A Quarterly Journal from McLennan Design. Rediscovering our relationship to the natural world. Volume 1 Issue 3
ARCHITECTURE How can design be elevated through the celebration of in-between spaces? Read.
INQUIRY How can architecture respond to the physical realities, cultural richness, and societal needs of place? Read.
A CLOSER LOOK How can ecosystem restoration be woven into the curriculum of a school? Read.
On the cover: An ice skating hut designed by students at the new McEwen School of Architecture in Ontario, Canada. For more on this school and its unique focus, click here! Photo courtesy of McEwen School of Architecture.
The Winter Solstice is upon us -
the darkest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s time for hunkering down and reflection, where we consider what we’ve accomplished throughout the year and begin our plans for the new year ahead. Here at McLennan Design, we all know that it’s been a big year, filled with a lot of great work with some amazing clients and projects that will make a real difference in the world. We’re nearly out of steam as the year draws to a close, but hopeful and excited that we’ll be able to continue to provide innovative service to the greater community in 2019. Love + Regeneration was an important experiment this year. It has been an opportunity to share with our community news from the firm and our partners, but also to do so in a way that adds ideas and intellectual contributions into the larger field of thought. The global news around climate change and the plight of the planet is hard to swallow – making it ever more important that all of us do what we can, wherever we can, to be contributors for positive social and environmental change. The response to the magazine has been very positive and we are committed to continuing this experiment in 2019, bringing you future issues filled with great content. We have a lot to share and are open to all of you who are reading this to contribute your ideas and work in our format. Consider this an invitation! In this issue we highlight ideas around the importance of the “in-between” spaces so crucial to good architecture. We acknowledge the life and work of Rachel Carson. We feature some great contributions from our friends at Bruner Cott, Biohabitats and Christine Lintott Architects. In between, we share firm news, photography, poetry and prose. We hope that the year’s end brings you joy, peace and hope for a future that is filled with Love – and embodying the possibilities of true regeneration of the world we inhabit. With Warmth, Jason F. McLennan CEO, McLennan Design
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
JASON F. MCLENNAN
EDITORIAL TEAM
research and editorial content - KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI graphic design and layout - KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI + ALBERT TRESKIN
CONTRIBUTORS
JASON F. McLENNAN + KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI, CHRISTINE LINTOTT, RICHARD TURNER, JASON FORNEY, ALLISON PERICICH, PETE MUÑOZ, SY MONTGOMERY + REBECCA GREEN, AND JUAN ROVALO Excerpt from “Octavia” from How to be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery. Copyright © 2018 by Sy Montgomery. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
SOCIAL MEDIA
December 2018, Issue 3 LOVE + REGENERATION is a quarterly publication of McLennan Design, LLC.
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Copyright 2018 by McLennan Design. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Content may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission and is intended for informational purposes only.
NAVIGATE
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ASPIRE
Whose examples have we aspired to in our work toward a regenerative world? An appreciation for Rachel Carson
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DESIGN
How can design be elevated through the celebration of in-between spaces? Architecture of the In-Between
CRITIQUE
How can architecture respond to the physical realities, cultural richness and societal needs of a place? An Exploration of the Fogo Island Inn by Christine Lintott
REVIEW
How does the Living Building Challenge respond to an industry-wide need to shift focus from less bad to good? Breathing Lessons by Jason Forney
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EDIFY
What impacts does McLennan Design’s work have in the world? What’s next for our firm? Exciting News from McLennan Design and Our Parnters
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EXPAND
What regenerative approaches are being applied to ecosystem restoration through the work of our partner organizations? The Handprint of a Flower by Pete Muñoz
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ELEVATE
“What might I discover about the interior lives of these animals if I were to use not only my intellect, but also my heart?” An Excerpt from Sy Montgomery’s How to be a Good Creature 5
ASPIRE
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Rachel Carson: An Invitation to Wonder Rachel Carson is perhaps best known for her 1962 work Silent Spring, which documented the effects of pesticide use on rural ecosystems - ultimately giving rise to environmental awareness at a national level and prompting the creation of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (1972), and the Environmental Protection Agency (1970). Long before Carson took on big industry in Silent Spring, she was a careful student and an eloquent voice of the sea. In 1937 her career as a science writer was launched when her essay Undersea was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her sea trilogy, Under the Sea (1941), The Sea Around Us (1950) and The Edge of the Sea (1955) invited readers to wonder, aided by Carson’s keen observation and poetic prose. While there is some debate as to whether or not Carson was privy to early science that pointed to humans as the cause of climate change, it is clear in her sea trilogy that Carson was aware of the fact of climate change and also aware of the heavy burden placed on the world’s waters by humanity. In her prologue to The Sea Around Us she writes, “Although man’s record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.” And later in her intro, “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” She opens the chapter entitled “The Shape of Ancient Seas” with the observation, “We live in an age of rising seas.” Though the subject matter of her writing points at bleak realities and human culpability, Carson’s passionate writing about nature also engenders in readers a deep sense of curiosity and wonder. That quality of balance in her work and her candid and compelling way of connecting human actions with environmental degradation is credited with giving rise to the environmental movement. Though technology and subsequent knowledge of the sea has increased dramatically since Carson wrote about it, her writing remains relevant in its example of arriving at action through wonder and love of place.
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It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
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architecture of the in-between BY JASON F. MCLENNAN WITH KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI
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There is architecture, and there is mere building. The line
between the two is measured by the skill of the designer and her ability to help transform the level of the quality of the experience - regardless of how profound or mundane the purpose of the building. In other words, great design does not have to be reserved for cathedrals or large civic structures. Any building, regardless of its intended use, however humble, can be elevated through careful and considered design. The simple designs of Sam Mockbee for example, show how even the most prosaic of uses can be elevated to a rich architectural experience. On the spectrum’s other end, we’ve all seen large, highly visible “important” buildings that are a true disappointment in their design and miss the opportunity to delight, edify and enrich their surroundings. They are merely “construction” or “building” serving a utilitarian purpose perhaps, but without style, proportion, and any sense of design. It is not the purpose of the thing nor scale that matters most – but the quality of it. While there are many ways that buildings can be elevated from mere building to architecture – an attempt to record them all is the topic for an entire book or series of books. This article focuses on just one of the key ways that may not be obvious to some: the thoughtful articulation and celebration of in-between spaces – the so called “unassignable” or non-programmed spaces found in every structure. In particular, we focus here on the hallways and staircases we need for circulation.
Left: Heron Hall stair detail, photo by Iklil Gregg
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Architecture can’t force people to connect, it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers, and make meeting places useful and attractive. -Denise Scott Brown Stairs and Hallways: Transforming the In-Between To overlook stairwells and hallways is to miss some of the most profound and important opportunities to elevate design and to improve the experience of a building’s inhabitants. Since the invention of the elevator in 1853 - one that made skyscrapers a possibility and gave rise to the kind of urban density only possible by utilizing vertical space - the glamorous, sweeping stairways that were the hallmark of the past began to disappear. In Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, Andreas Bernard chronicles the rise and reign of the elevator and the subsequent disappearance of the grand staircase: “In the course of only one or two decades, the traditional means of vertical access was pushed into the background, downgraded from a grandiose structural element occupying the centre of a floor to a mere escape route.”1 For the most part, this relegation to the background is still in effect today, even in low and mid-rise buildings where stairs could still play a major design role.
Facing page: The success of the Bullitt Center “irresistible stair” is in its view and rich material palette. The Seattle skyline is visible on three sides, making this a natural meeting place in the building. CC BY-SA 2.0 Taomeister 10
My belief is that stairs are one of the most important places within a building to build community, offering opportunities for chance encounters and informal conversations while connecting people visually and conceptually to multiple levels within a structure. Done right, the staircase becomes a world unto its own – a place to linger, to get views outside (and with it important biophilic connections), a place to reflect, to connect and to be active. This latter feature has finally returned the stairs to a larger discussion of the architect’s role in the promotion of public health through active design. The “irresistible stairwell” has been praised for its potential as an alluring novelty, one that, if given the proper
attention in design, can entice even the most sedentary into action. Signage at the Bullitt Center alerts guests to the fact that while the average American gains a pound a year - were one to ascend the Bullitt Center stairwell twice daily, that same American would instead lose 1.5 pounds over the course of the year. The Center for Active Design (CAD) specifically designates stairs as an opportunity for increased health of occupants if they are “accessible, visible, attractive and well-lit.” CAD’s building checklist encourages everything from locating stairs near elevators with signage that encourages use of the former over the latter, to the use of quality materials and the addition of art, music, views and natural ventilation to make them more appealing.2 Whether the opportunity missed in the fire stair is chiefly a health one or aesthetic in nature, internally focused, industrialmaterial finished, fluorescent-lighted stairwells accomplish little more than code compliance and represent significant missed opportunities for architectural expression and beauty. Special attention to this design element can have positive effects on both the figurative and literal human heart and I argue that the placement and design of the staircases often is more important to the conception of a building than the rooms programmed within it. While an obvious, more than aestheticsbased case for stairs might be made, other circulation routes throughout a building, specifically hallways, are just as often-overlooked design opportunities. All too often, hallways are begrudged as an unfortunate utilitarian necessity and minimized as much as codes will allow in pursuit of net-to-gross ratios that are as high as possible for maximum short-term gain. In the case of these circulation spaces (and with the exception of lobbies which are often
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Soul Deadening Transitions
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Above: complete lack of attention to fire stairs ensures building occupants will only find occasion to use them if literally being chased by flames. Below: hospitals and hotels have long given the word “corridor� a negative connotation.
oversized and garishly appointed), economics are against the architect. If we begin to think about hallways as vital places unto their own, in which people encounter other people, and are invariably enriched by their interaction, they take on more importance. And while an occupant’s waistline might be less affected by a hallway than by taking the stairs, his mental health can be supported by the artful design of hallways that incorporate daylight and views to the outside. In the end, we attribute the least value to these spaces that ironically may have the most value in determining the mental health and quality of life within a building. When we are inhabiting the rooms within a building we are typically engaged in some kind of specific activity – a bedroom is for sleeping, a kitchen for cooking, a work area for working. But it is the hallways that represent the break or completion of an activity, in-between spaces where we are most alert, most open to change. We use these spaces to literally transition from one mental mode to another, and, I believe it is precisely this time that we most need a quality experience that engages the senses rather than a mundane or ugly one that diminishes our sensory experience. In A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, much attention is given to the subject of circulation, passageways and corridors: “Long sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture. In fact, the ugly long repetitive corridors of the machine age have so far infected the word ‘corridor’ that it is hard to imagine that a corridor could ever be a place of beauty.”3 We’re all familiar with the images the word “corridor” conjures: sterile hallways of hospitals, blinding white, with a seeming infinite number of rooms tacked on, or dark and often dingy hotel corridors, with any number of insufficient decorative elements attempting to lessen the drudgery – patterned, plush carpeting, ornate sconces, wainscoting, the occasional mirror – where even a walk of a couple hundred feet feels interminable under foot. As it turns out, these types of corridors have a proven, negative psychological effect on the human brain. Harvard Medical School Department of Psychology researcher Mayer Spivack published Sensory Distortions in Tunnels and Corridors in 1967, a paper that examined the effects of architecture on mental hospital patients. In his introduction,
he notes that upon beginning his research, “I was sufficiently unfamiliar with mental hospitals to be especially sensitive to new experiences. I was soon powerfully aware that I spent most of my time traversing extremely long, unvarying corridors. Such spaces, commonly encountered in mental hospitals, are inappropriate in a milieu for emotionally disturbed patients and have long been criticized by architects and psychiatrists.”4 This work goes on to examine the extent to which these types of corridors distort verbal communication, create disorienting visual distortions, and, when too narrow, trigger anxiety in sensitive populations. Despite the intuition and scientific corroboration, in most developer-driven buildings, circulation spaces are minimized in order to maximize the building’s efficiency. Worse, they are always shunted completely to the interior, so as to completely separate us from daylight and views where we need them most. Again, I believe it is the in-between spaces that offer the most potential for a true biophilic connection to the outdoors, one that people who spend most of their time indoors so sorely need.
The stairs are your mentors of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you... -David Whyte The Art of the Intangible Our impressions are shaped in large part by intangibles. Mozart famously said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” Thinking of stairwells and hallways as “the silence between” hints at the potential imact of these design elements within a building. These are the spaces in which, if successful, a sense of expectation rises, where our senses come alive with possibility and anticipation, where the mind is unprogrammed, free to circulate between thoughts in a way that mimics its body’s circulation between rooms. Though the effects of poor design in hallways and stairs 13
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover
Clockwise from upper left: Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover’s stairwell is its own volume, generously sized, with ample natural light and views to nature outside. When viewed from the outside, the full expression of the stair volume is clear. A window seat alove in a corridor of House for an Art Lover. House for an Art Lover’s corridor is single loaded, with ample natural light provided by deep, seated alcoves off its outside wall. All images by Jason F. McLennan 14
CC BY-ND 2.0 End User
CC BY-SA 3.0 Valueyou
CC 2.0 scarletgreen
Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye
This page: to fully appreciate Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, I had to visit it in person and experience the play of light and shadow and movement throughout the hallways and stairwells, both inside and out.
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may not be as pronounced on the average building occupant as on Spivack’s mental hospital inhabitants, there is no neutral effect. “In a building where the movement is mean, the passages are dark and narrow – rooms open off them as dead ends; you spend your time entering the building, or moving between rooms, like a crab scuttling in the dark.”
Key transitions places help a person orient themselves within a building and to the outside world, blurring the in and out which is so important to our connection with life.
The old adage that life is about the journey and not the destination is a fitting reminder when we think of circulation through a building. It is the journey between spaces that is most magical, often more so than the rooms, or destinations, themselves. In a given home 6 or office, we spend a lot of time “journeying.” It is in times of transition that chance encounters occur, and the spaces through which one moves are where one’s sense of arrival and departure is generated. Further, it is a critical opportunity to feel connected to others and the outdoors. Beyond mental excitement and anticipation and personal connection, there is a quality of possibility inhabited by the mind while the body is in movement. We seek this soothing and productive mental space intuitively, this is why we have walking meditations, or take a walk around the block when stumped on a problem or task. Physical movement engenders dynamic, solutions-oriented, out-of-the-box thinking. When we are in a particular room we are often oriented to a particular task, but when we travel – down a hallway, up or down stairs, along the edge of a courtyard – we are in-between mental modes and our mental landscape shifts to a more expansive arena, rich with opportunity and possibility. If the design of circulatory spaces can support us accessing this mental space, we should assign a higher importance to these places, not seek to minimize them as unprofitable, unusable and unfortunate necessities.
Facing page: A single-loaded corridor in Heron Hall that connects the main hall with the master suite. Photo by Dan Banko. 16
every other aspect of design, in circulatory spaces, there is no neutral effect. Either design supports the intended experience or thwarts it. Attention paid to these critical elements of design is attention paid to the success of the design as a whole.
In the body, circulation refers to blood and the life-giving oxygen it carries. In a home or office building, we might think of circulation spaces in the same way, and as such, they are critical. “The building with generous circulation allows each person’s instincts and intuitions full play. The building with ungenerous circulation inhibits them.”5 As in
It’s the Circulation, Stupid! Show me great architecture that you love, and nine times out of ten a very particular attention has been paid to the circulatory spaces within, so much so, that moving around in the building takes on a special and even spiritual dimension. I probably had my own epiphany about the importance of in-between spaces when I had the great luck of attending the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, spending a year in the amazing masterpiece that Mackintosh created (which has just so tragically burned down) as well as spending time in other buildings he designed, like Hill House in Helensburgh. Mackintosh was an architect that understood how to bring a building to life through its hallways and staircases. His circulation spaces are so successful that you want to spend as much time as possible within them, marveling at the proportions, materials, artwork and harmony of the whole. Mackintosh always designed spaces that connected multiple rooms through single-sided corridors, sized to linger, with ample light. His staircases had their own three-dimensional volumes and were not tucked thoughtlessly within a building; they expressed themselves on the elevations and were consistently bold on the interior. Because they are so much about the experience of transition – from one space to an amazing connector space and then into a completely different space – his structures are hard to define without visiting them.
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My first real understanding of the genius of Le Corbusier was similar. From the textbooks I had misunderstood and underappreciated his work – an oversight quickly corrected through visiting and experiencing first hand the light, shadow, movement and flow through his spaces that elevated his architecture. Two dimensional photographs can’t accurately portray the interplay of these qualities, and, in fairness, small black and white photographs in my textbooks didn’t help either. Touring the Villa Savoye with friends in the summer of 1995 turned this house from one of my least favorites to one of my most. The stairs, ramps, decks and walkways caught my interest and changed my perception of space more so than the rooms themselves. Time and again, the most wonderful buildings to visit and experience are those where the in-between is elevated to the profound – something architects like Alto, Saarinen and Wright, among others I greatly admire, just got right.
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last I’m going, all along. -Emily Dickinson McLennan Design Architecture There is a running joke in my office that I have an obsession with stairs and hallways – and I readily admit it! It is more than mere fetish. In our work, we believe in pulling out and celebrating stairs wherever possible, giving them three-dimensional form and purpose, all with the intention that they become part of the overall, lived experience of the building that houses them. Fire stairs should be celebrated, along with any other vertical connection that usually plays a role in passively tempering a building and contributing to its energy performance.
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We believe these key transition places help a person orient themselves within a building and to the outside world, blurring the in and out, which is so important to our connection with life. Wherever possible, our hallways are single loaded, utilize daylight and visual sightlines to the outdoors, and are generously sized to allow for leisure activities, a place to
sit, and chance encounters. Heron Hall, for example, is all about its stair – my own homage to Mackintosh – and hallways meant for living and being in. The Silver Rock house, under construction now, contains a main hallway that we coined “the hallway of life,” a title that recognizes it as the central nervous system and organizing principle of the entire home. In our larger, commercial buildings the same expressions hold true – with three dimensional stairs and hallways that look out onto green spaces and courtyards wherever possible. As our young firm continues to design and build more Living Buildings and Net Zero structures all over the world, look out for how we celebrate these often-overlooked spaces. One of the ways we achieve this is by utilizing the following design principles interpreted in different ways appropriate for each project and site:
McLennan Design – Design Principles Mystery + Whimsy Humans are excitable and enjoy feeling surprise, delight, and wonder. We can conjure these emotions with clever design that incorporates mystery and whimsy. Each project, while being basically ordered, needs to create moments of pure joy by carefully incorporating novelty, biophilic or nostalgic artifacts, and subtle wayfinding into its design. Elevating In Between Spaces The most important places in a building are often the interstices. It is these in-between spaces - staircases, hallways, transitions, porches, vestibules - that define whether something is mere building or architecture. Special attention given to these areas elevates the overall design of a building. Clarity of Wayfinding Carefully chosen, subtle design elements should be utilized in a space to direct users imperceptibly and almost intuitively. This can look like discreet material changes that mimic pathways, lighting techniques, and deliberate site lines. People should not get lost in spaces, they should be guided through them without their realization.
Thickened Transition To signal and bring attention to subtle or pronounced shifts in function and feel from one space within a building to the next, we utilize thickened transitions. These transition spaces serve to alert and prepare occupants for those shifts and should be pronounced in relation to the degree of function shift between the places they connect. This plays into an overall design application that subtly curates the psychological experience in the built environment. Compression + Release Closely connected to the principle of thickened transitions, compression and release promotes our ability to read and intuitively experience a space. When moving from one space to the next, compression in the transition signals the shift and creates expectation for release, which, when delivered, is experienced both literally and psychologically.
Stairs as Volumes Stairs are wasted when tucked within an overall volume. We believe in expressing and celebrating stairs and giving them threedimensionality by creating separate volumes or special niches within volumes to highlight them. Everything Beautiful Design is meant to be a complete experience, attractive from all angles. No component of a design is too small to be exempt from consideration. Even the most mundane of structures should be given careful consideration – we are surrounded by too much poor design. Our design strives for more.
END NOTES 1] Bernard, Andreas. Lifted: a Cultural History of the Elevator. New York University Press, 2014. 2] Center for Active Design Checklist: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Design. New York: Center for Active Design, 2010. https:// centerforactivedesign.org/dl/guidelines.pdf, accessed November 20, 2018. 3] Alexander, Christopher, et. al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 4] Spivak, Mayer. Sensory Distortions in Tunnels and Corridors. Boston: Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, 1967. 5] Alexander, Christopher, et. al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 6] Alexander, Christopher, et. al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977
JASON F. McLENNAN is a highly sought out designer, consultant and thought leader. Prior to founding McLennan Design, Jason authored the Living Building Challenge – the most stringent and progressive green building program in existence, and founded the International Living Future Institute. He is the author of six books on Sustainability and Design including the Philosophy of Sustainable Design, “the bible for green building.”
KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI is a storyteller who believes in the importance of words and the power of wellappointed language to create change. Her work grows from a deep reverence and gratitude for wild places and the experiences to be had in them. In return, she uses her words to urge people to consider their integral part in a natural world.
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photo by Christine Lintoot
Fogo Island: the Far Edge BY CHRISTINE LINTOTT Sometimes I have to go to the far edges of what I know to remind myself of what’s important. What is it about edge conditions that give us perspective? Is it the “otherness” that is evident from the verging of two realms? Is it about vista – that moment when you emerge out of the forest’s edge and look across an expansive meadow? Or arriving at the shoreline – land meeting water? At the invitation of a client, I found myself on the far eastern reaches of Canada, on an edge, in the remote outport of John Batt’s Arm on Fogo Island. I was participating in a summit convening social entrepreneurs. The invocation was to engage in conversations with diverse voices toward developing innovative health and wellness infrastructure 20
in remote places across Canada. Fogo Island, and specifically, our host, Shorefast and their Fogo Island Inn, were the audacious inspiration for the summit’s conversations. This is the possible…so, what is this? This is social enterprise, rooted in the integrity of place. Shorefast’s website states “our mission is to build cultural and economic resilience on Fogo Island. We believe in a world where all business is social business.” The organization is the brainchild of eighth generation Fogo Islander, Zita Cobb, along with two of her brothers, Anthony and Alan. Her vision is profound, and aspirational for those seeking to stake healthy communities in their very essence, the place in which they reside. Cobb observes that “we exist in relationship to the whole: the whole
planet, the whole of humanity, the whole of existence. It is our job to find ways to belong to the whole while upholding the specificity of people and place.” ____________ Nothing about the Fogo Island Inn is about architecture. The Inn is rooted in the reality of generations of in-shore fisherman plying a living in one of the most inhospitable places in the world. So why are the people here? The answer to that question is rooted in the answer to another question: why are the fish here? The term fish is ascribed to the Northwest Atlantic Cod, one of several species found (at one time) in abundance in the nutrient rich waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Here, nutrients are released from the distinct shallow plateaus of the ocean floor, known as the Grand Banks, through mixing of a cold, northern ocean current with a warmer, southern ocean current – producing one of the richest fishing grounds on the planet, along with a biodiverse abundance of seabirds, shellfish and sea mammals. It is this abundance that brought the people, who carved out an intimate relationship with this ecosystem to subsist for generations. Until that all changed. With technological advances and an appetite for maximizing profit, the fishery scaled up and altered itself to increase the volume of fish caught using techniques that degraded the environment upon which the fishery relied. Zita Cobb describes the abrupt decline of catch, culminating in a day when her father, a fisherman, arrived home with a single fish, and slapped it down on the floor. She describes that moment: “it sounded like the end.” Somehow fish had ceased to be the reason – fish had simply been turned into money and it was money, and more specifically, greed, that had driven the cod fishery to the brink of extinction. Effectively, the fish had ceased to be the reason for being in this place.
The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment acknowledges that “human cultures have always been influenced and shaped by the nature of the ecosystem. At the same time, humankind has always influenced and shaped its environment to enhance the availability of certain valued services. While there are specific cultural ‘services’ that ecosystems provide (such as aesthetic enjoyment, recreation, spiritual fulfillment, and intellectual development), it is quite artificial to separate these services or their combined influence on human well-being.
Cobb’s vision, and the brilliance of Shorefast, is turning money into fish. Shorefast’s mission is to regenerate the economy and the culture through charitable programs, such as internships for artists, and social businesses, such as the accommodation of the Inn, thereby restoring viability of a people in place. 21
Fogo Island, all images by Christine Lintott
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Cobb’s courage is her recognition that what has value is the place itself; that is, the genius of a place is inextricably tied to the attributes of which it is composed. These attributes, from an ecological perspective, are interrelated and tune to optimize in relationship. Optimize, not maximize. In relationship, not in isolation. There is a system at work.
At its best, architecture emerges from generations of human endeavor in place. It evolves beyond the mere function of shelter to become a curiously tuned expression of how people choose to live.
Cobb, working with Architect Todd Saunders, himself a Newfoundlander, understands these attributes. They are in her soul and tie her to the physical realities of what is and what is not. Everything has purpose, a role to play, in the tidy roll out of facility in this decidedly inhospitable place. There is no more and no less to Shoreline’s endeavours than there needs to be to steward the distinct culture of this place.
To experience the culture of a Fogo Islander, you need only listen to their song. Each song is imbued with a reverence for the weather, the land, and life on the edge. An intertwining of human endeavour in and of the landscape. Songs are about endurance and reverence, a respect for the presence of nature’s will. Similarly, to build on Fogo Island is to tuck in and batten down. To scale “just enough” and utilize materials native to this place. To anchor on stilt on solid rock, nested, yet perched. And to stave off the long darkness of months, brightening your existence with a wash of colour on a wall or swirl of detail on a cupboard shelf. The making of the Inn is steeped in these traditions – no more, no less. Intimacy of being in place is embedded throughout, including walking into one of the twentynine distinct guest rooms, where the room, a simple box, frames a floor-to-ceiling aperture to the shoreline. The room is a vehicle for being in the landscape – it is the land that elevates and imparts value to the place. Zita calls the Inn a “hack on positional luxury goods and services”. Here, scale matters, and for the Inn and all its trimmings, the scale of craft and hand-made reigns, and it is the
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experience of this land that is consumed. The Inn reminds us that an architecture born of a place is steeped in the physical and cultural responses to that specific place. It is particular and clear. Yet, it emerges from place and ceases to be a one liner, solving for a single effort. There is interconnection and a network of relationships at work. At its best, it emerges from generations of human endeavour in place. It evolves beyond the mere function of shelter to become a curiously tuned expression of how people choose to live, the conditions in which they are living in relation to others, and the ways in which the makers, born of this place, leave not only their handprints in their craft, but the signature of the land through the elementsshaped resources they use. By contrast, an architecture that brings a mandate to a place is akin to an invasive species. In some respects, it might thrive, yet in others it may be so detrimental that it emerges to overshadow the very essence of what makes a place special. A sort of overfishing, perhaps, or using a powertool when a simple hammer might serve. The Inn’s Architect, Todd Saunders, referencing how his grandfather might view the Inn and its’ accompanying artist studios in this landscape acknowledges that they might seem strange, yet decidedly familiar. Saunder’s authorship of the built forms is an architecture that emerges out of a landscape and is at once strange and familiar. Of place. In place. For both Cobb and Saunders, this endeavour, on the edge, is, in essence, an act of love. It seeks to regenerate an entire community on the basis of its own cultural value. To reframe, as one writer observed with respect to the Shorefast endeavour, and realize “an act of human culture”. It is a reminder that love can be an important source of regeneration. Passion is abundant, and the things that we have in abundance, we give generously. Love of place is born out of a deep knowing. It can be hard to define. There is a complexity to a relationship with place that can be deep and difficult to attribute, yet we know. We just do. And being on the edge helps – it lets us see ourselves in relationship and reminds us what is important.
Above: Fogo Island Inn, photo by Christine Lintott For more images of the Inn, see ArchDaily’s photo gallery.
CHRISTINE LINTOTT Christine Lintott is an Architect and Biomimicry Professional based on the western edge of Canada on Vancouver Island. Her work focuses on uncovering the essential values that her clients hold, their culture, as generative of form. She aspires to share design stories in service to shaping conversations that elevate purpose and solutions in the built environment. 25
WINTER 2018-2019
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture in the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more 26
from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron
27 Dogwood in Yosemite Forest by Richard Turner
WINTER 2018-2019
Breathing Lessons:
when nature is architecture’s teacher BY JASON FORNEY This article originally appeared in Architecture Boston Fall 2018, Volume 21, No. 3
If ethics is navigating the moral ground between right and wrong, good and bad, then we should acknowledge that many things about designing and constructing buildings are not good. Many current practices are destructive and wasteful. The operation of buildings creates nearly half of all climate emissions. We send billions of gallons of mostly clean water down drains, to be processed as toxic waste. Construction often displaces species from their natural habitats and people from their communities. Most buildings are far from beautiful, have nothing to say about their particular place, and contain materials made from unknown chemical compounds. Buildings can be barriers, deepening social divides and separating people. Still, I’m optimistic. We’ve made progress toward reducing these impacts, mostly by thinking about how to improve current practices. What happens when we stop thinking about “less bad” and instead leap toward good? I’ve had the opportunity to work for clients who’ve committed to this idea through pursuit of the Living Building Challenge (LBC). It has been transformational.
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The LBC launched in 2006 as the world’s most stringent green building standard. Projects must meet 20 simple but thoughtful imperatives, designed to challenge current practices and work toward a vision of a positive future where buildings are inspired by nature’s model, where energy and water systems give back more than they take, harvesting resources from the bounds of their
sites. The LBC is not one size fits all; each project is encouraged to respond in its own unique way. More than a rating system, it’s also an advocacy tool, pushing to change current regulations or manufacturing processes. To its founder and creator, Jason F. McLennan, the LBC is foremost a design philosophy that centers around the question: “What does good look like?” In the mid-1990s, when McLennan first conceived of the LBC, he imagined a dramatic raising of the bar, with a generation of designers ready to construct the sustainable future that we seek. But he believes we should build those models now. The LBC encourages us to think about how the act of designing and constructing might lead to a world where buildings actually regenerate. For example, an LBC building must create 105 percent of its annual energy, on site and without combustion. It must have closed-loop, net-positive water systems. Every material must be free from “Red List” chemicals, such as cadmium, PVC, and formaldehyde. Performance must be verified with 12 months of collected data. An LBC building must consider the uniqueness of its place, use biophilic design principles that connect to nature, consider equity, and even seek beauty. The challenge seems audacious, but that’s what makes it inspiring. Breaking it into smaller pieces makes it easier to grasp. Each of these pieces has permanently changed the way I think about building design.
PLACE ENERGY
Closed-loop water systems draw only from the rain falling within the bounds of their sites, recapture nutrients from waste, and return the leftover water back into the air or ground.
MATERIALS
There is far-reaching power behind the materialtransparency movement: if manufacturers aren’t making products with toxic chemicals, then their workers and the surrounding community won’t be exposed to those toxins. On top of that, we can choose materials sourced close to the site, helping local economies.
EQUITY
Humans spend most of their time in buildings. Buildings should respect their occupants, surrounding them with light, air, and connections to nature.
I am encouraged by the power and volume in the movement for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in architecture. The LBC calls on us to start in our own practices, soliciting and cultivating more diverse points of view, and designing buildings that do the same.
BEAUTY
HEALTH + HAPPINESS
Net-positive energy is pivoting toward the mainstream, with available technology. The number of net-zero buildings or buildings working toward net-zero has increased 700 percent since 2012, according to the New Building Institute.
WATER
Buildings should relate to the human scale, be rooted to their place, and connect to the stories and people that surround them.
The LBC does not attempt to define beauty — that’s too subjective. Instead, it encourages designers to think and write about what they think will make their project beautiful — and then asks them to talk to occupants to see if the design was successful. Beautiful buildings make our world better and encourage us to care more — about our spaces, our environment, and the people who share them.
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McLennan intentionally launched the first version of the LBC when it was “threequarters baked,” imperfect and with some limitations. For example, the LBC has been successful at only a certain scale thus far. The first wave of buildings to be certified were environmental centers on unconstrained, rural sites. The next wave included “normal” buildings — the six-story Bullitt Center office building in downtown Seattle and the R. W. Kern Center, a 17,000-square-foot campus building at Hampshire College. The third wave is likely to take it to the next scale — a 40,000-square-foot Kendeda Building at Georgia Tech is under construction, and a 130,000-square-foot Residential Village is under design for Yale’s Divinity School. Now a Living Community Challenge is emerging to consider applying LBC principles at the community scale and in urban settings. Requirements sometimes overlap and tradeoffs must be made. When our team could not find plywood that was free of red-list chemicals, sourced close to our site, and FSC certified, we sought an exception, complying with the requirement we thought worked toward the most positive change. We chose red-list-free sustainably harvested plywood sourced in the Southeast. The impact of material toxins on workers and occupants and responsible forest management took precedence over transportation energy and supporting the regional economy.
Our choices as designers can support industries and manufacturers that are at the leading edge of safe materials. McLennan puts it succinctly: ‘Instead of specifying materials that might give you cancer, let’s choose ones that can’t.’
Obviously, not every building can be a Living Building, but the philosophy can guide us. The LBC challenges designers to smash through our preconceptions and reframe what we do in the positive. What does good look like to you?
JASON FORNEY
Facing page: The LBC certified R. W. Kern Center, designed by Bruner/Cott Architects. Images courtesy of Bruner/Cott, by Robert Benson. 30
Jason Forney AIA is a principal with Bruner/ Cott & Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He focuses on deep green design, including new high-performance architecture and the creative transformation of existing buildings.
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EDIFY
WINTER 2018-2019
McLENNAN JOINS BOARD OF McEWEN SCHOOL
Canada’s first architecture school to open in forty years calls Sudbury home
CLICK HERE TO VIEW ARCH DAILY’S GALLERY OF THE MCEWEN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGNED BY LGA ARCHITECTURAL PARTNERS.
Canada’s first new architecture school to open in forty years has done so in what might seem an unlikely place: Sudbury, Ontario. Known more for mining and environmental degradation than design, Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture (MSoA) is charting a new path in a town whose tired identity as a resource extraction hub is overdue for reinvention. The school’s curriculum revolves around Sudbury’s distinctive Indigenous and Northern cultural influences, blending the two to create a first-of-its-kind pedagogy firmly rooted in place. Above: The McEwen School of Architecture’s Advisory Board. Facing page, clockwise from upper left: McEwen School students construct a traditional birch bark canoe in their second year; curriculum also includes the design and build of warming huts, built on sleds; students meet with an Elder on a visit to the Dan Pine Healing Lodge; another warming hut on the ice, complete with ice skaters. All photos courtesy of The McEwen School of Architecture 32
The attributes of this place – Indigenous culture, climate, geography, abundant natural resources (specifically the boreal forests), English, French and First Nation languages spoken – converge to create this unique identity, one that is decidedly northern in influence and shares more with the vast expanses and communities of the North than with the southern influence of Toronto. This distinction was especially important to former Laurentian Economics Department Chair David Robinson who writes, “Sudbury is a jumble of buildings that were designed by Toronto architects and Florida design companies that sell plans to contractors…I would argue that we have been colonized by the aesthetic of a different world and that the issues of identity are intimately connected to the economy.” The McEwen School rights this “aesthetic colonization” by defining and evolving a style that is uniquely of place. The core of the learning experience at MSoA revolves around the studio, where students work collaboratively with each other, Indigenous Elders and other instructors, designing and building projects - including a birch bark canoe fashioned in the traditional way, and ice shelters - alongside more expected design school inquiries. Terrence Galvin, founding Director of MSoA, writes, “While some of what the students learn from the Elders can be of a practical nature…much of it is not tangible, and reflects more a way of thinking and being in the world. Students absorb attitudes about sustainability, materials, care for the land, the people and the animals that inhabit it, and how to do
good work quietly and modestly. Elders also help students realize that to be great designers, or good persons, they need to reach deep inside to find their inner voices so they can express who they are through their work.” This ethos, though born of and grounded in a distinct place, is a way of grounding design in any place, uniquely preparing McEwen School graduates for the emerging needs of society in the face of climate change and other global stressors with an intuitive sense of the ways in which place-based design can create change. Our CEO Jason F. McLennan, born and raised in Sudbury, has been honored with an invitation to join the McEwen School Advisory Board alongside over a dozen other distinguished leaders from both in and outside the profession. Together, the board are contributing their varied expertise and ideas to continue to grow the program. “My experience growing up in Sudbury and the North shaped my world-view, my sensibilities and my deep commitment to a different way of living and being focused on regeneration and beautiful design” says McLennan, who visited the school at the end of November to participate in the first meeting of the board. “I am honored to come home and provide counsel and ideas to this wonderful new icon of the north.” MSoA’s first Master of Architecture class will graduate in the spring of 2019.
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EDIFY
MD PARTICIPATES IN AIA HONORS AWARD SELECTION Allison Pericich serves on inaugural young voices selection committee
CLICK HERE TO SEE AN ONLINE PORTFOLIO OF ALL SUBMITTED PROJECTS. CLICK HERE TO READ AIA’S PIECE ON THE AWARDS CEREMONY
Inset: the Young Voices Selection Committee deliberating on over 100 projects submitted for a Washington AIA Honor Award. Right: Granny Pad, the 2018 YVS winner. Photo courtesy of Sozinho Imagery. 34
On November 5, the AIA Seattle chapter hosted the 68th annual Honor Awards for Washington Architecture to celebrate design excellence. This year’s ceremony introduced the Young Voices Selection (YVS), a program intended to engage and elevate the voices of young designers through direct participation and representation in the Honor Awards. Four panelists, Siyu Qu, Assoc. AIA (The Miller Hull Partnership), Anh Tran, Assoc. AIA (Integrus Architecture), Sarah Haase, AIA (Schemata Workshop), and McLennan Design’s Allison Pericich, AIA considered over 100 projects submitted in the built category. While the quality of design was high across all project types, the YVS panel focused on visionary projects that addressed issues relevant in Seattle - housing, sustainability, public space, education. After robust deliberation, the panel selected Granny Pad by Best Practice Architecture as the award winner. Granny Pad, a small detached dwelling designed for a growing, multi-generational family in Seattle, transformed an existing garage into a living space. The project was selected because it took a strong position addressing affordable housing, density, aging in place, and maintaining neighborhood character. The adaptive reuse of a garage also challenged private car ownership and the architectural typology of car storage in increasingly dense urban spaces. Granny Pad honored the history of the existing garage and neighborhood structure while meeting the needs of today’s residents and their expectations for the future of the city.
MD + BIOHABITATS FORM STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP
Firms offer comprehensive regenerative design to green building community
CLICK HERE TO READ THE LATEST ISSUE OF BIOHABITATS’ QUARTERLY, LEAF LITTER.
McLennan Design has formed a collaborative, strategic partnership with ecological consulting firm Biohabitats Inc. Biohabitats applies the science of ecology to restoring ecosystems, conserving habitat, and regenerating the natural systems that sustain all life on Earth. They do this through engagement, assessment, planning, engineering and design, construction, and monitoring. Aligned in values of environmental and social responsibility, and offering complementary services, our two firms will collaborate on planning and design projects throughout North America and beyond. “By transforming architecture and planning into forces for ecological and social good, Jason McLennan has dramatically broadened the definition of green building,” said Biohabitats’ president and founder, Keith Bowers. “Partnering with McLennan Design enables us to provide a more comprehensive array of services to help our clients enhance the resilience of their communities.” “Both Biohabitats and McLennan Design look to nature’s principles for guidance in design and in defining success. With our focus on the built environment and Biohabitats’ expertise in the natural systems that exist in and around it, this partnership has the power to truly regenerate and reinvigorate communities throughout the world,” says McLennan Design CEO, Jason F. McLennan. Plant identification, image courtesy of Biohabitats. 35
EDIFY
TORONTO MOHAWK SHOWROOM STARTS CONSTRUCTION 5,000 square foot showroom targeting LBC Petal certification
The Toronto showroom of flooring company Mohawk Group, designed by McLennan Design, is under construction. This showroom, which targets Living Building Challenge Petal Certification, will open to the public in March 2019. The 5,000 square foot showroom’s careful design makes thousands of tile and carpet samples accessible to salespeople and customers in a combination of a materials library, innovative displays, generous storage and finishes. It features dedicated space for sample viewing, informal work and collaboration spaces, a conference room, private workspace for Mohawk employees, a kitchenette and flexible space that will house mobile displays that can be removed to accommodate parties and gatherings. The project is currently in its demolition phase, and careful deconstruction is ensuring that all removed, viable material is salvaged for future reuse. Mohawk Group’s commitment to sustainability has resulted in some of the deepest green products and spaces in the flooring and commercial finishes industry. For more celebration of this company’s innovative collaborations with McLennan Design, see our Biophilia Floorplan from issue 2 and a recap of the award-winning Lichen Collection in issue 1 of Love + Regeneration.
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McLENNAN DESIGN ATTENDS GREENBUILD
Jason Wilkinson and Brad Benke contribute as workshop presenters
McLennan Design’s Jason Wilkinson and Brad Benke recently attended Greenbuild in Chicago where they each participated as presenters at the November 14 – 16 conference for AEC professionals. Jason Wilkinson presented in collaboration with Nicole Isle (Glumac), Nicole Craanen (environmental psychology expert) and Nash Emrich (Paladino and Company) to deliver an interactive session on the subject of Experiential Proof: The Business Case for Biophilic Design. As part of this session, sixtyplus attendees participated in comparative sensory awareness meditations indoors and outside, examining the effects of environments on experience.
Nicole, Nash, Jason and Nicole - co-facilitators in a Biophilia Workshop on the snowy shores of Lake Michigan in November.
Brad Benke presented in collaboration with David Walsh (Sellen), Meghan Lewis (Mithun), and Ryan Zizzo (Zizzo Strategy) on the subject of Beyond Measure: Using LCA to Transform Projects and Products. This session focused on the embodied carbon of materials and how they impact the natural environment. To reduce this impact and help meet larger climate targets, attendees learned how to apply life cycle assessment as a tool for decision making and implementation at every stage of a project.
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WINTER 2018-2019
the handprint of a flower BY PETE MUÑOZ This article originally appeared in Trim Tab, Issue 35, October 2018. The flower is used in so many metaphors. It is a regular stand-in for love, femininity, and even painfully fleeting beauty. A flower is a blossoming soul; the thing with which the earth laughs. In the case of the Living Building Challenge, it has provided an appropriate and elegant model for the efficiency of a building. As such a model, and as a lens through which to measure sustainability, the flower has served us well. But when we widen that lens, we are reminded that unless a flower has been cut and placed in a bud vase or fashioned into a boutonniere, it does not exist in isolation. It interacts with the soil, water, and air around it. It is part of a plant—a plant that is a member of a community of other plants and other living beings. It exists, and plays a role, within an ecosystem. It sits on a landscape that is part of a watershed. And the flower is not just the pretty, highly functioning part of its plant - it is the bearer of seeds and pollen that support its propagation. The handprint as metaphor for positive, intentional change is also powerful. Particularly because a handprint has, as Gregory Norris says, “the possibility to ripple outward with no limit.” When it comes to the flowers we create in the form of Living Buildings, why restrict 38
the size and ripple effect of our handprints - particularly on water and ecology - by limiting our scope to the building itself? While I have had the honor of contributing to the creation of Living Buildings - primarily by guiding the design of low-energy, naturebased systems to ensure the building meets the net-positive water standards of the water petal - I have also been involved in a larger body of work that Biohabitats does: planning, designing, and constructing projects that protect and restore ecosystems, enhance ecosystem function in the built environment, and reconnect people to place. We may lack a beautifully appropriate metaphor with which to label the outcome of this type of work, but we are very familiar with the handprint concept. This work is done with a long view and a dynamic approach that considers factors like climate change and environmental justice. People who do this type of work understand the downstream effect—often literally—of positive change that extends beyond a negative footprint. A great example of such a handprint can be found at a public school located 45 minutes from Cleveland. In the early 2000s, two science teachers at Hudson High School spearheaded an effort to restore a stream that ran through school property. The stream
had suffered a double whammy from its rapidly urbanizing watershed: its naturally meandering channel was straightened to accommodate development, and afterwards, it received so much stormwater it became eroded and separated from its floodplain. Its crumbling banks were a safety hazard; it provided little habitat and even less beauty; and during storms, it became an expressway for fast-flowing, polluted stormwater to enter nearby Tinker’s Creek, the largest tributary to the Cuyahoga River. The Cuyahoga River, a body of water once so polluted it caught fire and sparked the Clean Water Act, flows through Cleveland and right into Lake Erie, a source of drinking water for over 11 million people. Ultimately, those two teachers, and others who joined the effort, secured funding from the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, the City of Hudson, and the U.S. EPA, and hired Biohabitats to design and construct a stream restoration project. The goals were to restore stability and ecological function to the tributary. This meant slowing down and filtering polluted runoff; allowing water from big storms to flow over the banks and into wetlands that would slow down and filter pollution; and providing habitat for fish, birds, and other critters. Had the project done just that, the restoration would have
left a decent handprint. After all, it restored 1,700 feet of stream, created a conservation easement, improved safety, added habitat, and helped clean water that would ultimately flow into Lake Erie. But what really extended the fingers of this project’s handprint was the involvement of students, and the school’s ongoing use of the site as a living laboratory for experiential education. At the project’s start, students were taught how to do a Headwater Habitat Evaluation Index so they could monitor the project. Students participated in a charrette and helped craft the restoration design. Photography students documented physical changes in the stream system. When it was time to install riparian plants, students served as the landscaping crew. The site was dubbed the “Land Lab,” as it became a living, outdoor classroom, where biology, chemistry, and environmental science students could see, hear, smell, and touch subjects they had previously only read about in textbooks. Teachers and students created a blog, where they provided regular updates on the restoration, and on the life sciences and life lessons learned in the Land Lab. That project was completed six years ago, and Hudson High students still strap on waders, get into the Land Lab, and search 39
Right: The stream running through Hudson High School property after restoration by Biohabitats, Images courtesy of Biohabitats.
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Left: Students getting involved with the Land Lab at Hudson High. Images courtesy of Biohabitats.
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for macroinvertebrates. In the process, they gain an understanding of their school’s— and their own - place within the landscape, watershed, and broader community of life. Like a flower, that project is propagating seeds. Thirty miles north of Hudson, a similar stream restoration project is underway at the Willoughby-Eastlake School of Innovation, a STEM-focused public school. Teachers who were initially unaware that there was a stream on their property are now eager to get students out to their future Land Lab for hands-on education. Fifth grade science teachers, whose curriculum includes the topic of ecosystems, are already asking if students can remove invasive species as part of their problem-based learning. This type of handprint is not limited to schools, which are admittedly ripe with ripple effect potential. And you don’t have to be an ecological consultant to make such an impression. Architects have incredible power to do this, and an example is right 42
in the Living Building portfolio: the Dixon Water Foundation’s Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion. Through its headquarters in Decatur, Texas, and its working cattle ranches, the Foundation promotes healthy watersheds by demonstrating and teaching people— mainly ranchers—about regenerative land management. While ranchers often hold a deep connection to the land, their livestock operations may degrade it, and negatively impact water quality for everyone and everything downstream. The Foundation’s new, 5,400-square-foot pavilion, which was designed by Lake|Flato and became the first certified Living Building in Texas, is a beautiful, functional space that also demonstrates the sustainability practices the Foundation teaches. As the team’s water consultant, Biohabitats designed a system that treats 100% of the pavilion’s wastewater through constructed wetlands and a recirculating sand filter, reuses it for irrigation, and returns it to the natural water cycle.
A Living Building that is used to educate others about sustainable land management? Boom. Handprint. One that protects water in a region with seasonal extremes? Ripple effect. What really expands this handprint, however, is the way the building connects people to the landscape. In the tranquil, lowlying, open-air pavilion, you not only see the sweeping tallgrass prairie that surrounds you, you feel its breezes. You hear the swishing of its grasses and the buzzing of its insects. Without a word or an interpretive sign, you understand your place in this biological community, and it is one of steward. The handprint of a paradigm shift is infinite. Imagine the massive, collective handprint those of us in the Living Building community could create, even when working outside the sphere of Living Building projects, by carrying this ethic into all of our work. During the early design phases of the AIA COTE Top 10 Award-winning Engineered Biosystems Building at Georgia Tech, my colleague, Erin
English, participated in a charrette convened by Lake|Flato Architects to inspire and engage the client and design team around innovative water, energy, and site goals. Erin’s role was what it often is when Biohabitats participates in high-performance green building projects: planning and designing systems that reduce the water footprint, enhance ecological function, and serve as inspirational elements. When the time came to discuss water, most team members were focused on where and how to flush the building’s toilets. After waiting for the room to settle, Erin presented aerial images of Chattahoochee River watershed, pointing out the building’s location relative to this body of water that carved the land and helped define the region. Erin also mentioned that the building feeds into a combined sewer, the kind infamous for beelining pollution to surrounding waterbodies during storms. Rather than ask “Where will we flush our toilets?” Erin asked, “How can this building be a better steward of its watershed? How
This and facing page: The Josey Pavilion. Images courtesy of Dror Baldinger
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Above: The Engineered Biosystems Building at Georgia Tech. Image courtesy of Chris Cooper. Below: Planning officials in Atlanta working on the Urban Ecology Framework. Image courtesy of Biohabitats.
The resulting design approaches layer a series of water harvesting strategies to capture rainwater, condensate, and foundation dewatering to flush toilets, feed a recirculating water feature, and augment base flow to a stormwater treatment wetland. This provides habitat and reduces potable water needs and discharges to the combined sewer. But the wider impact – the real stretch of the handprint - was the shift in team’s perspective from ‘building a building’ to creating a regional model for appropriate design that held the health of the river miles downstream paramount. For the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, another campus project currently under construction and in pursuit of the full Living Building Challenge, Georgia Tech is now providing even more watershed protection by including composting toilets. With forward-thinking cities turning to ecology as a foundation for planning, the potential shift from footprint to handprint is considerable. The City of Baltimore recently developed a “Green Network Plan,” to transform vacant and abandoned properties into an interconnected system of flourishing community spaces that benefit the City’s people and ecology while laying the foundation to revitalize some of its most challenged neighborhoods. Working with the City, Biohabitats’ first step was to examine the ecosystems that underlie the city and the services they provide. This included acknowledging historic and lingering environmental injustices resulting from a legacy of racism. The team then gathered input from the people of Baltimore—not just advisory groups, subcommittees, agencies, and NGOs, but people who live in the neighborhoods most in need. The Green Network Plan, which should go into effect this autumn, celebrates and improves Baltimore’s historic streams and native ecology while connecting open space with safe, accessible, and increasingly green corridors. In Atlanta, planning officials faced with an urgent need to preserve and enhance the city’s unique natural resources while accommodating projected population
growth took a progressive step with “Atlanta City Design,” a vision for the future that embraces the core values of Equity, Progress, Ambition, Access, and Nature. They’re now developing an “Urban Ecology Framework” that will equitably guide development in a way that protects and expands native forests, conserves and enriches biodiversity, provides public access to quality greenspace, and fosters resilience through community stewardship. In crafting this Framework with Atlanta’s Planning Department, Biohabitats is examining the city’s ecology, assessing its habitat and biodiversity needs, and actively engaging its people - through public workshops, open houses, and meetings - to understand what Nature means to them and the ways in which natural systems might intersect with the areas of their lives they’d like to see improved. These planning efforts are not just connecting urban green spaces and stimulating economic development. They are improving, unearthing, restoring, enhancing access to, and celebrating the natural systems that pulsate between and below the buildings and infrastructure we have erected on top of them—systems that, quite literally, keep these cities alive. And they are doing so in ways that ensure that all residents benefit from their city’s natural assets. Now that’s a handprint. Flowers are stunning in their beauty, efficiency, and design. But when we think about our potential to imprint the places we touch with an ever-expanding handprint of good, perhaps we ought to start thinking about sowing the seeds of entire wildflower meadows.
Photo: Dave Cooper
can it positively impact the Chattahoochee River and the people and natural systems it supports?” Erin said she could feel the energy in the room shift, as the team widened the lens from the building alone to its role, its impact, and finally its potential, within the campus and wider community.
PETE MUÑOZ Pete Muñoz leads the Cascadia Bioregion office of Biohabitats as a Senior Engineer. Pete works around the globe helping to connect communities with appropriate inspirational living water infrastructure. A licensed engineer, he brings the balance of the water/energy/ food/ ecology nexus into focus on infrastructure projects involving wastewater treatment, stormwater management, rainwater harvesting, environmental remediation, and watershed restoration. He has contributed to numerous SITES, LEED and Living Building Challenge projects, and in 2017 was recognized by the International Living Future Institute as a Living Building Hero. 45
Octavia
AN EXCERPT FROM HOW TO BE A GOOD CREATURE BY SY MONTGOMERY ILLUSTRATION BY REBECCA GREEN
Only during my lifetime had scientists begun to acknowledge that chimpanzees, humankind’s closest relatives, are conscious beings. But what about creatures so different from us that you’d have to go to outer space, or into science fiction, to find anything so alien? What might I discover about the interior lives of these animals if I were to use, as a tool of inquiry, not only my intellect, but also my heart?
Octavia’s…head was about the size of a cantaloupe, and her arms were about three feet long. It was clear that Octavia was not really a young pup. She was a large, perhaps nearly mature octopus who had been living wild in the ocean just weeks before. Her red skin signaled her excitement. I was excited too. She had my left arm up to the elbow encased in three of hers, and my right arm held firmly in another. There was no way I could resist. A single one of her largest suckers could lift thirty pounds, and each of her eight arms had two hundred of them. An octopus’s arms, by one calculation, can pull a hundred times the animal’s own weight. If Octavia weighed 40 pounds, as Scott thought, that would pit my 120 pounds against her ability to pull 4,000.
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Even imagining that I could befriend an octopus would be dismissed among many circles as anthropomorphism - projecting human emotions onto an animal...But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.
But I wasn’t even trying to escape. I was aware that like all octopuses Octavia could bite, hard, with her parrot-like beak inside the confluence of her arms. I knew, too, about her venom. A giant Pacific’s is not, like some species, deadly, but it’s toxic to nerves and dissolves flesh. An envenomated wound can take months to heal. But I felt no threat from Octavia. I felt only that she was curious. I was too.
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But was I reading her correctly? Reading an octopus’s intentions is not like reading, for instance, a dog’s…Dogs, like all placental
mammals, share 90 percent of our genetic material. Dogs evolved with humans. Octavia and I were separated by half a billion years of evolution. We were as different as land from sea. Was it even possible for a human to understand the emotions of a creature as different from us as an octopus? […] Never before had I truly become close friends with an invertebrate— much less a marine invertebrate. Even imagining that I could befriend an octopus would be dismissed among many circles as
anthropomorphism—projecting human emotions onto an animal…But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all. […] Soon, all six of us…were overwhelmed with sensation: the sucking grasp of her tasting us, the colors playing over her electric skin, the acrobatics of her suckers and arms and eyes. We stroked her, feeling her soft, silky slime as she tasted our skin, creating red hickeys with her suction. We watched her reshape the surface of her skin, making bumps called papillae that sometimes looked like a covering of thorns and other times looked like fat goose bumps. Sometimes the papillae formed little horns over her eyes.
“She’s happy!” I cried to Wilson. “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Very happy.” […] Could she know how much I cared for her? Did it matter to her? I wish I knew, but I don’t. But now, thanks to Octavia, I know something perhaps deeper and more important, perhaps best expressed by Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived more than 2,600 years ago. “The universe,” he’s reported to have said, “is alive, and has fire in it, and is full of gods.” Being friends with an octopus – whatever that friendship meant to her – has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom – and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine. Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0
We decided to feed her another capelin. But when we looked at the edge of the tank, the bucket was gone. With six humans watching, she had stolen it out from under us. We didn’t try to get the bucket back. She had let the fish fall out of it and was holding it beneath her, exploring it. But while playing with the bucket, Octavia was still also playing with us. Multitasking for an octopus is easy, because three-fifths of their neurons are not even in their brains, but in their arms. It’s almost as if each arm has its own separate brain – a brain that craves, and enjoys, stimulation. I noticed that patches of Octavia’s skin had started to turn from red to white – the color of a relaxed octopus.
SY MONTGOMERY To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. Sy’s 20 books for both adults and children have garnered many honors. The Soul of an Octopus was a 2015 Finalist for the National Book Awards. 49
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ABOUT MCLENNAN DESIGN McLennan Design, one of the world’s leading multi-disciplinary regenerative design practices, focuses on deep green outcomes in the fields of architecture, planning, consulting, and product design. The firm uses an ecological perspective to drive design creativity and innovation, reimagining and redesigning for positive environmental and social impact. Founded in 2013 by global sustainability leader and green design pioneer Jason F. McLennan and joined by partner Dale Duncan, the firm dedicates its practice to the creation of living buildings, net-zero, and regenerative projects all over the world. As the founder and creator of many of the building industry’s leading programs including the Living Building Challenge and its related programs, McLennan and his design team bring substantial knowledge and unmatched expertise to the A/E industry. The firm’s diverse and interdisciplinary set of services makes for a culture of holistic solutions and big picture thinking.
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ABOUT JASON F. MCLENNAN Considered one of the world’s most influential individuals in the field of architecture and green building movement today, Jason is a highly sought out designer, consultant and thought leader. The recipient of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize, the planet’s top prize for socially responsible design, he has been called the Steve Jobs of the green building industry, a World Changer by GreenBiz magazine. In 2016, Jason was selected as the Award of Excellence winner for Engineering News Record- one of the only individuals in the architecture profession to have won the award in its 52-year history. McLennan is the creator of the Living Building Challenge – the most stringent and progressive green building program in existence, as well as a primary author of the WELL Building Standard. He is the author of six books on Sustainability and Design used by thousands of practitioners each year, including The Philosophy of Sustainable Design. McLennan is both an Ashoka Fellow and Senior Fellow of the Design Future’s Council. He has been selected by Yes! Magazine as one of 15 People Shaping the World and works closely with world leaders, Fortune 500 companies, leading NGOs, major universities, celebrities and development companies –all in the pursuit of a world that is socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative. He serves as the Chairman of the International Living Future Institute and is the CEO of McLennan Design – his architectural and planning practice designing some of the world’s most advanced green buildings. McLennan’s work has been published in dozens of journals, magazines and newspapers around the world.
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