediate outcome is the development of new National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) standards for sustainable education in architecture schools. COTE is also supporting the efforts of the Society of Building Science Educators to develop a series of new courses to teach carbon-neutral design in the studio setting.

When I was a graduate student at University of California-Berkeley, I entered a student competition for energy-conserving design, sponsored by the AIA. This was the beginning of my involvement in sustainable design and is a great way to foster interest in sustainable design in the academic realm. COTE has asked the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) and other partners, including Architecture 2030, to help us review existing student competitions and advise us on which programs to support and where new programs could fill important needs.

Advocacy
We continue to work with AIA’s Government Advocacy team to promote relevant federal legislation, such as the energy bill recently signed into law. Dozens of cities and states have passed green building requirements for public and even private projects, and COTE members have been active advocates at every level.

Collaboration
We continue to foster and develop relationships with the many allied organizations working on sustainability. Many of these are profiled on the COTE Web site.

Communication
Through this newsletter, the Web site, and our network of regional team leaders and local chapters, we maintain contact with COTE members throughout the country. And the COTE forum allows members to communicate directly with each other.

So now the ball is in your court. Let us hear from you about what we are doing (or not doing) and what we ought to be doing in the near future. We look forward to hearing from you. E-mail us at cote@aia.org.

Henry Siegel, FAIA, is a cofounder of Siegel & Strain Architects in California’s Bay Area. His firm has won numerous design awards. Siegel recently served as a juror on the National AIA Honor Awards Jury. He is the 2008 chair of COTE’s national advisory group.