Andrea Love, AIA

Defining the emerging role of a building scientist, Andrea Love, AIA, is breaking new ground by implementing state-of-the-art analytic and visualization tools to realize solutions for high-level performance criteria. She embodies a rare combination of unparalleled technical acumen, excellence in practice, and advocacy.

As director of building science at Boston’s Payette, Love pursues architecture as both an art and a science. Tackling issues facing the built environment—climate change, human health, water scarcity—she has spent the entirety of her career seeking to minimize the impact of buildings on our environment. When she joined the firm during her final year of graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was hired to begin Payette’s Building Science Group. In the past five years, Love has grown the group and established the firm as a foremost leader in high-performance buildings. Supporting every facet of the practice, Love’s group has significantly influenced the firm through its research projects and investigations. Through her guidance, sustainable practices are now deeply embedded in the firm’s design philosophies.

Ever-driven to minimize the profession’s impact on the environment, Love ensures that all of Payette’s research is shared publicly. To that end she regularly writes and is featured in a number journals and architectural magazines, lectures at MIT, and is often called upon to speak at national conferences.

At Duke University, Love was responsible for the guiding the school’s new Environment Hall, headquarters of the Nicholas School of the Environment, to LEED Platinum certification, establishing it as the most energy-efficient building on campus. The building, one of the first she worked on with Payette, achieved a 66 percent reduction in energy usage over the code baseline through the integration of sustainable systems that not only reduce impact on the environment but also serve as teaching tools for the school and the community.

In 2012, supported by an AIA Upjohn Grant, Love pioneered the exploration of building façades’ thermal performance. Intent on quantifying the widely understood but little researched impact of thermal bridging on commercial façades, she collected thousands of images, employed thermal modeling, and found that small revisions to traditional details can result in dramatic improvement. Payette has benefitted greatly from her research, and the final report on the topic is available on its website for the benefit of the profession.  

Love is active with Boston Society of Architects, the AIA COTE Advisory Group, and the AIA 2030 Commitment Working Group, which she chairs. She spearheaded development of the AIA 2030 Design Data Exchange (DDx), an interface that allows firms to benchmark and report the energy use of their portfolios. The online tool makes firm reporting on progress towards carbon neutrality much easier.

A uniquely gifted architect, Love is a key leader in the profession-wide effort to make our buildings better and our environment healthier. With her uncanny ability to connect with peers, students, and the public over complex technical concepts, she is an invaluable ally to the built environment.