Is it possible to save the world, stay billable, and be a good
designer-all at the same time? Can you actually change the
way your firm designs buildings just by emailing everyone case
studies, speaking at the project kick off meetings, creating
checklists and begging everyone? Do big firms have a better chance
of institutionalizing green strategies than small firms? There is
no longer the debate on whether climate change is happening and
whether buildings contribute to it-there is now the imperative to
design sustainably immediately, and this has changed our profession
permanently. As architects and designers, we are used to figuring
out complex problems and fighting the good fight, because we
believe there is value in beauty. We now have an updated
"fight": to create sustainable inspiringly beautiful projects that
no longer put a burden on our communities or our land. And because
of the urgency and the paradigm shift involved in achieving this,
it has left many sustainable design leaders within architecture
firmsfeeling as if we are fighting this mountainous effort in the
wee hours of the night, in our spare time, in between project
deadlines, and alone. Miraculously, a few good folks
recognized this, and decided that we could achieve more as a team
than as individuals. Nadav Malin and Jim Newman from Building
Green, Meredith Elbaum from Sasaki Associates and Nellie Reid from
Gensler were the masterminds.
On Thursday, July 24th, 50 architects, designers and
engineers from 46 design firms arrived in Colorado Springs to
participate in an A & D Sustainable Design Leaders Summit. The
statistics alone said something about our profession and our
leadership: the participants represented approximately 33,785
employees (5 to 10 percent of the design industry); the average
number of employees was 768; the smallest firm had 40 professional
employees; the largest firm had 7,000 professional employees; and
there was equal gender representation (26 women and 31
men). The number of branch offices averaged 12; 87 percent of
the project work was located in the United States, and many firms
provided other services such as Interior Design (93 percent),
Planning (79 percent) and Mechanical Electrical and Plumbing (27
percent). The number of LEED Accredited Professionals averaged
at 28 percent, and the group represented over 350 LEED certified
projects-accounting for approximately 20 percent of the listed
projects certified in the USGBC website. The participants
reported that on average three quarters of their office projects
used some sort of sustainable design guideline, with LEED and the
Living Building Challenge as the top benchmark system or
metric. Most of the participants were involved in design or
project management, and about a third of the group listed managing
sustainability as a primary activity with allocated time. The
statistics reinforced the belief that the group was a good sampling
of a profession that had accepted the call build sustainably, and
that we were all doing something about it. The early banter
made us realize that while we are doing something positive, we are
exhausted from not seeing more change in our projects and in our
firms. We came seeking research data, reassurance, connection,
information, case studies, strategies, technical information and
comfort. What resulted was part research hunt, part collaboration,
part therapy.
In the 24 hours we spent together, we shared six meals, and
gallons of water and coffee. Roundtable break-outs were structured
around Architecture 2030, research, post-occupancy evaluations,
BIM, energy modeling and carbon calculation. There was group
dialogue around the Integrated Design process, the need for
specialists, and how to create and build firm design capabilities.
Once you got us talking you couldn't shut us up, and what the group
soon realized was that everyone was experiencing similar challenges
and sometimes similar successes. As a profession, we are not
so alone after all. And what became clear was that we wanted
desperately to share our information and to define what we needed
as a collective community. We know that there is still much
research desired, better modeling software needed, more case
studies to be made available, and more advocacy in policy making
required. We know that we can not hold what we have learned tight
to our chests under the guise of market value, because if we do we
will both fail as designers and fall from exhaustion. Kit Ratcliff
said "we are trying to recover from the belief that specialization
will make our firms unique, and that holding onto information makes
us better than the next firm." With the realization of peak
oil, and the data on the quality of our air and water, we don't
have the luxury to hoard our information any longer-we need to do
the simple thing we were taught in preschool, which is to share, if
we have any hope of making a difference in the world.
After a full day of brainstorming on Saturday we came away with
more assumed "statistics" of our profession. We believe that to
really tackle what's necessary to design differently, truly
sustainably, you need to have dedicated time - fee supported
time-to do the right research and the right calculations. We
believe that we need to come together as a profession and inform
our clients that we can absolutely design better buildings, but to
do so we need to be compensated fairly for it. It is really
hard to teach old dogs new tricks, but we will need to keep pushing
our designers and engineers to define beauty more holistically and
to be comfortable with a different range of options. We believe
that the only way to make a difference, whether it is to create to
meet the Living Building Challenge, the 2030 Challenge or LEED
Platinum, we will have to depend on each other and share our
intellectual data because it will help us save time, save money and
save the planet. Imagine if we had a collective of base case
energy models that were developed for labs, or acute care
facilities or classrooms with displacement ventilation. Imagine the
time saved.
On our Saturday night after dinner there was an impromptu offer
to provide a room, a computer, a projector and wireless access to
anyone who wanted to share some work or resources that they knew
about. Person after person got up to briefly present work that they
had created, products that were the results of sleepless nights and
pure passion. Vikram Sami from Lord Aeck Sargent presented a
program he developed that allowed designers to "optimize glazing
size and orientation, shading and natural ventilation to extend the
period that the building can run passively." Kit Ratcliff
shared a Greenhouse Gas Calculating Tool he and his firm developed
using information from the World Resource Institute. Many more
shared communications tools, design process tools and works in
progress without hesitation. Hundreds of hours, perhaps
thousands of hours of research was provided to us for our use with
no fee and no disclaimer. This was an incredible example of
commitment and generosity, as well as the firm belief that we can
be better architects and designers together-this is the message to
our profession.
This of course is but one architect's
uncensored observation of the symposium and the profession, but it
was clear that I was absolutely not alone, as I had previously
thought. I came away feeling good about what our firm has done and
embarrassed about what we still had to do - a healthy natural mix
that left me inspired. All of us fortunate enough to have
experienced this day are grateful to Nellie Reid, Meredith Elbaum,
the Building Green crew of Nadav Malin, Jim Newman, Bill Tine, and
Jennifer Atlee, and Anne Marie and Glenn Fischer from Corporate
Realty, Design and Management Institute, as well as countless
others who made it possible for us to connect. And I am
grateful to all of the participants who are saving the world and
helping me to save it too.
Pauline Souza, AIA, LEED AP, is
Associate Partner and Director of Green Services at WRNS Studio in
San Francisco.
