Sustainability is Dead

Sustainability is Dead Richard Graves

Sustainability is Dead

Sustainability is Dead Re-Generation in Architecture William W. Braham Bob Harris Jessica Hellman Lance Hosey Julia Kane Africa Tom Kubala Marc L’Italien Jacob Mans Forrest Meggers Kiel Moe Julie Snow James Timberlake Richard Graves, editor

UMinn Papers on Architecture University of Minnesota School of Architecture

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Contents

Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 ReDesigning Design Lance Hosey

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Regenerating Architecture 37 Richard Graves The Intersection of Ecosystem and Human Health 53 Jessica Hellman and Julia Kane Africa Theory, Practice, and Research 69 William W. Braham, Jacob Mans, Forrest Meggers, and Kiel Moe Connecting Design and Regeneration 89 Bob Harris, Tom Kubala, Marc L’Italien, Julie Snow, and James Timberlake

Sustainability is Dead

Contributors

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Acknowledgments

In 2014, I came to the University of Minnesota as the second director of the Center for Sustainable Building Research after John Carmody retired. I was attracted to the university because of it’s long tradition and leadership in sustainability with the center, one of the first Masters in Sustainable Design and Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines and many other accomplishments. The genesis of this symposium was a grant from Judy Dayton to “continue the tradition of bringing great people to the School of Architecture.” Marc Swackhamer, Blaine Brownell and I discussed topics that the school was in a unique position to show leadership and insight. Out of those discussions the title: “Sustainability is Dead, Architecture as (Re)Generator” emerged. (Thank you to Blair Satterfield for the title). It is an investigation of the next generation of sustainable thinking that moves beyond checklists and reductionist approaches to embrace the complexity, beauty and potential of social and ecological systems to inspire architecture. When I asked Lance Hosey to keynote the event he asked “is this a funeral or a baby shower for sustainability?” The symposium was intended to conceive a new future for regenerative design.

Thank you to all of the contributors, supporters, and detractors who were a part of it.

Sustainability is Dead

—Richard Graves, June 2018

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Introduction Sustainability is Dead

Sustainability is dead or at the very least meaningless after the term has been co-opted by the branding and green-washing of corporations and governments and as the technological pursuit as typified by green building programs and other reductive approaches. The world is in constant flux and change. Complex systems are continually in a process of adapting to influences and priorities. Unfortunately, much of the work and theory has been incremental fine-tuning of architecture and fails to inspire design and innovation. Design relies on humanity’s ability to not only be rational and technical, but also to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional and experiential meaning as well as function. Given the realities of our time, architecture requires much more than fine-tuning. A complete overhaul is required to redesign our way of building and making to contribute to the web of life.

The worlds we inhabit—natural, social, and technological have real limits and fragility. The euro-centered world that has dominated the culture of the last two hundred years is in the process of coming apart, perhaps to be replaced by new and better stories or perhaps not. Natural systems that humanity has lived within have been altered beyond return to a pristine state, but hopefully to a point where they cannot recover and thrive in the future. “We are living on an Earth 2.0, where all bets are off.”

Social and ecological systems are unstable and fractured.

Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year. It now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. We maintain this overshoot by liquidating the Earth’s resources. Overshoot is a vastly underestimated threat to human well-being and the health of the planet, and one that is not adequately addressed in architecture.

How do we envision a new role for design? In a world that is increasingly digital, global and devoid of connections to place, people and the natural world? How do architects consider an integral design process merging the designed world or “technosphere”

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with the life support system or “ecosphere” of the planet? How do we meet human needs, create delight and inspiration while enhancing the potential of natural and social systems? Can buildings be analogs for living systems? How do we create architecture in a complex world that is in an inherent state of flow and flux?

This symposium explored design and architecture as a means to conceive and shape complex systems at the intersection of natural process and culture, where form follows flow. The exploration was structured around three aspects of regenerative design: theory, metrics and integration into practice. As I designed the symposium and my keynote titled “Regenerating Architecture,” I had a quote as my inspiration for each section: Theory It is not enough to aspire to mitigate the effects of human activity — people need to take their place again as a part of nature.

—Pamela Mang and Bill Reed Pamela Mang and Bill Reed call for a shift in mindset from people separated from nature to people and nature co-evolving together. Often green and sustainable design has focused on doing less bad work and not addressing the fundamental human condition that we’ve separated ourselves from nature. We are part of one social and ecological system where people and nature are integral and the delineation between social systems and ecological systems is seen as artificial and arbitrary. The first panel with Dr Jessica Hellman and Dr Julia Kane Africa explores the intersection human health and ecosystem health.

Metrics … I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.

—Brian Eno, quoted in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn

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Introduction

Past green building metrics have been static in space and time.

Brian Eno’s quote comes from a worldview that sees the complexity of life that is regulated by a combination of ecological and social systems that are continuously dynamic, complex and adaptive. This is a stark contrast from many of the current green building tools and metrics. The panel with Dr. William W. Braham, Kiel Moe and Dr. Forrest Meggers asks architecture to embrace and research the dynamism of social and ecological systems.

Sustainability is Dead

Practice Green design is directed at reducing degenerative impacts… this is insufficient for an ecologically sustainable future and is an insufficient aspiration to motivate design professionals and their clients.

—Dr. Ray Cole, University of British Columbia The last quote is from Ray Cole at the University of British Columbia. Reductive definitions of green design were not embraced by most architects and design professionals who are used to navigating multiple factors that they need to incorporate into one whole building that works for people, works for the environment, is energy efficient and functions with the program.

I think most designers and most of the best designers are used to thinking in wholes and that’s created part of the tension of reductive approaches like LEED and other checklists. These approaches are like dissecting a patient into site, energy, and water… The architect’s brain inherently knows that’s not the way to approach life. How do we incorporate regenerative design into all practice? Every act of design and making is inherently in act of hope and doesn’t have to be a Living Building to find ways for regenerative design to emerge. Lance Hosey’s keynote and the panel of award winning architects: Tom Kubala, AIA, Julie Snow, FAIA, Bob Harris, FAIA, Marc L’Italien, FAIA, and James Timberlake, FAIA provides examples of architectural inspiration for the urgent and hopeful future of sustainable design. After hosting a symposium with the title Sustainability is Dead, maybe the center (CSBR) should be renamed to the Center for “Studies of Building Regeneration”.

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Sustainability is Dead

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Redesigning Design—Lance Hosey Sustainability is Dead

A decade ago, the American Institute of Architects staged a conference that I co-chaired with Greg Mella of the Smith Group and others called “Architecture of Sustainability.” I was just starting to do the research on my book, The Shape of Green.

This historically was the first—and still only—event that was co-sponsored or co-hosted by the AIA Committee on Design and the AIA Committee on the Environment. What does that tell you?

It tells you that we still talk about design and environmental issues completely separately.

The interesting thing has always been the integration of design excellence and sustainable performance. Yet we tend to think of sustainable performance as something that stands over there, and design as something that stands over here. Design excellence is this phrase, hold on to that for a minute, because if you know anything about the AIA and you’ve ever looked at any of its language or looked at any of its awards programs, design excellence is this phrase that they use but never really define.

For example, the Committee on Design, with some of the same people who were at that Architecture of Sustainability conference ten years ago, got together four years ago for a conference called “What is Design Excellence?,” which basically asked, what do we mean by good design? The conclusion was many provocative observations but no consensus, meaning they got together some of the smartest designers in the United States, and nobody could agree on what good design is. Basically, we’re saying that as designers, we exist to create good design, but we can’t agree on what that is.

It’s not just architects and designers who struggle with this.

The Wall Street Journal calls Gary Hamel the “most important business thinker alive today.” He says that good design is like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: “We know it when we see it.” How are we supposed to do this thing if we can’t articulate what it is? For a long while I thought, well, architects are really more about image or form and space, and less about words, and it’s just that we don’t like words and that’s why we struggle with the challenge, I’d rather do it. It’s like jazz. If you know anything about jazz, Miles Davis used to say, “First I’ll play it, then maybe I’ll talk about it.” That’s architecture in a nutshell—Architecture

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Raafael Viñoly, Fryscraper

with a capital “A.” Architects like to do it, we don’t like to talk about it so much. For a long time I thought that was the challenge, but now I’ve come to believe that there is a different set of challenges.

Do you know this documentary that came out a few years ago about a design competition with a lot of rarefied architects doing a project and the camera crew following them around just to see their thought process? At some point, Jean Nouvel turns to the camera and says, “I hope you captured the mystery and the deepness.” He’s French so you can forgive the word deepness, but he wasn’t talking about the architecture, he was talking about the architects. He wasn’t talking about the design, he was talking about the design process. I could see how buildings and places should have some degree of mystery to be provocative in the way that we’ve been talking about, but why should the process be mysterious? I’ve come to believe that as an industry, we have not taken the time to agree on what we mean by good design because it would rob us of what we think of as the best part of design, which is its mystery. It’s almost biblical. We portray the most celebrated architects as if they go up on the mountain and angels whisper secrets in their ears that the rest of us mere mortals don’t understand. Then the architects come back and deliver the gospel to the masses. This is exactly how we portray architects, as if we’re mystics or magicians—but first and foremost, artists.

Everywhere you turn, the definition of architecture is that it’s art. Philip Johnson says, “It’s art and nothing else, all it is, is art.”

Frank Lloyd Wright says, “It’s the mother of all arts.” Santiago Calatrava says, “It’s the most abstract of all arts,” whatever that means. The Pritzker Prize, which is the Nobel of architecture, is about work that promotes the art of architecture. But if

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Redesigning Design—Lance Hosey Sustainability is Dead

architecture is art, what is art? If you asked everyone in the audience to write down a definition of art, you might get a lot of different answers. A really amazing book that came out not that long ago says that our whole modern concept of art is a fairly new invention. Art used to mean, before the last couple of centuries, something more akin to what we consider to be craft. It was about skill in creating something that people found useful and enjoyable. Then in the eighteenth century, the fine arts became more about something that was meant to be about expert taste, about the upper classes having some sort of privileged vision on the beautiful that the masses don’t have.

In popular definitions, art means different things, but it is always about self-expression. We believe that people create art in order to express themselves, and this is exactly how we think about architects as well. Frank Gehry says that “to deny the ability of self-expression is akin to not believing in democracy,” but democracy is the will of the people, not the will of the individual. What it comes down to is The Fountainhead. It’s Howard Roark. Think about this. This is the most popular story that has ever been written about an architect, and the basic plot is that he dynamited a building because it wasn’t built to his specification. It’s a temper tantrum. Self-expression can be a wonderful and incredible thing, but when it is extended to architects, it can be a major problem.

Remember Rafael Viñoly, who in full disclosure is a former employer of mine? You know the Fryscraper in London that actually melts cars and eggs on the street because the curved glass of the design concentrates the sun? In interviews after the problems were discovered, Viñoly said he could not meet with all these consultants… Anyone who took eighth grade physics know that concave glass focuses light. Or what about the CCTV Tower in Beijing? I spent a fair amount of time in Beijing, and the office that I worked at looked right over the tower. For my money, it’s a god-awful building. It’s falling apart already. It was only about a third leased three years into its construction. They can’t get anybody to live in it, and it’s streaking miserably, and yet it gets a lot of attention from experts as being one of the great buildings of all time. There is just this complete disconnect between what

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Google Search results for “innovative architecture”)

OMA, CCTV

architects think is good design and what everybody else thinks is good design.

Despite this, when I wrote an article for the Huffington Post, “Why Architecture Isn’t Art (And Shouldn’t Be),” people didn’t like it. In the article, I argued for introducing the scientific method into the design process in order to think about the value and impact we create. That’s not normally how we think about creating design, and it’s certainly not how others want to think about design either. Andrea Dean, a respected design journalist replied, “Clap-trap, what’s your point?” Another commenter replied, “If architecture isn’t an art, what is it?”

Art is hard for architects and so is innovation. Architects give a lot of lip service to the word innovation. If you Google the phrase innovative architecture, you get a lot of images like this: exotic geometry with a lot of sweeping curves, a lot of pointy corners, etc. We think that innovation is something that looks different. But the business world and our clients define innovation very differently. It’s about breakthroughs that create more value or a different dimension of performance that impacts experience. It’s about creating more value and a better impact.

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Redesigning Design—Lance Hosey Sustainability is Dead

This is exactly how we define sustainability. The word, measurably positive, reminds me of a story I told earlier of how I was on the design jury a few years ago with AIA, and someone said, “You know, the overemphasis on measurement has drained all the joy out of architecture,” as if numbers somehow inevitably rob us of poetry or something. I gave a talk along these lines once, and someone stood up afterwards and said, “We’re architects, not accountants.”

The reason that I show that there is this reaction to measuring things, the idea that architecture is art, and that it’s about good design, that it’s whatever we say it is, is because it’s so firmly ingrained in our training, in our thinking, in our culture, that the minute anyone says that architecture might be something else, he gets called out. We use this word sustainability, and everyone’s familiar with the term, and everybody wants to declare its death, but we rarely stop and ask ourselves whether we really know what it means, in the same way that we talk about design. The original, broadest understanding of sustainability is simply the intersection of social, economic, and environmental value. Remember I said that innovation is about value?

Sustainability is about value. It just is. I can’t think of anything that anyone in the world could value that doesn’t fall into one or more of these categories. If I ask you to tell me what you care about most, you might say family, friends, love, community— those are social values. In other words, sustainability is about creating real social, economic, and environmental value.

There are other hurdles to integrating sustainability into architecture. The single most common thing I hear from my colleagues and peers is, “My clients don’t care about it.” I point out that sustainability is actually everything, and I hear them say that our clients don’t care about anything. It’s just not true. Our clients care about something. It’s our job to figure out what that something is, and build from there. If they care about saving money, that’s an economic value. It’s our job to be as smart as possible about starting there and then moving into the center of the diagram above. This is a typical way we think about projects: How much will it cost? Does it work well? Does it look good?

Occasionally we’ll throw that other criterion in here. Sometimes

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Using sustainability as a lens for design decision-making & what is good design? (Hosey)

Structure of Sustainability

Broad definition of sustainability diagram (Hosey

it’s there, sometimes it’s not. In my job as chief sustainability officer, I get called into a meeting if LEED or sustainable shows up in an RFP, but otherwise I don’t get called into a meeting.

Instead of thinking of it as something that is parallel to but separate from all the other criteria we use to judge good design, we should think of it as a lens we use to make these other decisions. How smart are we about money, function, and aesthetics?

We return, of course, to the original question of good design.

Now, if we go to a more narrow understanding of sustainability, which is environmental value, I’m sure you all know the public perception is that industry, factories, and transportation or cars cause the problems with emissions. But up to about half

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of energy and emissions in the United States is determined by the building sector. The point of that is, we can’t solve the challenge of climate change without addressing the building sector.

We can’t wait for our elected leaders to address it because they’re not going to—it’s too politically charged. This is why architects need to lead. We have a big impact because we determine up to half of the problem. Are we actually doing that? Are we leading?

A few years ago, my friend Mary Ann Lazarus produced an amazing report with this diagram that says we want the whole industry to move forward and not just those people right at the leading edge. The 2030 Commitment created a vision for decreasing energy use of buildings to get to carbon neutrality by 2030. We’re right in the middle here. The 2030 Commitment started in 2010, and the volume of projects being submitted to it has grown by nearly seven times. However, if you look at the number of firms actually submitting work to the 2030 Commitment, it represents less than one percent of the industry.

So we’re still just looking at the early adopters, the people who really care about this. You would think this would mean that the numbers would be really good, since these are the people who care the most. It’s the cream of the crop, the one percent who really cares about sustainability, but for six years straight we’ve flatlined at about 35 to 36 percent reduction. If you look at all the studies on an average energy performance for LEED certified buildings, it’s the same number. What this tells me is that we only go so far if the message is, “Choose different materials and methods and different systems. The problem is in a technical manual, it’s different insulation, it’s a different mechanical system, but otherwise design is business as usual.”

That strategy gets you to about 30 to 35 percent.

We can’t get much beyond that unless we rethink the entire purpose of design, starting with the napkin sketch. We’re nowhere, and yet a few years ago the AIA Board, in its infinite wisdom, decided to discontinue the requirements that all members would be educated on sustainable design. The argument they gave was basically that everybody’s already doing it, so why do they need to learn about it? Everybody’s really itching to

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MLK School, Cambridge, MA

move beyond sustainability. Health is the new green, resilience is the new green, smart is the new green. The old green was dumb, is that the message? I don’t understand. The only way this happens is if we think of sustainability as a fad, it’s a trend, it’s something we’re ready to move beyond rather than an ethic that could transform our entire culture of design.

I wrote an article called “Six Myths of Sustainable Design.” I’ll tell you about a couple of them. One of them, the most common one, is we think it costs more. The reason why people say that clients don’t care about it is that clients think that it’s really expensive. Some 80 percent of building owners in surveys said that they don’t pursue sustainability because they think it costs more, but the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) did a study a little while ago with 3,000 building models to try to optimize the energy cost curve, and they found we could get to about a 30 percent energy reduction, which is about the average I showed you above, for 15 percent less in terms of costs of construction, than in a normal project. If we’re getting to 30 to 35 percent and spending the same amount or more, it’s because we’re kind of stupid as designers. The NREL said if we spend the same amount of money as a regular building, we get to 60 percent. Up until this January, the 2030 Commitment target was 60 percent. All this tells us is that if we really optimize the design process, we can meet those targets without spending any more money. There is a huge opportunity for innovation here that we’re not taking advantage of.

How do you get to low-cost high performance? This is a school that my office recently completed in Boston, and it looks as if it’s on track to becoming the highest scoring LEED Platinum new school in the world. It met the 2030

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Commitment targets with no more costs than other schools that were built in Boston at the time. For about a decade, I was a design director at William McDonough and Partners.

The last project I worked on was this project at NASA Ames Research Center. It produces about a quarter more energy than it needs to operate for only a few points more than typical market-rate construction. It has a lot of bells and whistles, and if you took those out, it would be well below market-rate construction. This doesn’t have to cost more, and the only reason it does is because we think we’ll design something and then we’ll invite some engineers in to make it smarter, and the stuff the engineers do may cost more because they’re more expensive systems.

Another myth is that sustainability isn’t about design.

There’s a lot of research that shows that up to 90 percent of the eventual impact of the project is determined in the earliest design decisions: the napkin sketch, not the BIM model, not the technical manual. One of the things I hear in my role— because I go around the world fifteen different times and I meet with a lot of design teams—one of the most common things that I hear is, “We really want your input, but just know the design is set, nothing can change.” Well, then I could talk about what you might do differently next time. There are lots of rules of thumb that show what you can do to optimize design decisions.

One of the other myths is that we think that sustainable design is not beautiful, and this is essentially why I wrote my book The Shape of Green. It came out in 2012, but I started working on it in 2005 or 2006. The basic question it asks is: Does sustainability change the face of design, or only its content?

Conventional wisdom about this is really clear. You get some of the most familiar designers in the world dismissing the entire agenda because they say it has nothing to do with architecture.

Again, my former employer says, “Sustainability has, or should have, no relationship to style.” If it starts to influence the way a building looks, you’re doing something wrong. In 2009, American Prospect magazine asked if well-designed green architecture is an oxymoron. As if following sustainability

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A-List produced by Vanity Fair vs. G-List produced by Hosey

through design is not just occasionally ugly, it is inevitably ugly.

There is something about the principles of green that make a building really hideous, that’s the message.

There are plenty of examples of buildings that perform well and also look good. A house came out about a decade ago and made the rounds. It’s a guesthouse in Australia that I think looks pretty good, and it does pretty well from a performance standpoint, but it looks like the Farnsworth House with a bent roof.

We don’t think of Mies van der Rohe as particularly green, so what makes it look good and what makes it green have nothing to do with each other—as if making it look good is just window dressing. It’s just what I was saying a minute ago: We’ll deal with a napkin sketch to make it look good; we’ll deal with a BIM model to make it smarter. As a test of this, you may have seen that in 2010 Vanity Fair did this survey of a lot of leading architects to ask about the most important buildings of the previous thirty years. They published it, and by far, with I think three times the number of votes of any other building, was Gehry’s museum in Bilbao. As a number of people wrote at the time, including me, there was a conspicuous lack of exemplary green architecture in the survey. A couple of architects, Foster and Piano, who today are doing pretty interesting work from a performance standpoint, had projects on there that were pretty old and don’t do quite as well by today’s standards.

To me, the whole thing seemed to be an indicator that the architectural elite doesn’t really care about sustainability. In a column in Architect Magazine, I did a parallel study. I called the

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Vanity Fair list the A-List (for Architecture), and I made another list called the G-List (for Green). I got 150 green building experts to say what they thought the most important green buildings of the previous thirty years were, and the contrast between the two lists was remarkable. There’s not a single American architect that’s on both lists. There is not a single project that’s on both lists. The two who are on both lists, Foster and Piano, have projects on the G-List that are much more recent and therefore more advanced. This seemed to be proof positive that our standards of good design and our standards of green design are completely disconnected.

Another way of putting this is that we think of art and science as different things, different sides of the brain, different ways of thinking. However, E.O. Wilson—if you are familiar with him it may be as the world’s foremost expert on ants—also in his spare time tosses off these little books that completely revolutionize our thinking. One of them is Consilience, subtitled The Unity of Knowledge. He says that the idea that the arts and sciences are different fields of thought is a modern conceit, and until we return to the idea of integrating them, our relationship with the earth will remain problematic.

With that in mind, I divide The Shape of Green around three different principles: conservation, which is how do you shape something to conserve resources; attraction, which is how do you shape things to build on emerging research around the kinds of things that people respond to positively; and connection, which is how do you shape things to be appropriate to a place. A really good example, outside of architecture, is the pot for boiling water.

I wouldn’t have thought that this could’ve been an opportunity for innovation, because you think anything they did to perfect it was probably done centuries ago. Pretty recently, however, this pot was redesigned to create these little nodules on the outside, similar to humpback whale fins, and it’s 40 percent more energy efficient and faster heating now, just because it focuses the heat even more on the outside than it would otherwise.

I spent a long time in Charlottesville where Thomas Jefferson is a god. If you know the University of Virginia grounds, which you do if you studied architectural history, what’s interesting about

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the famous garden walls, the Serpentine walls, is that they are the only thing in that place that isn’t derivative of French Neoclassicism. Everything else looks like he was an ambassador to France and came back and sort of retooled Monticello, and Jefferson’s architecture was heavily influential by French Neoclassicism, but adapted to central Virginia, except for the Serpentine walls. As the story goes, well, it might be apocryphal.

You may or may not know that Thomas Jefferson had a challenging relationship with money. For instance, I lived five blocks from the Library of Congress in DC, and the Library of Congress was founded because Jefferson needed money, so he sold all his books to Congress and they created the Library of Congress with them. Another instance: He had always planned to free the slaves of Monticello when he died, but they had to be sold to pay his debts. He kept a meticulous ledger of all of his expenses, but never balanced it, so he was obsessive with accounting but not about balancing the ledger sheet. I mention that because as the story goes, this was a late development in the building of University of Virginia, and they ran out of brick and he had to come up with some clever way of using less brick and holding up a wall like this. Normally a wall like this would have two wide of brick, so it wouldn’t fall over, but the undulating form keeps it from falling over and uses maybe 40 percent less brick than it would otherwise.

Architecture could be similarly innovative when it comes to conservation. Raise your hand if you’ve had a structures class in your life. When I show a moment diagram to a roomful of architects, there’s a Pavlovian response: You see beads of sweat on their brows because it reminds them of when they didn’t get any sleep and then they went in and had to stare at this in their structures classes. This is maybe the most common conventional form of construction in the world. It’s a gabled box, and yet, if you look at it, the material we use, it’s very conventional, it’s just extruded bits of wood or steel or concrete. Normally, the way that we build something like this is we think of the worst-case scenario. A beam has to span from here to here, and in order to do its job, it has to be about this deep here. Instead of making it this deep there and thinner at the ends, we just extrude it along its

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whole length, which means virtually every building you’ve ever seen or been in uses a lot more material than it needs in its structure. Construction is inherently inefficient.

Mark West and his students at the University of Manitoba were experimenting with textile formwork for concrete, because concrete will take almost any shape you give it. Pour in the concrete, it hardens, take off the box, and what’s left over is box-shaped concrete. So they were looking at sewing the formwork like a dress. They put the concrete only where it was needed, so it’s a three-dimensional moment diagram. They were only using enough material to do this particular job. What results is something that used about half the concrete of the typical beam, which I think is incredibly beautiful, not because it started with some sense of wanting a particular shape but because it started with asking about the most effective way to do this job.

Now, imagine what would happen if we applied this kind of ingenuity to every aspect of a building: columns, beams, stores, walls, windows, etc. Would buildings stop feeling like cages and boxes and feel more like skeletons or forests or reeds in a riverbed?

Another way of putting all this is that there is this relationship between form and performance. Most of the most celebrated designs live solidly at one end of the spectrum, which is compelling form without compelling performance, and often what makes the form compelling undermines the ability of the building to perform better. At the other end of the spectrum are buildings that might be LEED Platinum and have pretty good MEP systems and pretty good insulation or high performance glazing, but lead people like Peter Eisenman to dismiss the whole sustainability agenda because they think it has nothing to do with architecture.

There are relatively few architects or buildings that are in the sweet spot in the middle, where the very image of the thing, what makes it work the way it does, also makes it look and feel the way it does. Foster’s City Hall is one example. It minimizes the profile toward the hottest times of the day, leans into the sun so it’s self-shading, is more transparent on the north, and leans away from the walkway. The very form of the thing leads to a significant reduction in energy use, and I call this self-sustaining form. Other examples of this are Sauerbruch Hutton’s Bank Tower

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Saguaro Cactus diagrams (Hosey)

Form vs. Performance diagram w/ examples (Hosey)

Concrete experimentation project by Mark West & students

in Frankfurt, which faces west—the site faces west—which is problematic because of heat gain, so this sort of airfoil shape rises up out of it, meaning that it minimizes the building’s profile at the hottest time of day but also conveys breezes over the façade. It’s being called the most energy efficient office building in Europe.

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With some of these ideas in mind, I steered a couple of projects a few years ago. One was a competition for a super tall tower in China. We were really interested in the saguaro cactus, which is very smart from a structural standpoint but is also selfshading because of the sort of facets in its skin. Working with our structural engineer, we brought in this idea of the saguaro cactus, having no idea whether it was a stupid idea. They said that actually it works pretty well because when you go really tall, wind loads are a problem. If you’re hitting a flat facade, the wind tries to knock over the building, so you want to curve the building, to try to convey the wind. But if it’s curved too much, like a wing, it speeds up the wind, and that’s a no-no. All these little nodules created little eddies that sort of sped up the wind and then slowed it down, regulated it, and so it worked out pretty well. It happened to work that way and also give us a place to embed a lot of solar panels, so we were able to take advantage of that.

Now that’s shaping things to try to conserve resources.

The second type of shape I mentioned is attraction. Again, it’s the idea that buildings that are not attractive are maybe not so compelling. From an environmental standpoint, it’s not enough just to think about reducing harm in terms of inspiring designers because reducing harm is not very inspiring. The first LEED Platinum building in the Middle East, which won an award as the most intelligent building in the world, is—I think it’s safe to say—not a very compelling design. It looks like a glass hockey puck fell out of the sky, right? So why is this a problem?

One my favorite quotes is a Senegalese poet who says, “In the end, we conserve only what we love.” That’s incredibly important because as relatively recent research has shown, it can take up to eighty years to make up for the environmental impact of building a new building, even an energy efficient one, rather than preserving or adapting an existing building. If we hate the buildings we live in, we’re more likely to tear them down rather than continue to use them. If we only conserve the things we love, it begs the question, what do we love?

We want designers to be more informed by research and science that shows that certain kinds of colors, shapes, patterns, textures, and spaces tend to lead to a certain kind of response.

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It’s not prescriptive, but it can be predicted. We think you’re likely to get a certain kind of response if you embrace certain kinds of forms, patterns, etc. The interesting thing is, there’s an emerging wealth of research over the last decade or two in neuroscience in environmental psychology that suggests that all the things in the standard designer’s toolkit, the things we normally think are a matter of intuition, really come down to a superficial choice: I like blue, you like purple. How do we resolve that? Well, I’m making the decision, so I guess it’s going to be blue; next time you can choose purple. Instead, we need to ask what we’re trying to do here, and what the research tells us will help us find an answer.

Let me talk about a couple of examples. E.O. Wilson, who, again, literally wrote the book on biophilia thirty years ago, says that the human race spent the first 98 percent of its history in a very particular environment, namely the African Savannah. So it stands to reason that in the relatively recent history since we left that place, we tend to seek out similar spatial environmental visual cues. The kinds of things the research shows that we tend to like are rolling landscapes, stands of trees, little bodies of water; we feel safer in those places. These preferences began as a sort of safety advantage but have become a cultural preference. The idea is that a golf course or an English garden is a sort of sanitized Savannah. To paraphrase Wilson: Beauty is in the genes of the beholder. When you look at how biophilia plays out in the research, it basically just shows that people are innately attracted to nature. Normally, architects and designers go about fulfilling this attraction by planting a few trees so that people aren’t just looking at concrete and brick.

I worked on this huge hospital in San Francisco that has a lot of healing gardens, so the patients look out at nature, rather than at artificial material. Generally speaking, surveys show that they enjoy it, so that’s smart. There are subtler ways to do this. I worked on this project a few years ago that was a competition to do a big mixed-use retail project in China, and we looked at it as a sort of built Savannah where the whole thing would be slung under this type of landscape.

A lot of research shows that one of the most prominent images in the African Savannah is the acacia tree and that people

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Redesigning Design—Lance Hosey Sustainability is Dead

have a certain kind of response to the acacia tree. A physicist in Seattle, Richard Taylor, has done a lot of work looking at the tree’s patterns, which are called natural fractals. I used to think of fractals as these sort of computer generated paisley patterns— Benoit Mandelbrot, I think that’s how you pronounce his name, the French mathematician, coined the term—and on the cover of the 80s bestseller Chaos about chaos theory, a populist chaos theory, there is a computer generated fractal on it. Artificial fractals are self-identical at every scale, meaning, if you look at something, zoom out, zoom in, it looks identical. Natural fractals are self-similar, so if you zoom in and look at a tree at different scales, it’s not identical but looks similar. That sort of irregularity is something that we like. Scientists and mathematicians classify fractals on a range from one to two. One being something like an open ocean or the Sahara Desert; two being something like a thick forest. We tend to like a pattern in the middle, somewhere along the lines of the acacia and Savannah. We like it so much that, as Taylor’s research has shown by looking at heart rate monitors and such, it lowers stress by as much as 60 percent, just by being in our field of vision. The theory is that we crave these patterns so much because it relaxes us.

Taylor calculates that in the United States, we spend up to three hundred billion dollars a year combating stress-related ailments. If you imagine an entire environment with buildings and whole cities designed with the sort of shapes, colors, patterns, and textures that tend to relax us, could they be worth nearly two hundred billion dollars a year and help us avoid ailments? Taylor wrote a book on Jackson Pollock and found that in 1949, when Life Magazine called Pollock the most important living painter, the canvases he was doing conformed to this optimal fractal density. His theory is that Pollock spent a lifetime flinging drips and drabs of paint onto a canvas and excavated the sort of mental image that we all share of an idealized sort of pattern. I mentioned Jean Nouvel earlier. His design for the Louvre in Abu Dhabi is interested in irregular patterns. I talked to Nouvel’s office when I was doing my book, and I asked them if they were familiar with this research on fractals, and they said they weren’t. Imagine what would happen in a building like this,

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if those patterns were tweaked subtly so that they actually conformed to what the research says is most beneficial. Instead of being something that Nouvel happens to like, the building could be something that actually helps us all feel better. We used a lot of these patterns on the cover my book just because I wanted to say, judge this book by its cover, which is a ridiculous thing to say, but I was able to say it.

Finally, the last thing I’ll talk about is shape for connection.

We often talk about sustainable design as being beneficial for— or more responsible around—nature and maybe sometimes inspired by nature. This begs the question, what is nature like?

Well, you look at nature, and you see this seemingly endless diversity of fields and streams and hills and havocs and a lot of richness. But what we give back to nature often looks like this: Everywhere we go, we see that McDonald’s builds the same kinds of buildings, and we like to laugh at this and dismiss it as McDonald’s being so irresponsible, but then we give awards to Frank Gehry for doing the same thing. The difference here is that Gehry has won a lot of awards and the Pritzker Prize, and his buildings are very expensive. But the attitude toward place is exactly the same, McDonald’s and Frank Gehry are selling a brand. This is one of the most coveted things in the culture of design, this so-called signature style. In fact, architects whose work isn’t recognized by some level of consistency, from project to project, are often criticized as if their voices are not mature.

They have not evolved enough to get to a certain level of consistency. The thing that we arguably most covet is actually the thing that is the single biggest obstacle to sustainable performance.

If you know in advance roughly how something is going to be shaped before you even start working on it, you rob it of an opportunity to become whatever it needs to become for this place, even just in terms of climatic response.

One of the most common phrases you hear in architectural theory is “form follows function.” Louis Sullivan coined the phrase. He was influenced by French nineteenth century evolutionary biology theory (which was wrong by the way). The theory, before Darwin undermined it, was that forms evolve to serve a particular function. Natural selection suggests that forms evolve

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Redesigning Design—Lance Hosey Sustainability is Dead

randomly, and they happen to survive if they perform a function, so it’s not an easy relationship. However, what Sullivan meant by this is that function is programmatic use: An office building looks like an office building looks like an office building because they all serve the same purpose. But if you look at vernacular and indigenous building traditions it’s the opposite. These may serve the same function but in very different forms. In Virginia, for example, it gets hot and sticky in the summer, so the buildings are low, spread out, and with a big hole in the middle to promote breezes. In New England it gets really cold in the winters, so buildings are compact with small windows and a hearth down the middle. These buildings may serve the same function but with very different forms.

I know relatively few architects who have gotten a lot of attention who are really place-based. Bob Harris—who is sitting here in the front row designs for place. A lot of Lake/Flato’s work is very steep in the area of Texas. I like the Glenn Murcutt House a lot, too, because it’s sort of loosely based on regional traditions, but it’s also based on this very particular piece of land which is windswept. These scoops over the top of it bring in life, but they also bring wind up over the top so you don’t get it slamming into the side. I worked on a project in Dubai when my former firm had an office in Dubai. Dubai has no precedent for something at a really big scale—you get a lot of prismatic jewel-like towers. We were interested in trying to establish a new kind of precedent.

So we looked at two things: the date palm trees, which have this heavily sculpted bark that is self-shading, and the mashrabiya porch, which is also deeply shaded and allows breezes to come through. We estimated without looking at materials that the shape alone would reduce heat gain by about 30 percent.

So much of ancient architecture is represented by churches, cathedrals, temples, and mausoleums, but these were designed to be set apart and somewhat unreachable. We look at the entire history of Western architecture, which, from the day we’re eighteen and go into architecture school, we learn that great architecture is made up of the monuments to wealth and power that are set apart from their local environment, and then we’re shocked when people like Calatrava do this same thing. That’s

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Diagrams for building in Dubai as example of place-based design approach (Hosey)

what we think great architecture is. Yet there is this whole other hidden history that isn’t much talked about, which is the indigenous, vernacular traditions, which are deeply informed by place.

If you squint your eyes, these places, the building and landscape, sort of bleed together. Today, we seem to still want to train architects to create designs that are set apart and unreachable. What we should be doing is training them to think about creating designs that fit in and augment the place they will rest. This is how we’ll move toward conserving resources and simultaneously fostering innovation.

I mentioned that I’m on the COTE Advisory Group. In April last year, we issued a report based on the Committee on the Environment’s twenty-fifth anniversary of the first twenty years of the Top Ten program. Someone mentioned earlier that COTE’s flagship program is arguably the initiative of the American Institute of Architecture that gets the most media attention. It was launched in 1997 and has an interesting history. When AIA started COTE in 1990, one of their first goals was to get sustainability criteria in the Honor Awards program, meaning they believed that design and sustainability should merge. It took twenty years, and it didn’t happen until a few years ago. The reason they launched Top Ten in 1997 is because they couldn’t sit around and wait for the Committee on Design to embrace sustainability, so they created their own design awards, thinking it’ll last a few years before it is embedded in the regular Honor Awards program, but it’s still going twenty years later.

A lot of these projects, ten projects a year for twenty years, have been looked at as individual case studies and have never been looked at as a whole group. But the group is a remarkable chronicle of twenty years of innovation on the leading edge of

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Redesigning Design—Lance Hosey Sustainability is Dead

sustainable design. There is Bolin Cywinksi Jackson’s Ballard Library in Seattle, which I really love. A review of the COTE Top Ten winners looked at the following: Are standards of design and standards of sustainability starting to come together? The committee put together a jury of a lot of very smart, interesting people to look at the history of the Top Ten program and choose those projects they thought most exemplified the integration of sustainability and design, meaning the structures perform well and look good, or they felt good or they were joyous or delightful, but the thing that made it those things were also the things that made it perform well, and they chose the following list. You can see the votes on the right, and number one by far, the only one that got a majority of votes, actually, was the Packard Foundation Headquarters.

The other thing the AIA Committee on the Environment l ooked at is the Honor Awards program, which the Committee on Design steers, which is design excellence and the overlap with the COTE Top Ten program, we found that there are only about a dozen projects ever that have won both awards, and all but two of them won in the last decade. That suggests that things are starting to move in the direction of bringing design and standards of sustainability together. On both lists, some of the firms that keep coming up or are doing remarkable work are Lake/ Flato and Brooks + Scarpa. If you don’t know Angie Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa, the work that they’re doing in Los Angeles is really just phenomenal. We also looked at all of the Top Ten winners for twenty years and asked ourselves to rank everything in that group on a scale from one to ten to the degree to which we thought design and sustainably were integrated (meaning, if you look at the Ballard Library, it has a sort of low slung roof that’s a green roof, and it’s heavily shaded on the west; what it looks like has everything to do with how it performs). We judged all 200 projects by that scale, and you can see by the trajectory that, using our subjective analysis, projects seem to be moving in the direction of more integration. Hopefully, this provides a meaningful future trajectory for architecture to integrate sustainability into design.

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

What is the discipline of architecture? How does sustainability integrate with design? Why do architects have to qualify sustainable design, regenerative design? This symposium explores the evolution of sustainable design to incorporate ideas of regeneration into the practice of architecture.

It is important to set the context of regenerative design.

One of the goals for the day is to move beyond the semantics of design and get to the structure of design. Too often we’re just dealing with the naming of things and we’re not actually addressing the core issues of what architects do and how it impacts the world.

I’m going to be setting the context of the history of regenerative design thinking. It’s not the history, it’s my history of regenerative design.

How many of you thought you were coming to a funeral today for sustainability? Maybe we are going to bury sustainability—at least some versions of it—today. I remember when Lance Hosey and I first talked about the symposium, he asked: Is this a funeral, or is it a baby shower? I thought about it and quickly answered that it’s a baby shower for regenerative sustainability that hopefully sucks everybody in with the promise of a funeral for incremental greening.

I now realize that when I first came to the Center for Sustainable Building Research I had come from the rarefied air of the Living Building Challenge. At CSBR, we are connected with the broader range of practice. Within a few weeks at CSBR, I started to get the pushback of, “oh, we’re beyond sustainability,” or I had two or three people say, “sustainability—I thought that was dead.” Some people said it’s too politically charged to even talk about sustainability any more. This really shocked me and started this thinking about maybe we first off are not speaking with the same vocabulary. Sustainability means a certain thing for me, and obviously it has meant different things to different people. I’m not killing sustainability—our culture uses the word very casually.

It’s an exploration along three themes of regenerative design.

I am using the phrase regenerative design because it represents my trajectory, but there could be other names. There are three

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themes or questions this symposium explores, and they are represented as a series of quotes. The first quote comes from Pamela Mang and Bill Reed, who are a part of the Regenesis Group: “It is not enough to aspire to mitigate the effects of human activity—people need to take their place again as a part of nature.”

Green and sustainable design have focused on doing less bad and not on addressing the fundamental human relationship with nature. Humanity and nature are part of one system.

The first panel explores how human health and ecosystem health intertwine.

The next quote comes from Brian Eno: “I think humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.” We are drawn to a dynamic and living architecture. Many of the tools and metrics that have been made for green design are very static tools and do not acknowledge complex systems that are living and moving and changing over time. We’ve been asking the wrong questions. That’s the theme of the second panel: How do we start to ask different questions, and how does that start to lead us in a new direction?

The last quote is from Ray Cole at the University of British Columbia: “Green design is directed at reducing degenerative impacts, this is insufficient for an ecologically sustainable future and is an insufficient aspiration to motivate design professionals and their clients.” Innovative sustainable design firms are often waiting for the perfect project, the living building, the perfect client, the perfect conditions, etc. Our reductive definitions of green design inherently didn’t feel good with most architects and design professionals who are used to navigating multiple factors that they need to incorporate into one whole building that works for people, works for the environment, is energy efficient, and functions with the program. I think most designers, and most of the best designers, are used to thinking in wholes, and that’s created part of the tension of reductive approaches like LEED, because it feels like dissecting the patient instead of healing them. Let’s dissect things down to site, energy, water, etc., and then we’ll understand. I think the architect’s brain inherently

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

knows that’s not a robust approach. It is helpful, it lets us analyze things, but at the end of the day we’re working on whole things that come together.

The history of environmentalism has been focused on reducing negative environmental impacts, but design and development have the potential for positive regenerative impacts to emerge. Human development inherently has what might be called negative impacts: energy, water, food, and materials. If we do not find ways for positive effects to emerge and renew or replace these impacts, true sustainability will never be achieved.

In addition, these systems are complex and ever changing and sustainability is only achieved by humanity and nature existing in a state of co-evolution and renewal.

Lately, I have been telling the history of green design using Holling’s adaptive cycle to talk about how we go through, even as designers, different cycles, similar to an ecosystem, as sustainable design evolves. The green building movement first went through what Holling would call the growth phase. This is the sixties, seventies, eighties of green. We didn’t even call it green design—instead there was “ecological design,” or other names, and we had multiple voices defining things in different ways. It was all freedom and growth in the growth phase. The Bateson Building by Sim van der Ryn in California is an example of this time.

1994 was a critical juncture point in the history of green design: The United States Green Building Council was founded, kicking in the conservation phase of LEED, which started to define a green building through a specific set of categories and a checklist. Sustainable designers started to align themselves around LEED, and it came to define green design. The challenge with the conservation phase is that you start to lose freedom, and you start to lose exploration, and both of those things happened. I know my initial work with LEED was focused on it as a market transformation strategy, but that it was also a way to expand the movement and connect to all practitioners. The USGBC did a really good job of building awareness and preparing the landscape for future developments of sustainable design.

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A Regenerative System, John Tillman Lyle

Then the Living Building Challenge created a release phase.

It was a disrupter. Many designers and builders with a long history of working in green design and thinking about ecological buildings started encouraging explorations in different areas.

Sustainable design is in a current moment of reorganization that is very fragmented—it’s about restoration and net positivity and greenness and health. This creates paralysis. Where do you go? What do you do next? It’s the challenge that we are in. My path out of this fragmentation is regenerative design.

As Bill McKibben states in his book Eaarth: “The worlds we inhabit—natural, social, and technological have real limits and fragility. The euro-centered world that has dominated the culture of the last two hundred years is in the process of coming apart.

Perhaps it is to be replaced by new, better stories, or perhaps not.” What can start to give us some trajectories for the future?

To set the context, let me tell you my history of regenerative design, probably not the history. For me, this began in graduate school. I was told the other day by another professor here that I’ve got to stop talking about my thesis because I must’ve done other work. I have—it’s just been the same project for twenty years. It was based on the title “Patterns in a Landscape.” I scanned the literature of sustainable design at the time, and it was all doom and gloom and we’re all going to die, and that just didn’t feel really good. I got fixated on the word amelioration.

We can create these healing effects and that’s actually our place as humans on the planet.

One of the leading thinkers who inspired me was someone named Gregory Bateson. A couple of quotes from him: “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.” It had me start to think that we’re all a part of one system. Then the

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

other is: “The biosphere is an interaction between structure or form on the one hand, the processor flux on the other or as an interaction between the elements of life to which these two notions form and flux refer.” I love this quote because it’s all about the fact that we are often designing forms or structures and trying to have them relate to the flux or the dynamics of life, and we separate them into these two things, but life doesn’t know the difference. It’s all just one system, and getting your head around that complexity becomes a real challenge.

Another leading thinker in terms of regenerative design is a landscape architect named John Tillman Lyle, who wrote a book Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development. For me, it planted the seeds of the knowledge that you actually can’t have sustainable development unless you have aspects of regeneration because human occupation necessarily uses materials, energy, water, etc. Unless humanity regenerates the systems that support life, development will never be truly sustainable. Lyle started to map our existing way of thinking about systems. This throughput system is based on a mindset of unlimited resources: unlimited energy, unlimited water, unlimited etc. It focuses on efficiency and minimizing waste. This mindset also assumes that the environment can be filled with limitless pollution. “Nature” can be humanity’s sink for pollution. As long as there are very few humans, this mindset might not matter. However in the Anthropocene, humanity lives on a planet with real limits on either ends of this diagram. There’s only so much energy, and as humanity starts to have a bigger and bigger impact on the planet, the environment cannot be an endless sink.

Lyle created a diagram of a regenerative system based upon living systems. The sun is the source of energy and is exchanged for other materials that support life. Same with water, same with materials. The use of these resources is different than when they can be harvested or delivered on the site. Therefore, storage is important in living and regenerative systems. In addition, there is no waste, materials and resources are assimilated back into the ecosystem.

According to Lyle, the way of understanding and ordering natural processes described here does not correspond with the

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conventional breakdown of knowledge into academic disciplines as they have developed since the Enlightenment.

Academic disciplines are neatly defined areas of knowledge and expertise with jealously guarded boundaries having little to do with the realities of natural processes. For this reason, the thought required in understanding, planning, designing, and managing human ecosystems is necessarily multidisciplinary.

It requires teams of people knowledgeable in a range of different disciplines. Even more importantly, it requires the ability to define the connections among disciplines to organize the disparate fragments of information from different disciplines into coherent wholes.

It’s interesting also that the history of regenerative design intersects with the history of modern architecture. How many people know Rudolf Steiner? He worked with farmers who were using chemicals on their fields. Steiner, as an architect, worked with them to figure out a process by which they could farm and not have chemicals and fertilizers, and he was one of the forerunners of organic farming by redesigning the process to have the soil regenerate its own health and fertilizer through biodynamic farming.

This was the precursor to Robert Rodale and his father, who were the beginning of organic farming. This was one of the first places that used “regenerative” because the soil would regenerate its own health. Then, later, Lyle and others adapted the word to landscape architecture and other disciplines.

I am inspired by Sim Van der Ryn, who published the book Ecological Design, also in 1994ish or 1995ish. He published a book just recently, Designed for Life, where he starts to explore some of this transition and the four epochs of humanity. Again, I worry about some of these constructs, but what’s the intersection of culture, design, technology, and nature, and how has that changed over time? And how has our changing culture in relationship to nature affected our impact on the planet as we move through these epochs? What is the future that will approach?

Bill Reed at the AIA Convention in 2007 gave his keynote— maybe some of you were there—on a living systems approach to design. This was the beginning of starting to blow things apart

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

and think about this growth phase of, yes, we’re successful in LEED, we are doing some good working and we’re scaling, but isn’t this all about life, and shouldn’t we be asking bigger questions? He and the Regenesis Group have explored this also with projects like the Loreto Bay project and The Willow School. It’s a school campus in New Jersey that actually has LEED Platinum buildings and Living Buildings. The different buildings they’ve done on this campus track a history of green building design, which is interesting.

They also worked on something called “The Story of Place.”

It’s been very inspiring for me. In some of our work at CSBR, with Virajita Singh and the Design for Community Resilience, we’re trying to think about this diagram, and what they said is that any project or act of design is trying to understand a place. Yes, it’s trying to understand that ecosystem and how it functions in the design of a project, but it’s also growing capacity in the stakeholders that you’re engaging with to design this place because you are going to build this building and that will be one brief moment in the time and history of that place. The vast majority of the life of that building will be after the architects and after the contractors are gone and people are living and interacting with the place and functioning. What I take from this is how do you use the design process to build that awareness and capacity that then bridges on to the life of the building?

This relates to the Living Building Challenge, which has often been approached as the next big thing. It blew me away when I was there how many teams came and were on a pursuit to design a building to the most extreme rating system they could find, and they all thought the Living Building must be the next step. They would call and say, we want to do this Living Building because we know we heard that it’s better than LEED Platinum. How much does it cost? This was a symptom of the rating system mindset.

Architects were focused on the certification program and competition with others; however, they were missing the philosophical underpinnings within the challenge as a way of thinking about design and interacting with a place that is more important than certification. It’s great inspiration, but it is a series of twenty goals, and you can incorporate some of those goals on any

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UniverCity Development Living Community Model, Vancouver, British Columbia

project. Unfortunately, the approach to doing the perfect Living Building may hold us back at times and may even cause a slide back to regular practice because we cannot get all the way there and be a certified Living Building.

I see three areas of inquiry for regenerative design: mind and nature and what is our connection as humans to the natural environment and the intersection there; metrics research and education; and then process and practice. These areas of inquiry— mindset, metrics, and practice—guide our three panels for today.

I want to show some work that I’ve done either at the Institute or as we have started to bridge into CSBR, building on the great foundation John began at CSBR. One thing that attracted me to come direct the Center was the ability to do work inspired by the Institute that you could never do at the Institute because you have to be focused on the high bar of Living Buildings. CSBR can bridge from Living Buildings to practice.

We are trying to redo the CSBR website and do the standard website stuff of explaining the classes of things that we do, and we finally realized, wait a minute, we are always trying to do whole projects that incorporate all these different classes of things and now we’re trying to categorize them? If you then take the projects and try to stick them in separate categories, the website doesn’t really work because everything is two or three of the components. I take that as a good thing because that’s exactly what we’re trying to deal with in architecture—we’re aggregating, we’re working on wholes and common solutions all the time.

While I was at the International Living Future Institute, we received a grant to use the Living Building Challenge as a guide

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

on a series of master planning projects as a pilot for the Living Community Challenges.

The first project was Univercity Development, and Univercity gets at the c in university. Univercity is in Vancouver—actually in Burnaby British Columbia. In the 60s, it was Arthur Erickson who designed a new university campus for Simon Fraser University on the hill.

What’s interesting is when they planned the campus, there was a lot of backlash from environmentalists about how they clipped the top off this mountain to build it. This is inherently a bad decision. So the early planning was forced to do a couple of things. One, Simon Fraser University planned a community next to the campus to avoid people going up and down the mountain with all the unnecessary transport. In addition, a concept in the early master plan that dictated that whatever they did for development, the forest ecosystem below the campus could not be affected and had to function as if it were the pre-settlement ecosystem of the forest. So water needed to flow down into the forest at the same quantity and quality that it did as if there were still forest up on the top of the mountain. Early ecological planning integration at Simon Fraser and UniverCity made it easier to use the Living Building Challenge as a goal for the master plan of the fifth phase.

So now the Simon Fraser University, it is to the left, and the Univercity, and then the Living Community, have been building out in phases for a while. The early buildings were precursors to LEED, and then later they built LEED Gold buildings, and then the latest buildings are LEED Platinum. Then, just before we did our master plan, they had built a Living Building childcare center.

They had actually found when they did the childcare center that they could connect with district energy systems and district water systems, and they actually built the childcare center at the same budget that they had for an LEED Platinum building.

So they knew that they have these conditions at a district scale that made it easier for them to do a Living Building.

The original master plan required cutting down additional forest land to the south for the phase we were planning. First thing we said was, no, you need to build additional development

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Redevelopment Plan, Bend, OR; International Living Future Institute)

UniverCity Water Petal Diagram)

on the southern parking lots. It’s a classic university thing: You’ve got a parking lot so you build on it, even though you know you shouldn’t do that because you then have to change the transportation system. So the master plan ended up creating a series of buildings connected to district systems. The whole development in and of itself would achieve the Living Building Challenge. It evolved my thinking about achieving net zero energy by creating exchange systems, because some of the buildings wouldn’t be net zero by themselves. Some buildings must be net positive to provide for areas that are more dense. It is the exchange between them that achieves a zero energy district.

We did a series of diagrams at the time that we called petal diagrams (after the flower petals of the Living Building Challenge) that started to define the layers of these systems and that looked at the water system because the building development actually intersected with two watersheds. Two stream courses run off the peak of the mountain, so we started to look at that and how it worked to map our water system. We ended up capturing water on the roofs, catching it in cisterns so we could use it later, and we managed stormwater so that it would go into

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

these constructed wetlands that treat waste as well. The landscape features were built around this. We started to create this relationship through treating waste with a constructed wetland because doing so means there’s a connection between areas of constructed wetland and areas of buildings. That became a master planning concept to work with these systems—creating biophilic spaces in the whole development.

The water system was built on some studies that had been done on the intersection of water and energy. The International Living Future Insitute had done some research on the carbon footprints of different approaches to net zero water: If you just focus on water and net zero water, and you forget about energy and use high-tech systems like recirculating biofilters and membrane bioreactors, those are very energy intensive and use more carbon than typical centralized treatment plants. Other technologies, like composting toilets, constructed wetlands, and ecomachines, are lower tech and can address water challenges while also addressing some of the energy challenges as well.

The master plan creates a waste treatment system that is based on connecting buildings and ecomachines in sewer sheds that have buildings send waste to eco-machines that then perform the final treatment in constructed wetlands. This approach is currently against the law, which favors centralized treatment.

However, the water quality through the constructed wetland is equal to stormwater, so we can merge these things together to have an outlet for the quantity and maybe even achieve better quality than the water that would’ve gone through the original stream courses.

While I was at the Institute, we did another Living Community Challenge pilot project in Bend, Oregon, in a redevelopment quarter there. Bend is a place in an infrastructure crisis, like many places. They were beyond their capacity for their sewer system and their water system. The city is located in the high desert in eastern Oregon with only thirteen inches of rain per year. Water became the driver and limiting factor of this pilot project.

The original goal was to fill this zone with buildings, but if we did that, it would’ve been well beyond the Living Building Challenge’s limits for net zero water. So to do a Living Community

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Living Community Patterns, San Francisco, CA

to that set of criteria, and knowing that the city couldn’t develop all its space, our proposal became to use the district as a combined park and constructed wetland to treat the waste water that currently goes through a pumping station on the site. By diverting the waste water, the pressure on the city wide sewage system would be relieved.

We also did a pilot project in San Francisco that focused on using the Living Community Challenge as a planning guide for existing neighborhoods. The idea was that we wouldn’t do the master plan but we would create a pattern book inspired by Christopher Alexander. We had been collecting patterns from the first two pilots of what are the elements of green infrastructure that, like at Univercity, can be woven through a development.

We started to talk about this idea of urban re-wilding, which, now

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History and Theory of Regenerative Design—Richard Graves Sustainability is Dead

that we have this green infrastructure we can bring nature right into the city, and we’re re-wilding the city. Urban Re-Wilding became a pattern. We also created patterns like Roof as a Resource. The roof is often the collector or harvester of things, so how do you think about that? Then the idea was that we would give this pattern book out to community and neighborhood planners in San Francisco, and they would use it so that every act of planning in a neighborhood could pick off some of these patterns and try to get that going in a living direction.

The pattern guide was tested in two neighborhoods. In Noe Valley, the neighborhood had a lack of park space (unlike many of the other neighborhoods in San Francisco). We started to think about and diagram how could you create public space and parks using these patterns with a neighborhood group. A carrying

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Ford Site, Saint Paul, MN Redevelopment: Modeling of “Net Zero” from standard to regenerative development

Theodore Roosevelt quote on a sign in Ortonville, MN

capacity and footprint analysis of each neighborhood was necessary. We asked about the limits of energy they could generate in the neighborhood with solar roofs and how much water they could capture.

In the Noe Valley neighborhood, there are great art installations in the alleys where artists collect things and paint murals.

This is an example of how the patterns play through in some planning. We started to think about the alleys as a place that can create communal space and roofs as a resource to harvest energy, collect water, etc., etc.

We also did a project in Chinatown that focused on retrofitting some affordable housing projects to get them to be more energy efficient and created fog catchers that would harvest water. Most of San Francisco is in effect a desert with only 23 inches of rain.

In some other examples, the process of practice is another thing that we have to know: What’s the role of the architect as integrated designer? We’re deep generalists, meaning, we need to know a lot of stuff to be able to facilitate, but we also need to be grounded in our discipline and know how to be architects

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in our training so that we can bring that expertise to a team of other people with expertise.

My work on the Living Community Challenge pilots has influenced our thinking about the redevelopment of the Ford site.

For the site, we’ve worked in terms of solar income. What’s that energy value? It’s interesting, Henry Ford, when he built the factory on that site, built a dam that would generate as much energy as they needed in the factory because he wanted to control his supply chain. He did this in many of his early factories and picked the site in Saint Paul because he could have a dam for energy and mine silica below the bluff for glass. Raw materials were sent up in elevators into the plant where they made glass, assembled the cars, and then sent them back down onto barges. He knew enough to be connected to his resources and supply chains and work within the renewal capacity of the place, and that was good business.

CSBR’s Net Zero proposal for redevelopment of the Ford site in Saint Paul, MN integrates deep energy efficiency, optimizing solar, and integrating with district energy. All of the building’s target energy usage 80 percent below the average building in 2003: equivalent to our SB2030 program goals in 2020. This cut the energy systems by 57 percent. It’s the most significant move in the design. Distributed energy generation is added that sets the potential to generate some of the energy onsite, but the density of the buildings is too great to generate all of the energy on the building roofs. A district energy system and/or the grid is needed to get to net zero.

In closing, how do you take an act of design and building a building, and how does that start to become both an expression of a different worldview and a catalyst for the future? How can it signify a different relationship for how we think about place, space, and nature? A truly sustainable building needs to earn the right to occupy the land that it’s built on. Every building does not have to be a Living Building. Architecture must find a way to integrate regenerative design into all projects and practices.

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Jessica Hellman / Julia Kane Africa

The Intersection of Ecosystem and Human Health Sustainability is Dead

Jessica Hellmann Good morning everyone! I’m thrilled to be here, and thank you, Richard, for the invitation. Let me start by revealing a bit about my perspective on the world: I’m an ecologist. If I could start my career all over again, I might be an architect or another kind of designer, but today that would be just wishful thinking. In fact, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about design lately, because some of the most exciting thinking in ecology today—in my opinion— is about creating and building.

Ecologists become designers when we work in restoration ecology, build new ecosystems or deploying ecosystems in new places and in creative ways. And that’s what I want to talk about today, about advancing the conversation on ecological design, so that we can build a restorative future for natural and human systems. Specifically, I will focus on adapting to climate change through ecosystem design. I’m going to talk about what it means for people to adapt to climate change as part of our quest for well-being and human health.

Last night I had the opportunity, like many of you, to listen to Lance Hosey’s keynote talk. If you were there, perhaps you remember his slide that included “function,” “aesthetic,” and “sustainability” as key dimensions of his design work. In that slide, the sustainability bubble flashed on and off, as if sometimes we do sustainability and sometimes we don’t. It occurred to me that as an ecologist, I think about that slide in the opposite way. If I showed that slide, the sustainability bubble would stay up, and the aesthetic and the people part would flash on and off. The challenge for ecologists and architects in working together is supporting each other’s growth areas. For architecture, growth is integrating sustainability into everyday design. For ecology, growth is recognizing that humans not only drive the planet but we should help make the planet suitable for people of the future while protecting the other creatures that live here. Both ecologists and architects mold the future.

What future do we want? We want a future of opportunity and possibility. We want a future that overcomes the dichotomy of humanity and a planet at odds. We want a future in which people and the planet prosper together. I think this is what Richard

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Image of renewable energy sources-solar power & wind

implies when he says “sustainability is dead.” If sustainability is about slowing down the rate of human depletion of natural resources, wrecking things more slowly, it’s not enough. We want a future inspired by a belief that what’s good for the planet is good for us, and what’s good for us could be good for the planet.

This concept is one of restoration, of rejuvenation, of mutualism.

There are signs that this future is here, that sustainability is dead and restoration is upon us. An example is the rapid rate of solar energy deployment. I use solar as an example of people and planet prospering together because one doesn’t invest in solar to save the planet. You can invest in solar because it’s a smart financial decision. The environmental responsibility and human desirability (in an economic sense) of solar have begun to align. Today, we can power nearly 11 million homes in the United States with the solar power already deployed. And every minute-and-a-half a new solar project is installed in the US. For all the political conversation about coal and coal jobs, there are 200,000 more people employed in the solar industry today than there are mining coal. Solar is a case where we’re doing things that are good for us and good for the planet.

Here’s another good sign that a restorative future is coming: GDP. We can talk about whether or not GDP is a good metric of human well-being, but there’s an exciting thing happening with GDP. The once-persistent relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and GDP growth over time is beginning to decouple.

We have long assumed that you have to have fossil-intensive energy to grow an economy. Recent studies suggest, however, that despite a recent carbon peak in 20 countries around the world, those regional and local economies are continuing to grow.

I list a few of those 20 countries here. Some of them won’t

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surprise you: Denmark, Finland and Germany. Germany is going though its “energiewende,” where it’s transitioning its energy economy to renewable technology. But there are some surprising cases on this list too. It’s not just the wealthiest and most politically organized countries that are economically growing without increasing emissions, so is Uzbekistan. This is a positive and exciting trend.

Still, I don’t need to tell you that we face significant threats regionally and globally that are either caused or strongly exacerbated by climate change. Fossil fuel use and other processes that drive climate change continue at an alarming rate. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow year after year. We’re already seeing the effects of climate change in coastal regions across the United States, for example, regions that are vulnerable to climate extremes despite being part of one of the world’s most prosperous economies.

The real and projected threats of climate change are affecting global supply chains and destabilizing economies. The World Economic Forum conducted a survey of government and corporate thought leaders. What are they worried about in the medium term for the future of global business? Every one of their top five concerns are either climate change or related to climate change.

Against this backdrop of widespread economic concern about climate change, we went to Paris in December 2015—whether you were actually there or you read about it in the paper. In Paris, nations signed a new emission-reduction agreement, 21 years after committing to take action on climate change. Signatories agreed to limit greenhouse gas emissions so that Earth’s temperature increases to no more than two degrees Celsius, above the historic average. This goal to reduce and then stop greenhouse gas emissions—to stop climate change—is called mitigation. If one takes the text of the Paris Agreement and searches for the word mitigation, you will find it fifty times.

Other parts of the agreement were dedicated to the concept of living with climate change, or adaptation. (By the way, “adaptation” to describe adjustments to climate change drives ecologists and biologists crazy, because we use “adaptation” to refer to evolution by natural selection.) The Paris Agreement calls out

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Green Roofs in the city

adaptation eighty-five times, and most of what it says about adaptation is vague: “we need to think about adaptation”; “we need an adaptation committee”; “the adaptation committee should meet,” etc.

But the Agreement did say one particular thing: we need to raise money. The Agreement aspires to raise a $100 billion per year by 2020, with wealthy countries contributing to a central fund that would be allocated to both mitigation and adaptation.

This seems like a large number, but it’s on the low end of what experts think it will cost annually to adjust to the effects of climate change.

How will we spend that money? We’ll probably spend a lot of it on technical adaptation solutions, including landscape hardening—think seawalls—and air conditioning to fight extreme heat. Some of these come at the expense of increased emissions and others deplete our natural resources and undermine system resilience.

Those of us interested in a sustainable future where people and planet prosper together must think of other adaptation strategies, effective strategies without greenhouse gas feedbacks and other negative side effects. Here are some possibilities: using natural ecosystems for coastal protection, incorporating green infrastructure into urban designs and pursuing wetland restoration to recharge groundwater used in irrigation.

Perhaps adapting to climate change will allow us to examine our stewardship responsibilities to other biodiversity, striving for adaptation solutions that benefit both people and planet.

Let me give you a couple examples on some of these “green” alternatives to climate change adaptation, that draw on

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ecosystem goods and services to mitigate the risk of climate change to people. These are strategies with fewer negative side effects and, done well, they might even protect or help restorative natural systems.

One example is using green roofs to reduce the urban heat island. Some colleagues and I performed a study that simulated very local-scale weather under a variety of conditions for an extremely hot day in August, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The model producing those simulations considers incoming radiation and building heat from air conditioning and other power demand.

This heat drives up the street-level temperature where people live, work and play. The top, black line shows the temperature on the roof of a conventional building during this simulated, very hot day. If you make this roof either a green roof or a white roof (a roof that reflects sunlight), however, you can substantially reduce the local temperature, particularly during the hottest part of the day.

Given this difference in how conventional versus green and white roofs affect the local temperature in Chicago, we then played with different building scenarios. We said: what if we took 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, 100 percent of the buildings in downtown Chicago and turned them into green roofs?

Each additional increment of green roofs reduces the daytime high temperature, from a baseline of zero percent. If half the roofs in downtown Chicago were green roofs, we could reduce peak day-time temperature by a degree and a half Celsius. This might sound small, but that amount can meaningfully reduce heat-related health problems and air conditioning demand. And this does not count other potential benefits of building-related greenspace, including a place to conserve regional plants, native insects or even rare butterflies.

Another example of “green� climate adaptation. A study

by Olwig and colleagues used remote sensing to evaluate the tsunami that hit the east coast of India in December 2004. To determine if coastal ecosystems can protect human settlements from a surging sea, they evaluated tsunami damage and the amount of pre-existing vegetation at hundreds of data points moving inward from the ocean onto the land. They found

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a positive relationship between the amount of woody vegetation that was present in a pre-tsunami image—the length of woody vegetation in meters—and the amount of damage after the tsunami—the length of damage behind the woody vegetation. Where there was more woody vegetation, there was significantly less damage, and where there was very little woody vegetation, they observed the greatest extent of damage.

This suggests that coastal ecosystems do protect the people behind them.

How can we get a sense of whether or not the globe is actually using “green” solutions, in the form of ecosystem services, to adapt to climate change? I want to share another dataset with you, called the Global Adaptation Index. It’s an index that some colleagues and I archive and maintain, and it is composed of six sectors that are essential for people: water; food; ecosystems; health; human habitats (which basically means cities); and infrastructure. The index considers various indicators of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, that together capture “vulnerability” in each of the sectors. Each country has a sector-specific and total vulnerability score. The index also includes “readiness” factors, including social, economic, and governance readiness.

Readiness evaluates how prepared a country is to put adaptation systems in place.

One can use the vulnerability and readiness scores to rank countries, tell stories about groups of countries, or to explore the situation of individual countries. If you divide the index scores

by GDP, you can rank and compare countries independently of wealth. For example, the United States goes from number eleven to number twenty-five in its overall rank when you divide it its index score by GDP, suggesting it is relatively more vulnerable than its income suggests it should be.

Let’s zoom in to the ecosystem service sector. If you look at the top of the list of countries based on vulnerability and readiness overall and the ecosystem service sector specifically, there is relatively little overlap. Fourteen of the top twenty-five countries in the ecosystem sector are different countries than top-ranked countries overall. And many of the top performers in the ecosystem service sector are surprises. In that sector, the

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United States is ranked thirty-seven. Its ranking neighbors are Gabon and Mongolia. This suggests that we—in the US—have much work to do because the hazards to our national ecosystems from climate change are high and our adaptive capacity to reduce that hazard is low. This pattern is true in some other well-developed countries: ecosystems are at risk and we’re not sufficiently protecting or enabling them to help humans confront climate change.

I’ll end my talk with a final point about the potential for ecosystem-based adaptation: that the need to adapt to climate change—though presenting many challenges and likely being quite expensive—could open a window of opportunity for humanity. The simple need for adaptation allows us to re-examine the value of nature. Adaptation provides a reason to harness natural assets and gives those natural assets an important and new utility: to help humanity withstand climate change.

Is it possible that adapting to climate change could allow us to rediscover the benefits of nature, for our own sake? If such a realization happens—like has happened for solar power being both right for the pocket book and right for the planet—we will be one step closer toward realizing that future where people and planet (the environment) can prosper together.

Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to conversation and questions.

Julia Kane Africa Well, I’m really happy to be here this morning, and thank you for your attention. My name is Julia Africa. I’m a program leader for the Nature and Health Program at the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Health and Global Environment. I work at the intersection of biophilic health and design, so my interest is in the health outcomes that accrue from using nature and natural design cues in the built environment to support human health and well-being.

I like to start with this quote, “science is reductionist in nature, global environmental changes are not.” Our timeless narratives of nature are under intense disruption both from climate change and urbanization, and the sorts of narratives that we

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come up with about ecosystem services are accordingly going to change. This is a call at just the outset of what I’m going to talk about today to remember that we must continue to evaluate what exactly those ecological services are giving us and how we can best accommodate the environment as it changes.

Many prevalent human diseases are linked to climate fluctuations. This will come as no surprise to anyone in the room, and these problems are amplified by sociopolitical displacement, and many populations face significantly increased health challenges in the coming decades. These health challenges will not be equitably distributed, and we are not prepared. This will, again, come as no surprise, but as you’ll see from the coming slides, as we propose a future where we depend increasingly on ecosystem services for our resilience, ensuring human health and well-being will increasingly depend on ecologically complex biodiverse environments that provide mental and physical health benefits for humans.

One example that I like to start with refers to anticipated changes in plant physiology and metabolism. In an elevated CO2, in an elevated temperature scenario such as we are in right now, at 400 parts per million (ppm) and growing, we anticipate seeing increased plant growth, at least among C3 and C4 metabolic plants. C3 will have a better, higher growth index. C4 will plateau a little earlier. This means more and more allergenic pollen over extended growing seasons and increased synergy of those pollen particulates with diesel emissions, such that the impact of that pollen when it’s taken into lung tissue will be more significant, increasing rates of allergies, asthma, eczema, and atopic diseases, which are nuisance irritants for most of the population but which taken to a severe level can be crippling. It also means increased fungal diversity from increased precipitation in some regions, potentially increased spore counts, and sort of unclear data regarding microbial populations and active constituents of plants—the irritants, for instance, in poison ivy or poison oak are projected to become more severe, to become more physiologically damaging, potentially in response to some of these climate changes. When we think about incorporating plants in our environment, I support this with every fiber of my

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body, but it is a notion that we have to examine in the context of the fact that these plants are also responding to the changes that we’re seeing around us.

We all start with the Savannah image, and many of you will be familiar with some of these terms, but the theories that are written in exceedingly small font at the base of this slide refer to how we try to talk about the features of landscapes that are considered most supportive for human health and well-being. These include theories like a Precognitive Landscape Assessment, Savannah Theory, Attention Restoration Theory.

These are all ways in which we talk about structural features, depth of perception, color, hue, shape, prospect. Savannah Theory might refer to the availability of air, food, water, shelter, the basic things we need to survive. Attention Restoration Theory might refer to things like being awake, compatibility, fascination, and extent, these words that refer to basically the viewer’s engagement with their natural environment, how it draws them in, how it displaces their resting emotional state, how it enables them to have a form of psychological and physiological restoration that allows them to function better. This is a really quick thumbnail sketch of these theories, forgive me, anyone who is devoted to the nuances, but for our purposes there are a lot of ways to express the design features in natural environments and the ways that they impact our biology, our neurological function, and our emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Not included generally in these theories are discussions of phytochemicals, microbiota, and baseline arousal, which are extremely heterogeneous in the environment and produced by many kinds of trees and plants. They are most prominent in the mornings, they are present at low levels in forest environments, but they are thought, in some circles, to be part of the causal mechanism for the forest bathing experience—that is, reductions in blood pressure, improvements in mental health and well-being, and diminished salivary cortisol levels. That’s one explanatory mechanism. Another might be continued exposure to a diverse microbiome, that is, looking at the ecological microbial diversity of that natural environment and how it affects our mental health and our physical health.

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Example of Savannah Theory as seen on the covers of many famous books about Africa

All these sorts of things are among the strategies that researchers are using to examine why natural environments matter. You will recognize the images at the top left, the three scales of the fractal dimension of a branching tree. Apparently Lance and I read the same articles, and that’s great. One thing I’d say about this is that we all rely on this image of the acacia tree and, as a sidebar, one of the great benefits of having a last name like Africa is that my friends send me articles that have to do with Africa all the time, even if they have nothing to do with what I work on. A friend sent me these images at the bottom of the page, which are thirty different very famous books about Africa, and all of them have—you guessed it—the same image on the front: an acacia with a sunset in the background. This is The Power of One, The Constant Gardener, Out of Africa, all these books, which you may be familiar with. Why do we choose the same image? The continent is extremely biodiverse. Are we lazy?

Are our publishers badly informed? Is there, as I suggest at the top of the slide, a kind of an arboreal ethnocentrism? We have an image of what Africa looks like, we have an image of what the natural environment we developed as humans looks like, and it looks like that image of the Savannah and we’re very attached to that image.

As environmental psychologists and public health clinicians and landscape designers, when we talk about this information, we have to be careful when communicating with the public that we’re not telling them they have to plant an acacia. I do have people come to me and say does this mean I need to have an

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acacia in my front yard? No, what this means is that the branching structure of an acacia between that 1.3 and 1.5 fractal ratio, with the degree of shade it provides but also projects, you can see through the tree and potentially have either the dappled sunlight that comes through or see the cheetah that may be hiding up in the branches. These things provide a certain level of comfort because of how we live in the environment. It’s just important to remember that when people make a power assertion, which is to provide an explanatory mechanism for why you like what you like, when they tell you it’s evolutionary, that could be true, but it’s also hard to prove. Always question why you’re told why you like what you like. Who says we like what we like?

How do we know?

As public health researchers, we can use a lot of tools at our disposal: surveys, first-person accounts, cognitive performance tests, pre- and postcognitive performance tests. You see how somebody’s mind is functioning before and after their time in the forest. Physiological monitoring, wristbands, chest straps, and headsets, all these things which show us a slice of the individual’s health in real time, and health is multifactorial, it takes a long time to develop. It’s diet, it’s genes, it’s emotional tenor, it’s your workplace, it’s what your grandparents ate, all these things, through genetic expression, influence your health. Health is multifactorial, but what we can get is that moment of insight into how an individual is responding to their environment and then make some speculations about how that accrues over time and what the aggregate influence of being exposed to an environment is, which is more or less restive for the physiology, restive for the mind, and may contribute to an individual’s health performance over time.

I like this graphic, it’s not mine, it’s Tim Beatley’s at the University of Virginia. It’s structured on the FDA food pyramid, but it provides an idea about dosage, that is, we should have nature at every scale, from the moment we walk out our door, through our commuting route, outside our offices, on the weekends, monthly, yearly. We may not always have the same quality of nature, maybe it’s a manicured urban park or maybe it’s Yosemite, but between that spectrum, no matter what, you can

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Child’s handprint on petri dish

Nature ‘Dosage’ Pyramid (Tim Beatley at University of Virginia)

get in contact with nature. If you can have a continual corridor of that feedback in your life, that is important. Sound is neglected in this research as far as I can tell, and I do some work in the sound area, and I’m very interested in it, but one of the people that I tend to look to is Bernie Krause. The argument here is that the voice of each creature has its own frequency, amplitude, timbre, and duration and occupies a unique niche among other members of the biophony that represents a unique grouping for any given biome. That is to say, there is a sound signature for any intact ecology, but for disrupted ecology, too, there is a sound signature. What you may notice in any given 24-hour cycle is that there will be niches that will be missing as those species go

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silent. One of Bernie Krause’s best articles actually was on a place that he sampled for over twenty years repeatedly, and he shows that in the Californian drought, versus ten years ago when it had water, the silence is deafening. What you’re listening to is the absence of water. When we think about the way that sound changes in our urban environments and cities, we think of sound as being one of the restorative components of an environment.

Think about how sound changes cities, of course animals and insects also readjust some of their vocalizations to suit the urban biophony, more infrastructure gray space-phony, whatever you call that. We don’t know necessarily if the absence of those sound spectrums or the shifts are necessarily restorative in the way they might have been evolutionarily. We know that we’re looking also at changes that are wrought by environmental contamination. Just as our IQs are impacted by lead, the calls of birds are impacted by heavy metals. They change their way of speaking. There’s a lot to be said about sound’s contribution as a signaling mechanism.

The microbiome gets a lot of attention in public health lately.

This is a child’s hand print grown on a petri dish. The outside of the dermis of our skin has its own microbiome, the inside of our nasal cavity, the inside of our intestines. We have multiple different types of biomes, all of them are responsive to our environment, informed by our environment, and there’s this interesting work being done on how the materials’ chemistry in building and the materials we select can help create indoor environment microbiomes and what’s a helpful microbiome. We’re really at the outset of this, but biomimic inoculation is this idea that if you do take those hikes and you go to those natural environments and that shifts your microbiome or you’re ingesting the soil particles or whatever it is, to what extent is that protective?

Everyone here is probably familiar with the hygiene hypothesis, biodiversity, and allergic sensitization, that is, if you are in contact with environments with greater diversity in the microbiome, you are more likely to be immunologically primed and not exhibit atopy—asthma, eczema, allergic rhinitis, like here in this article, “Allergy is rare where butterflies flourish in a biodiverse environment.” This brings to mind the Fuller 2007 study. It turns

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out that people are terrible judges of biodiversity, I mean not like everyone in this room, who may have had education in this field, but when you take the average person into a park, they’re going to focus on birdsong and butterflies and the structural diversity, that is, the texture on the leaves, the size of the leaves. That’s what they will pick up on, whether or not that’s an accurate indicator of actual structural biodiversity, that’s what they’re going to think represents biodiversity and health in that environment, generally. Those are the signaling mechanisms. In the absence of a biodiverse park, is it more helpful if we try and stock that park with the signaling mechanisms that the public’s going to interpret? Is that a way in which, as we try and bridge that biodiversity issue, as we try and increase the diversity available at that park to be a restorative environment, can we try and at least, without meaning to be pejorative, fool people, and is that important?

I think a lot about this idea of climate change refugia, that is, the climate territories which are thought to be less ecologically affected by climate change, that for whatever reason exhibit traits of resilience, and the states that mean that they are less prone to some of the disruptions that we’re all concerned with.

Perturbance is a term that is really useful. Perturbance is to ecologists what allostatic load is to public health clinicians. In public health, we refer to this concept of allostasis, which is a system’s ability to recalibrate and go back to normal, to its homeostatic mean. When you continually stress a system, it loses its ability to return to homeostatic norm. It loses its ability to return to health. When we look at these climate refugia, when we look at these spaces that are able to exhibit this resilience and this endurance, what can we learn from them, and how are those going to be important to the survival of our species? Is there some sort of mapping that we can create that layers the areas that are resilient for their own particular reasons on to how our communities function, and what does that look like structurally?

Michael Weinstock says “all the works of humans are natural and in making the artifacts of civilization over the last ten thousand years we have changed nature. The understanding of the natural world—the very conception of nature is culturally produced.”

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That’s so useful to remember and never more so than in this moment when we have amazing work happening. This is just by way of one example—the work of Neri Oxman at MIT in the Mediated Matter Lab. She works at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology. The project on the left involves grinding up shrimp shells with chitin, the organic structure that you’ll find in shells and butterfly wings and various other things, adding a biopolymer, adding various different layers of this bio-based, water-based polymer mix, extruding it through a 3-D printer at various different layers, and finding that this one material can serve through different material capacities, material functions. This one totally biodegradable structural component can be used in some very creative ways. I am not doing justice to her project, but there’s a TED Talk on it that is really inspiring. On the right-hand side is another project of hers that creates and embeds synthetic beehives in an eternal spring in buildings, in our built environment, to attempt to preserve some of the bee habitat that is being wiped out. On that note, I appreciate designers like that so much because they are really innovative at coming up with new materials, new structures, new syntheses that may in fact form a great way forward. I look at that bee project and a quote that she released recently about every sustainable building having a beehive embedded in it, and I on one hand really appreciate that sentiment, and on the other hand, wouldn’t it be easier if we just banned neonicotinoid pesticides, and we went to Monsanto’s doorstep and we shot them down? I’m sorry, I know that’s inflammatory, but if they’ve managed to ban it in Europe, we can do it, too. There are design responses that are extremely helpful in considering the future of our species. We need these pollinators, and I appreciate that with especially something as multifactorial as climate change, we’re going to have to come at it from every angle we’ve got and hit it with everything we’ve got, and still we’ll be behind the game. But we also have to prioritize our responses and do what’s most central to making that solution happen. In any case, I’m looking forward to your questions, and thank you so much for your attention.

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William W. Braham / Jacob Mans / Forrest Meggers / Kiel Moe

Theory, Practice, and Research Sustainability is Dead

Jacob Mans Thanks Richard. They have been incredibly influential on the research I’m trying to do, and it represents a really unique form of optimism in architectural design that uniquely questions a number of habits that we’ve made around this topic of sustainability over the last twenty or thirty years.

To introduce them, we have Kiel Moe from Harvard, Bill Braham from the University of Pennsylvania, and Forrest Meggers from Princeton. Their work is deeply engaged in a systematic approach to ecology or thermodynamics or experimental setup and rigorous testing. I would like to say before handing it off that within very nuanced specific descriptions of those systems of thermodynamics and of what “energy” actually means—breaking apart that very general topic and getting specific to see how we might look at a system that seems inefficient or at a system of scarcity through a very unique form of intense research—that you can actually look at the systems as incredible opportunities filled with optimism and unique design solutions. Now I’m going to hand it off to Kiel.

Kiel Moe Thank you, and I’m grateful to be here. I like the idea of this symposium a lot, and it’s very poignant for me right now. But to jump right into the ecological failures and the neoliberal success of sustainability suggests that sustanability suffers from a large set of epistemological and methodological limitations that constrain its practices and do not serve the good intentions of its practitioners very well. These limitations, as partially indicated by the green platitudes on the screen, have produced many false positives, and moreover a false positivism, that are, in my view, contradictory to a more ecologically sane mode of practice.

Based on these concepts, I believe we’ve often developed elaborate means and methods for the wrong questions about the ecology of architecture. These concepts have also engendered a lot of confusion and impaired our ability to understand what we’re actually talking about.

So I would ultimately counter with a different set of concepts and practices that I work on with my students and colleagues

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that often invert our assumptions about the energy and environments of buildings. These concepts and their associated methods align better with the governing thermodynamic laws, political economies, and formal potential of the process of urbanization that we call building or architecture. These are not nuanced semantic or academic differences. In short, the words we use to describe our world to ourselves matter.

As but one example, the epistemological and methodological limitations of sustainability have imposed errant system boundaries on our pedagogies and our practices. Thus, despite our good intentions we too often work on the wrong forms of energy at the wrong orders of magnitude. I will argue that, in this regard, sustainability seems to lack a sense of irony about the basic ecology and contingencies of building and design in this world.

So my first question for anyone interested in energy in environments is always what is your system boundary and why?

Answers to that question will help establish what orders of magnitude are actually at stake in the hierarchy of energy associated with architecture, and this is a very important starting point for this kind of topic. If we look back at sustainability in the last couple decades we will see that the dominant characterization of “energy,” as one topic, has been focused on “operational.”

This is the energy efficiency paradigm and its current guise as net zero energy. But this only considers a very small portion of the actual formations of energy associated with the building.

In my view, this defies ecological and even political analysis.

While some recent forms of analysis have aimed to expand this system boundary of building considerably through life-cycle analysis, etc., only an ecosystem approach is methodologically prepared to address the thermodynamics of large scale, non-isolated systems that constitute building and thus address the manifold biogeophysical inputs, throughputs, and outputs that presuppose building and urbanization.

The inexplicable focus on energy analysis and energy efficiency and net zero energy is teleological in that it assumes that the biogeophysical basis of building is an infinite reserve and externalizes these known resource costs in order to balance out its spreadsheets. For instance, energy analysis externalizes the

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energy required from the growth of a tree in a forest from that of the wood building. For me this teleology and its obvious metabolic rift is problematic from not just ecological points of view but architectural and political points of view, as well. In aspects of my work I’m motivated to include much more within my system boundaries. When we expand our system boundaries to reflect the actual ecology of building, and all of its energetic inputs and outputs, the task of design fundamentally transforms.

For just one very quick example, one of our colleagues did a very extensive ecosystem assessment of a contemporary North American institutional building which was happening at the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. When you start to look at that sort of data, and I certainly don’t expect architects to do this type of extensive analysis—that’s not the point of this work, the point of this kind of work is to help us understand the hierarchy of the energy of architecture and what orders of magnitude and what scales of energy we actually should work on—it will help us reconstitute practice today.

When we look at a building in this ecosystem context we can see that the hierarchy of energy, that is, the kind of the orders of magnitude of energy involved with different aspects of building, suggests quite emphatically that most of the energy associated with building is related to construction and maintenance. If the current preoccupation with operational energy persists, thus lowering the operational quotient further, then the role of construction and maintenance becomes all the more critical. This does not mean that operational questions are not relevant. You should really be as comfortable as you like and enjoy all the potential delights of our thermoluminous environments, but this delight should not occur at the expense or externalization of other consequential formations of energy that we know are inextricable from building. In short, we should scale our energetic concerns according to the hierarchies involved.

Given this kind of emphasis on, let’s say, the energy of construction, materials, and maintenance, some of my recent work has been focused on a kind of historical understanding of the actual geographic, temporal system boundaries of buildings. So I looked at this book, Empire, State, & Building, which looked at a

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Image of a building in a city to context and diagram of a building’s context in scale to the human body.

Diagram mapping of the material and geographical system boundaries in phases

from a farm in the 1800s to the Empire State Building.

single parcel of land, currently occupied by the Empire State Building, through its material and energetic histories. It has three chapters, the first on empire, the second on state, and the third on building.

The first chapter, about empire, claims that every building reflects an empire of matter, energy, and territory. But I assert that in this chapter it is an empire without rule because architects have been trained to externalize all of these dynamics. The chapter simply goes through and maps out the material and geographic system boundary of building in each of these phases, from a farm in 1800 to row houses to a mansion, and then from the mid-nineteenth century to the original Waldorf Astoria, which

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was on the site at the turn of the century, to the Empire State Building itself. That kind of geographic and material mass flow understanding of building helps me think about the role of state, both its political terms of how architects might better this empire without rule, but also in terms of its macroscopic definition and characterization of a large thermodynamics system.

So I can look at that kind of shifting ecological efficacy of these different modes and impulses of building and unbuilding over time. I can even look at the velocity of any material that’s involved in this ecology since the concept of residency is as a key ecological indicator of a system, and I think it should be of urbanization as well. All this helps me understand that building and rebuilding again is a process of urbanization and that all the consequential ecological questions occur within the reciprocity of phenomena. They are absolutely planetary in their constitution. It is the cosmopolitan reciprocity of these systems based on the relevant orders of magnitude that matters to me as an architect interested in energy.

So in short, building undoubtedly requires an abundance of matter and energy, but from an open system ecological point of view this abundance is the source of its greatest ecological potential, not its liability. To grasp, much less achieve, this ecological potential of cosmopolitan building through design will require an epistemological and methodological evolution of practice toward ends that are more ecologically sane, politically robust and just, and architecturally ambitious. This involves new concepts, new methods that are more valid, ambitious, and resonant with the world. Anything less, I believe, will only continue to constrain and distort how we collectively reason and imagine architecture.

To conclude, I would urge architects and engineers to consider what can happen through design when we shift our practices away from the hegemonic pessimism of equilibrium-based notions of net-zero oriented, isolated systems, toward the delirious dynamics and abundant vitality of open systems that not only survive far from equilibrium, but thrive there as well. This would reflect a far more optimistic and ambitious practice for architecture and urbanization all based on the ecological,

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political, and architectural potential of not-zero energy architecture and urbanization. Thank you.

Kiesler Diagram showing energy flow of resources between Human (H), Technological (T), and Nature (N)

William W. Braham I completely agree with the initial provocation of the symposium.

We don’t need more metrics. We don’t need another standard.

We don’t need new ways of measuring things. I don’t just mean this as a compliment to my host, but I would point to the Living Building Challenge (LBC) as the most interesting of the standards that are out there precisely because it frames an open-ended question. It’s in the title: let’s design for something other than efficiency. However, if we dig more deeply into it, the LBC does accept the same practical constraints as the rest of the standards. It begins with the same general categories as LEED with the notable distinction that for each category they seek the most ambitious metric for energy, water, material resources, and so on. If we consider the Bullitt Center building, designed under the previous version of the LBC, it was largely conceived as a net zero energy building. The pragmatic move from “Living” to net zero energy is precisely the kind of topic we need to address.

Let me restate things you’ve heard said a couple different times today. Buildings can’t be sustainable, neither can shoes, nor smartphones, nor shopping bags. Buildings are just tools that we use in our social and economic arrangements in more or less efficient ways. Ultimately a sustainable building is a building that participates usefully in a sustainable economy, even if that particular building is somehow less efficient or shorter lived.

Our challenge as designers, who are naturally focused on the

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object of building, is to think about how our work operates at environmental scales.

I have organized my proposition in a diagram that I adapted from Frederick Kiesler, which summarizes the basic point. We are trying to design for the common good. That’s not ecosystem first, it’s not people first, it’s the common good. This diagram underlines the fundamental point that environmental design begins with understanding the carrying capacity of the global geobiosphere. Our species evolved within the natural systems of the planet, but we now operate within an environment of our own making—the social and economic environment—which has made us powerful, but that has its own dynamics that can be at odds with underlying natural systems. And within that social environment we have unleashed a technological environment of which buildings are a centrally useful and productive part, and which has its own evolutionary dynamics. In Kiesler’s description the three environments co-evolve, each influencing the other, but ultimately, we are brought back to the carrying capacity of geo-biosphere. How much can the planet support?

Carrying capacity may be the starting point for environmental design, but we are naive if we think it stops there and that is the value of recognizing the dynamics of the other two environments. I’ve been to more meetings like this in which people carefully describe an environmental problem and then conclude that we all have to change. But changing the way people organize themselves or construct the built environment, that’s a real design challenge. In our work the first step has been to develop tools for connecting these big questions about carrying capacity to the design, construction, and operation of buildings. Over the last half dozen years, we have adapted the work of systems ecologists who track all of the exchanges of work, resources, and information that run through ecosystems.

This simplified diagram of the global ecosystem places the built environment in its context, and allows us to evaluate the upstream and downstream costs of every material, product, or service that we use. This does require another metric—e[m]ergy or energy memory—which is a cumulative accounting of all the materials, energy, and information that are used or degraded in

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Diagram showing resource flow within three critical groupings of site, shelter and setting.

the process. Unlike life-cycle assessment, this considers purchased and environmental resources equally. However, e[m]ergy diagrams are ultimately valuable because they reveal the structure and organization of a system, in this case of the interaction of human construction and global ecosystems. They can reveal opportunities to “close loops” by recycling waste products, but also explain which resources or products are valuable even if they’re inefficient.

The outer boundary of the diagram is the total biosphere, but in the building trades we mostly operate with the much smaller boundary around the individual building or site. So when we talk about net zero, which is the inner diagram, we’re literally counting purchased energy as one kind of input, because we pay for it, and count the many inputs that come from the environment as free. Net zero energy is a simply balancing the amounts of things we pay for against those that natural systems deliver to us at no charge. It is really a tactical, economic goal, at a very small scale, especially once we consider the work and resources that went into the photovoltaic panels. In the studies I have seen, the annual e[m]ergy cost of electricity from photovoltaics is about half that of the electricity from the grid. It is an improvement, but far from free.

If we come back to the Bullitt Center, the net-zero design process revealed another important distinction. Miller Hull, the architects of the building, put together a summary of the design decisions in the process, nicely illustrating the net-zero energy formula. The challenge is to reduce the energy consumption of the building you can fit underneath a covering of photovoltaics

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so that the building can operate within the energy budget dictated by the panels. It’s actually quite an architectural proposition, because it produces such a visible symbol of the energy achievement. The challenge the architects encountered was that to get from the consumption level of a typical building down to the budget imposed by the photovoltaics, they only got halfway by improving the envelope, maximizing daylight, and using efficient systems. The rest came from changing the way occupants worked and lived in the building. In fact, tenants have to sign energy contracts to work in the building. The point is that there are two different design problems here, and we all know it’s much easier to engineer buildings than it is to engineer people.

In fact, you have to use a different word and think about it more critically.

Broadly speaking, one of the big benefits for the students I work with has been to use e[m]ergy diagrams to distinguish among different kinds of environmental design challenges. We seek general principles, but also explore how they are manifested in all their particularity. My current conclusion is that there are three design scales or problems for most buildings.

I’ve just described two of them. The first is providing Shelter, which architects are really good at, making things comfortable, well lighted and ventilated and so forth. That is the middle circle in this diagram. However most of the resources are expended by people working and living inside buildings and not by things determined by the building envelope, so the second scale is the Setting of the building.

The third and largest scale of design challenge is the Site, and it most directly addresses the provocation of the symposium.

Thinking critically about sites, helps us rethink regeneration. For the most part, architects simply accept sites as legally defined entities that have different physical characteristics. But we can also look at sites as locations in a spatial economy, whose value is both the resources they contain and their location relative to other social and economic activities. From that perspective, buildings are an intensification of their sites, enhancing the value of the location, facilitating one kind of activity instead of another. We don’t plant an acre of corn in the middle of

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Manhattan. It makes no sense economically. Just as we do not build high-rises in the middle of cornfields, not unless we are trying to make a city happen around them. Those characteristics are both relational and self-reinforcing, meaning the more office buildings you put in one area, the more valuable the remaining land will be for more office buildings.

To exemplify the challenge of sites understood more broadly, two students asked what a renewable economy would look like. They chose a rural county in Western New York because it seemed easier to imagine alternate futures in a place that wasn’t growing rapidly and already super urbanized. They tracked every resource flow in the county and organized it according to land use types, revealing the classic hierarchy between large amounts of lower-intensity uses like forest and agriculture and smaller amounts of high-intensity developed land. We worked together to produce the “New Chautauqua Game” (www.mostapha.io/ SettlementEmerge), which you are welcome to play.

Another student was provoked the rural example, but wanted to consider an urban situation. He analyzed all the buildings in Manhattan, which is so often held up as an efficient mode of living. The point revealed by the New Chautauqua Game was that when you consider food and all the other resources consumed in a city, you still need a tremendous amount of lower-intensity land to support the efficient arrangements in high density cities.

He estimated the total amounts of building materials, along with all the resource flows of energy, food, water, and transportation for every building on the island. It was a staggering amount of database work, yielded a detailed picture of the differences in land use intensity on the island, but is ultimately incomplete without its other boroughs and the larger region on which it relies.

One fascinating takeaway was revealed in a chart of e[m]ergy intensity versus Floor Area Ratio (FAR) for all those buildings. Somewhere between 15 and 20 FAR, roughly a forty-story building, the intensity of buildings jumps dramatically. There’s lots of ways to think about this kind of result. It reinforces something that seems true, that tall buildings are wasteful, but that falls into the same assumption about efficiency. Maybe everybody should stop building sixty-story buildings, but what we

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need to ask is why are we building them in the first place. In fact, we should consider the opposite question, on what should we choose to spend our resources? Tall buildings higher than sixty- or seventy-stories are the most recognizable symbols of the wealth of cities. A city makes its claim to the world stage by displaying that excessive use of resources. This is what I mean when I say that we should not be naive about identifying waste, and then expecting the waste to go away. We need to understand the degree to which we waste resources precisely to make ourselves appear wealthier and more prosperous.

Forrest Meggers Fantastic, so I’m going to take an even further step back. Having been trained as a mechanical engineer and in environmental engineering, and then somehow falling into an architecture school, I find myself often having to take very broad perspectives on things. Today I want to try and elucidate for you a little bit how that perspective helps to frame the idea of value. I think in terms of “sustainability being dead” that I would probably argue that it never was really alive. It’s a rhetorical tool that is extremely important for us to argue about for our future. A productive rhetoric is as important to sustaining our future as any technology.

Therefore I want to talk about perspective, paradigm, and intuition in that framework.

To start very broadly, this—the Earth—is our value, this is the famous pale blue dot for Carl Sagan, who said that we needed to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot because it’s the only home we’ve ever known, and it’s the only value we really have. That is what I’m going to be reiterating today—how value is something that’s relatively vague, but there’s a lot of places we use it in architecture, design, and engineering. The rhetorical use of value is a productive means by which we can achieve more sustainable outcomes in our designs, but this requires reconsidering the argument used around value and sustainability.

The evolution of that argument has traversed from the idea in the 1970s of the blue marble, where the environment was something we cherished its degeneration was the problem, to today, in which the degenerative is inherently part of our role on

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the planet creating an entire new epoch, the Anthropocene. We are causing changes, fundamental changes to the entire Earth, which we can see from space at night and in various changes to CO2 atmospheric concentrations. Today, we have to start thinking of the real values that people see day to day, not just the ones that you see from space.

Unfortunately, when you traverse a spatial domain, one from picturing Earth from afar to making decisions about supporting family, value quickly changes definition from long term environment to short term paycheck. When we talk about buildings it’s usually this: ”How do we reduce the energy demand and get a payback on what we’re doing?” But rarely across environmentally significant timeframes. So the value we have is an abstract, inherent value that we impose upon the Earth and our livelihood.

It is in something as simple as its beauty and also in the dangers of all the things we are changing on the Earth, but we fail to recognize the different in these values. There is a Freakonomics example of a fifty-dollar tomato in which the authors argue that when you try to grow produce in New York City, that’s how much each tomato should cost based costs and labor that an urban dweller puts into it. But this again focuses on shifting the ecological value back to a paycheck and the short term economy.

There’s a whole other set of values that go into why it’s good to do ecological integration in a city and to teach people about the values of ecology.

Unfortunately, economic values tend to supersede these sorts of empathetic and fundamental values we have in the environment. Real estate is something we don’t often talk about very much in architecture school, but it’s something that plays an important role in how decisions are made in buildings. It’s a point where you transition from one value regime (that of the Earth being beautiful) to another (how much did it cost in things and how much did I get). This complexity of value often plays out in architecture which shifts fluidly from economy to performance to aesthetic and culture.

The Seagram Building is an interesting case. Go to the current Wikipedia page and the first thing it says is that it’s by Mies van der Rohe. The second sentence is that it’s the worst Energy Star

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performer in New York City. It is strange the way we place such diverse values of design versus so close together without having any means to relate them. So the main difference I want to try and focus on is that there is qualitative value and quantitative value. I think architects have the ability to try, through design and intuition, to straddle those two domains. My argument is that we can extend the intuition for design to really conceptualize and leverage principles rooted in science.

I really liked Richard’s prompt. He had a sentence in the famous “sustainability is dead” essay that “design relies on humans’ ability to not only be rational and technical, but also to be intuitive.” I like to use this point to argue for our current state of intuition.

Historically, the architect was someone who was able to address the problems and complexities of architecture across many disciplines and was a so-called jack-of-all-trades. Gaudi could do hanging chain models. Ustad Ali Maryam could do evaporative cooling and wind tower catching from the mechanical systems of his building. George Gilbert Scott could plan circulation and industrial design of large train stations. But current architects need to have structural engineers to support contemporary structures, mechanical engineers to advanced systems like solar panels and infrastructure, and industrial engineers to do the circulation through airports and hospitals.

The technical expertise has largely been transferred, but unfortunately, we also allowed the design intuition and creative feedback from these systems to be transported along with that technical expertise. I think there’s a lot of potential in bringing back a basic intuition.

At the Princeton School of Architecture right now I do not teach a building systems class that aims at facilitating the technical competency for the AIA exam. I prefer to teach more fundamental things, like the first law of thermodynamics. It’s super basic, but too many people think it’s going to be too hard or too much about science and equations. If we think about the first law of thermodynamics, though, you can actually explain it really nicely in terms of a climate change.

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What’s happening in the fundamental Earth system is that energy in has to equal energy out, otherwise the if more energy is coming in than going out, the plant warms up. Generally speaking all the systems on Earth were in balance, except now we slightly changed the amount of heat that is leaving on one side of a simple first law of thermodynamics equation. What’s happening is that we’re reflecting some of the heat trying to escape and keep us in balance back to earth. This is because there’s more CO2 in the atmosphere that reflects that heat. We end up with this warmer planet because the first law of thermodynamics makes the planet want to come back to equilibrium. In order to do this it must warm up. There is a relationship between how much heat is leaving and the temperature of the Earth. In order to keep everything in balance, even though the Earth is now holding in more heat than it used to, the surface temperature needs to rise. The Earth is just doing what it should be doing thermodynamically, but understanding it from a fundamental level is much more useful because that concept can then be applied across many different systems, including buildings. Having architects memorize how to calculate U-values of walls without an intuitive understanding of the first law of thermodynamics is like making everyone understand atmospheric photonics before being told about climate change.

We can continue the Earth example further to understand that the Earth is not consuming energy since the same amount coming in is trying to go out. Rather the value of energy on earth is found in how the systems leverage the potential as it traverses that energy balance. The solar energy coming in does not have the same value as the energy leaving. This is due to the second law of thermodynamics, which is a bit more abstract. It’s pretty boring to think about “the energy in equals the energy out.”

It feels like nothing is really happening then. What’s really happening is dissipation. At a broader scale, you have all these potentials that are being dissipated, and those are all defined by temperatures in the system. That is the additional value. It is as if you go out to Starbucks and try and buy coffee with your three Euros instead of three dollars—it’s the same quantity of money numerically, but there’s a different value. That is similar

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to all the temperatures that take place across all the systems in the planet. All those temperatures are like the currency exchange in the energy systems. The way we think about the flow of all the different processes throughout a building, all those temperatures are ways that you can gain a sort of intuition without doing any hard math. Just understand that there’s some implicit value in the way energy gets processed through building systems leads to a broader capability to engage e The way we invented our current paradigm of ubiquitous energy in buildings is through the transition to the fully air-conditioned building, which ASHRAE began standardizing in 1922 to a universal set of black box technologies and oversimplified comfort criteria, which has largely removed the largest energy demand in buildings, heating and cooling systems, from the architects design intuition. What are we doing in the case of the air conditioner? We are only changing the temperature and the humidity of air we can deliver to the building. Those are the two quantities that mechanical engineers can achieve. But, there are other equally important factors that make you comfortable. Historically there is much more research and design intuition that existed prior to the mid20th-century expansion of central air conditioning systems, like the Olgyays, which would allow us to have a better, more intuitive understanding of where temperature changes happen in buildings. Where is the real value in the system? Why are people always complaining of being not comfortable in buildings that are “technically” within comfort conditions?

If you will all do a little experiment for me here, since I like doing experiments, touch the table you’re sitting at. First, touch the wood. Now, touch the metal leg of your chairs. Which one is colder? The leg is really colder, right? Nope. Didn’t we just learn the first law of thermodynamics? It can’t actually be colder because energy in equals energy out. Where would the energy be coming from to make the chair leg colder? We cannot disobey the first law of thermodynamics, but, physiologically speaking, you are a thermodynamic engine who needs to dissipate a hundred watts of energy, and your thermal comfort is just the ability of your body to do that dissipation. When you touch the metal, the conductivity of the metal is higher, the heat leaves your hand

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Rendering representing density, temperature and smokes lines.

faster, so you are just sensing heat flux, not temperature. Yet everything we do in buildings is based on fixing a temperature, even though temperature is not the only variable the affects the heat flux leaving you and what you feel. With a little intuition architects have the opportunity to leverage things like radiant heat transfer from surfaces or air movement in design.

In Design with Climate, by architects Victor and Aladár Olgyay, from 1963, we have a holistic model uninfluenced by ubiquitous air conditioning that includes all the ways that you interact with hot or cold surfaces around you, with higher or lower air flows in the space. It uses those as actual design criteria for the buildings that were studied at this time period, before we had universal AC. The design criteria Olgyay used was one that was much more intuition based and used a fundamental concept of energy.

I’m going to touch on a couple research projects in which I have deployed this kind of design intuition. We did a project where we integrated the mechanical systems into a voided structural slab. This is a slab loaded in compression on top and tension on the bottom so the middle space can be removed. You can take a lot of mass out of there and put your ducting in the new decentralized ventilation. The air can come directly from the façade and you don’t have to push the air very far. You can then

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use displacement ventilation so you don’t have to push it very fast. The result is everything gets smaller form an intuition for structure and the physics of air movement. Now a building can fit three floors in the space of two with the exact same floor to ceiling height experienced inside.

We also looked at double facades and the history of a strange double facade mounted on the architecture building at Princeton, the origin of which nobody quite knew. It turns out it was Harrison Fraker, the former Dean of Berkeley, who installed the system in the 1970s. We wanted to understand the role of intuition within that design. There has been a lot poking fun at architects being able to “control the air movement by drawing an arrow.” In the case of Fraker, this intuition was good for how a warm double façade would insulate in winter and provide suction for ventilation in summer, but no one operates the system or recognizes its function at the school at present. We looked at ways to represent phenomena with real data by performing a rigorous series of experiments and producing the drawing shown to the left. Every arrow is every gradient—their density is determined by pressure sensors—the colors, red and blue, represent temperature, and the stripes are actual smoke lines from images that we took of the space trying to play with the idea of making drawings styled like Philippe Rahm with every stroke representing some type of real data. In this way the complex operation of the double façade can be easily registered.

In the same context, we are creating new tools to make it easier to interpret the temperatures of surfaces. The SMART sensor builds a model of radiant exchanges in the built environment by Scanning Mean Radiant Temperature combining thermal imaging along with geometry scanning, which enables for the first time a completely discretized visualization of the variation in radiant sensation in space. We have shown variations in perceived comfort greater than 2°C independent of air temperature. This data is also unknown to any mechanical engineer, and so the new data and system of visualization can in fact give the architect a higher level of thermal intuition, one that plays to the geometric expertise of the architect. It can enable new ways to think about geometry while also explicitly recognizing

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Thermoheliodome experiment on radiant evaporative cooling of an energy-informed pavilion digital robotic fabrication.

the human form as being in direct exchange with the architectural form surrounding. As you sit there trying to dissipate your hundred watts of energy, you do so only half by convection to the air and. The other half is by radiation. Therefore the mechanical consultants have been brute forcing thermal comfort systems by focusing on air conditioning . Only half of your thermal comfort is determined by the air temperature; the other half is dissipated through radiation to the surrounding surfaces, which is where architects can begin to engage more directly At Princeton, we did an experiment demonstrating an architecture driven by thermal radiation geometry, which leveraged that radiant exchange to manipulate your perception of comfort.

To do this we built a large Thermoheliodome outdoor pavilion that radiates coolness through a strategic reflection of radiation from pipes onto occupants inside. Then throughout the summer you can stand in it, and perceive that you are standing in a space that was closer to the thermal comfort range of a traditional building. Rethinking some of these paradigms about how temperature and temperature difference are leveraged in a design context allows you to build slightly crazy or unorthodox structures that maybe aren’t as programmatically functional, that provide our students with an intuitive understanding of how some of these phenomenon actually work. For example, they can stand in the Thermoheliodome and experience radiant heating and cooling and intuitively understand how it is not coupled with temperatures in space.

I think if architects can re-engage in some of these more engineering consultant type of modes, there would be a huge

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opportunity to shift the way we engage the classic challenges of energy and exergy in the environment. A broader understanding of how intuition can help define value better in the process of design, both technically and rhetorically, will be a critical for design practice to sustain a comfortable and healthy future built and natural environment.

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Richard Graves / Bob Harris / Marc L’Italien / Tom Kubala / Julie Snow / James Timberlake

Connecting Design and Regeneration Sustainability is Dead

Richard Graves First off, I want to thank the five architects who have agreed to be on this panel. I can’t thank you all enough for letting me convince you to first of all come to the symposium. But then I also thank you for allowing me to make a lot of requests of you in your presentations. I am looking forward to a really good discussion of the role of a practice in pursuing a regenerative future.

In order of presentation, we have Tom Kubala from Kubala Washatko in Wisconsin; Marc L’Italien, formally with EHDD and now with HGA; Bob Harris from Lake/Flato; and Julie Snow from Snow Kreilich, and then James Timberlake from KieranTimberlake.

Tom Kubala This quote from John O’Donohue is deeply meaningful for our studio: “Our times are driven by the inestimable energies of the mechanical mind.” We realized this early in the creation of our firm, which we started in 1980, as an answer to why we are so sad most of the time in our built environment. The idea is confirmed again by Albert Einstein who said, “a human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

What we call a reductive world is the cosmology we’re dealing with all the time. Two of the henchmen of that reductive world are stylistic thinking and mechanistic thinking. Both are equally devastating to our environment. Robert Stern stated that stylistic thinking “deals in pure and simple shapes often at the expense of problem solving.” Mechanistic thinking is the idea that we are reducing a very complex, beautiful living system into things that we can comprehend, a machine-like interpretation of the real thing. Stylistic thinking forces designers to stop listening. It’s like Lance’s napkin sketch problem, where as soon as you make that sketch, you’ve stopped listening to everybody because your goal is now to make the building turn out like the napkin sketch. It is not easily shared, stylistic thinking; it’s very egotistic,

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THE HENCHMEN OF A REDUCTIVE WORLD MECHANISTIC THINKING

“It deals in pure and simple shapes, often at the expense of problem solving.”

Robert A.M. Stern New Directions in American Architecture, 1969

The theory that every complex phenomenon, especially in biology or psychology, can be explained by analyzing the simplest, most basic physical mechanisms that are in operation during the phenomenon.

Pattern Example: “Eddy”

STYLISTIC THINKING

Stylistic and Mechanistic Thinking

or confined to a single individual. Usually it must oversimplify complexity. It is deaf to ecological needs, and it lacks long-term value simply because it is stylistic. Mechanistic thinking has some similar problems. It fragments larger continuity, it discounts feelings and emotions, it marginalizes art and beauty, it is most often imposed on nature, and it artificially separates form from function.

I’m trying to be practical in the sense of asking how one designs a building in a nonreductive world. The disclaimer here is that for our firm, most of the work, the really hard work, the philosophical work, has already been done by Christopher Alexander, whom we connected to early in our practice and who’s work we have attempted to involve in everything that we do as an architectural practice. Early on we wrote a manifesto: “I choose to presume that the world is undivided, whole, and meaningful, that a unity of creation exists and it is exquisitely beautiful.” That became our starting point, and if you see the world differently from that, maybe it’s just a matter of the way you’re looking. It is shown in both relativity theory and quantum theory that notions implying the undivided wholeness of the universe would provide a much more orderly way of considering the general nature of reality. It’s this kind of movement toward

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seeing undividedness as reality as not only an artistic adventure but also a scientific one.

I’m going to focus on one area of our architectural practice that is trying to be nonreductive, and that has to do with the program, and how information that one gleans from the programming phase makes its way into the design of the eventual building. We write patterns based on Alexander’s work on pattern writing. We like to say patterns are a dance between human activity and the built and natural environment. It is always between human activity and the environment, and if you write a pattern that doesn’t include human activity, it’s not a pattern.

Traditional programming, for us, is a very mechanistic way of looking at a building, a list of rooms, proximity, a matrix of nearness or distance from one room to the next. So many things have already been decided, from a design perspective, once you’ve written a program like this—it’s not funny—you’ve cut off maybe 90 percent of the possibility of how the building could be designed, just by writing down a list of rooms. We avoid this practice at all costs.

A pattern is an interesting thing. Here is an example from nature of the pattern ‘eddy’. It has a name. Everybody knows it.

It’s the epitome of a nonreductive part of the world because you can’t remove it from the river without utterly destroying it. It’s a beautiful differentiation of the whole. It’s a different way of looking at a part of the environment or a part of the building. We also assume that when a building is fully alive, patterns like this occur at all levels of scale, nested in a continuous unbroken field.

That’s the manifestation of a program, of written patterns, and I’ll give you an example from a building currently being designed in our office. This is the short, modest pattern language that we wrote for the building. Within this list of patterns are all the necessary aspects of what the building needs to do, how it’s going to respond to human beings, how it responds to the natural setting, how it responds to its historical and cultural setting.

We’d rather not break architecture down into different fields of study. We want to do one thing, we want to make buildings that are alive, undivided, and the process of getting us there has to be an undivided process. The closest thing we’ve found is writing

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Edge of Nowhere

Implications for Practice

patterns that allow us to include all kinds of information that have physical implications for the building. Here is one of those patterns, called ‘The Edge of Nowhere’. For us, the goal of writing patterns is to gain a deeper understanding of how a building and its multi-dimensional environment can be configured to support both human activity and the natural world in a harmonious way.

Many of our patterns start with a poem. We feel that a metaphor is a great example of a piece of writing that deeply involves the listener. It’s an example of an unbroken piece of literature. A metaphor doesn’t work unless the hearer responds to the strange juxtaposition of words in his or her own particular way, and we feel that patterns have that same capacity, to engage a client in a

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way that is not prescriptive, but evokes meaning for both the client and the design team.

I have placed the line between my friend and me today.

The line of love was hard to do to keep my love at bay.

—Bradley Lester The poem speaks to a peculiar issue on the site, and seems counterintuitive.

Visitors to Lakeshore State Park, pictured below, cannot easily experience Lake Michigan. Rising up along the park’s eastern perimeter lies an impressive wall of refrigerator-sized limestone boulders. While the stones are a needed bulwark against stormtossed waves, they create a deep visual and psychological barrier. The solution, for us, was to recognize that visitors seek a physical and emotional experience of the edge. Edges are alluring. We wanted to think holistically about how the building, adjacent outdoor spaces, and pathways can strengthen and connect more directly, especially to the east. The lake’s edge must offer more than a distant vista. The pattern is written in such a way that it allows multiple kinds of solutions, and because the patterns work in conjunction with one another, they can interact with one another. So there are certain decisions about building placement that have to do with this issue as well as smaller scale issues that have to do with how you actually approach the lake.

We like to think of patterns as a genetic code, but not in the mechanistic way that genetic code had been understood up until maybe twenty years ago. Previously, genetic code was thought to be more machine-like, in that it produced a particular form in an organism, and there wasn’t much way of getting around it.

However, now researchers have discovered that expression, gene expression, is much more common than previously understood, much more normal, in the way organisms take form and shape. The great example of this is the grasshopper and the locust, which have the exact same genetic code, and are in fact the same animal, but under different environmental conditions they completely change their form. If you can see a pattern as a

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When pattern meets environment

Pattern Meets Environment

piece of genetic material having the ability to express itself in the environment, it offers a new way for seeing how a building can be a direct response to its environmental conditions.

It was interesting that many in the client group were pushing us to place the building in the northernmost portion of the island, because of its relationship to existing circulation, even though it also put the building in a hole, where you would then no longer experience the lake. The final pattern, which was eventually agreed to by the entire building committee, helped the client see that it made the choice of building location based on the psychological, energetic and environmental reasons for doing so. Then, smaller scale issues, like reaching the boulder wall at one particular spot was connected to the way the building operated and where it was located.

I’m going to leave you with a few images of this building. The technical aspects of it, for us, are much less interesting than the unfolding of its design as a building via the pattern language.

The capacity for patterns to allow a building to respond to many more conditions and problems on the site, the needs of the human users and the culture that surrounds it, is a compelling

Lakeshore State Park Visitor and Education Center

Not a collision, an expression

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approach and very possibly an architectural design process of the not-too-distant future.

I’ll leave you with this quote, which is one of our favorites, from Aldo Leopold. He wrote a short essay at the end of A Sand County Almanac, called the “Land Ethic,” and in it he writes, “it has required nineteen centuries to define decent man-to-man conduct and the process is only half done; it may take as long to evolve a code of decency for man-to-land conduct.” The latter portion of the quote is what is personally reassuring to me seeing how easily I can be overcome by the bleakness of our current civilization; Leopold says, “In such matters we should not worry much about anything except the direction in which we travel.”

Thank you.

Marc L’Italien Good afternoon everyone. When I started practicing yoga thirteen years ago with my wife, I consider myself a yoga fraud because it took me a long time to get with it. I always felt like I was just going through the asanas and not getting anything out of it. I would say that when I started practicing green design, I didn’t use the s-word, I considered myself a green design fraud. It took a long time for me because my brain didn’t process the information in terms of data and metrics. I approached it as a designer from a very different perspective, and I had to be paired up with somebody in my practice who was really the visionary for bringing environmental matters to the practice. When we worked together, we made a great pair.

I’ve been really fortunate in my career that I’ve been able to work for two firms that have longevity. I think there’s a lot to be said for practices that can go back and look at buildings that were done before most of the people in the firm were even alive and look at how they’re holding up. I think that’s one of the major things about the environmental movement in architecture, that great architecture transcends that. It lasts. I’m really fortunate to be with HGA now, after 26 years with EHDD, because they are practicing that type of architecture and doing award-winning projects that really do stand the test of time. I’ve been really blessed in my career that I’ve been able to work with clients who

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Habitat Africa, Brookfield Zoo. Brookfield, Illinois.

Photo Credit: Doug Snower

are enlightened and really want to push the envelope. Not all architects have that opportunity, and what I love about what HGA is doing is they’re putting together some pivot points that really speak to ways that we can go about our practice and make sure we are dealing with design and environmental issues even with clients who don’t really recognize it. We’ve come a long way, but some clients admittedly are not quite there yet.

When I got out of grad school, I went to California to work for Joe Esherick because I was really inspired by the work he was doing, the work he had done, on the California coast—work with daylight, work with houses and siting— and it influenced my work greatly. The project that probably influenced me the most was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and this is a really holistic project in terms of design, in terms of what it did for Cannery Row, in terms of what it did for technology. It brings in raw seawater for the animals, it uses that same seawater to run through a heat exchanger to heat and cool the building and heat and cool the vessels for the animals and beyond—and our work is a lot about not just looking at the architecture, but looking at ourselves as enablers to allow great things to happen.

My work is focused on education projects. They tend to be demonstration projects or informal education projects. They’re projects that deal with exhibits and are very permanent. They define the structure. They define the architecture. They are not always flexible, and there’s this inherent conundrum in my work about trying to deal with issues of adaptability and longevity

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against buildings that are very specific. Aquariums are a great example because they are buildings built of concrete. They are expensive to build. They are not great for greenhouse gas emissions, and yet they have this great environmental message with what they’re trying to say, even though they’re really gas guzzlers.

I’ve spent my career trying to see how we can do these projects and do them in a more sustainable manner.

The first project at EHDD that I was a designer on was an aquarium in Taiwan, and it was on a very hostile site. We had typhoons. We had earthquakes. We had drop mountain winds.

We had corrosion. We had tsunami waves. Everything that could possibly happen to this building could happen to this building and this site. We worked with a lot of experts to do wind tunnel studies. We worked with a wave expert at the Naval Postgraduate School to determine how to situate the terraces to minimize the impact on the building. The building is designed with sea doors, so that all the life support equipment and all the mechanical systems, when you close the sea doors, can become self-sufficient and operate for seven days. That’s all great, but if I were doing this project again, I’d reconsider the compulsion to be at the water’s edge and just move it up the hill.

Shedd Aquarium was another project where we came in and really changed the way they were doing exhibits. We were modernizing their system by changing their life support systems and going from gravity systems to systems that were more automated. We transformed what had been the most glorious space in that aquarium and had subsequently become the worst space because they put ceiling tiles over the daylight, and they painted the space dark because the prevailing attitude at the time was to keep the animals in the dark. We came back and changed that with lighting, but if I were to go back and do it again today, I’d keep more of those passive systems and I would allow the daylight to come and go in the space. The point of my message here is that what we have done is great over the last twenty to twenty-five years, but it’s a slow process, and we learn a lot along the way, and we go back and we change things.

Habitat Africa!—The Forest at the Brookfield Zoo housed okapis. These are animals that live in the rainforest, and their

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Opposite: The Factor 10 (F10) House; Chicago, Illinois. Photo Credit: Doug Snower

Pritzker Family Children’s Zoo, Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago, Illinois. Photo Credit: Marc L’Italien

means of survival is through camouflage. We came up with this concept when the zoo director told us to go to it and design a building, but to make it disappear. Zoo directors don’t like to look at architecture, that’s kind of humbling to hear as an architect.

What we did is, we used three-dollar-a-foot asphalt shingles in a camouflage pattern so that the mission and the design is in alignment with the way the animal actually survives. You can find the building in the winter, and then it seems to literally disappear in the summer.

Here is the Pritzker Children’s Zoo at Lincoln Park Zoo. They wanted a building that would replicate the North American woods, and they wanted to embody some kind of a tree in this project. We didn’t want to build them a tree, but what we ended up doing was putting a riparian grapevine on the outside of the building, which, on this west-facing glass, really gives you the illusion that you’re

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under the canopy of a tree. But it’s also blocking the daylight from coming in and provides seasonal variety to the buildings. It’s not something that you have to water, but it’s something that actually disappears when you need the light in the winter time and reappears in the summer when you don’t.

For the Christopher Center Library Services at Valparaiso University, we had a very forward thinking director, and he was really into automated storage and retrieval (ASRS) systems.

These are ways of doing high-density book storage. What’s really great about this is it allowed us to cut about 15 or 20 percent of the building area. We only built one module to allow them to expand, so in the future, rather than expanding the building, they’re going to add another stack of ASRS, so the building doesn’t have to get any bigger. The idea here is that sometimes the best answer is to not build.

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The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Los Altos, California. Photo Credit: Jeremy Bitterman

This is the Factor 10 (F10) House, a project we did that began as as a competition between the Department of Environment and Department of Housing in Chicago. It’s called the F10 house because the contest was to design a house that in theory reduced environmental impacts by a factor of ten, as compared to a standard house built in the U.S. It was pretty simple. It was an open plan, bringing daylight into the middle of the house, which doesn’t always happen in Chicago homes, and figuring out a way that we could passively bring cooling into that house and heat it comfortably in the wintertime. We went back to things like transoms and high ceilings, which we were doing a hundred years ago. There was nothing particularly groundbreaking about this, but when people visited this house they all thought it was the largest one of the case study houses. There were five that were built, and it was actually the smallest. It was these simple moves that made it feel so much larger. I’m really glad that the house got a lot of press, and Sarah Nettleton here published it in one of her books, The Simple Home, but I was disappointed that all the books dealt with the sustainability and none of them dealt with the affordability—the fact that we were doing this house for $20,000, and that, to me, was the meaningful point because it would have given access to a larger population. We could have built more of these things and through economy of scale, made it even cheaper.

With the David and Lucile Packard Foundation project, we were able to work with the Foundation to develop a transportation management plan that allowed us to convince the city not to build a required parking garage under the building, which saved about $8 million and 400 tons of CO2 emissions. The Packard children had worked on the original foundation building with

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their parents, and we could tell what they really loved it. The problem was it wasn’t a really outstanding building, and what we tried to do when we were designing this project was try to illustrate that the things about the other building that were worth repeating/accentuating and other things that would to change. It really helped our thinking in terms of taking them along and making sure they were on par with what we were doing. A lot of my thinking had to do with developing this interior courtyard space that allowed them to have a space that they could use passively for collaboration. We worked with the city to make sure that we got views into the building, so that this courtyard would have this centripetal force on everybody in the building and people would want to use it.

The access points to the courtyard are all places where they collaborate, so it’s an easy place to go from your desk to collaboration to outside using the courtyard, and the climate there is far better than it is in San Francisco, so they actually get quite a bit of use out of this. The projects was a COTE Top Ten winner as a net zero energy building. It was operating at net zero before its first year through photovoltaic array on the roof.

Bob Harris Hello everybody. One of the questions Richard asked us in preparation for this session was to address how we are transforming our practice in order to address issues of sustainability and maintain and enhance design excellence. What I thought I might do with this presentation is talk to you a little bit about Lake/Flato and where we are in that journey. I also want to give a little bit of a window into our firm and how we struggle with how we achieve greater architecture that can serve communities and keep ecosystems whole, while also being profitable and workable and not getting sued. That is one of the things that we all concern ourselves with, but more importantly, we concern ourselves with the way that we work and the people with whom we work. For us, it’s very important to recognize that in our thirty-year history, we’ve brought on an amazing group of diverse people with their own skills and varied talents and passions that they bring to the table. This has made us who we are today over

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Carraro Residence, 1992

the course of the last thirty years, and it is a big part of the story of where we’re going.

One of the other things about our firm is the shared values that we all bring to the table. People who are attracted to Lake/ Flato are, more often than not, steeped in the traditions of a critical regionalism, and for some of you students who don’t know critical regionalism, you should look up the work of Kenneth Frampton, which is now thirty years old, and think about some of the things that people were talking about at that time of the formulation of our firm back in the early 80s. It has led us to a group of people who have a love for nature. They have a love for place, and what we call craft. I would not put us on the level of art.

Architecture, for myself, is different than art, but for the craft and beauty that comes with that, and the materiality and texture qualities, we have a great passion.

When I first put our list of shared values together twenty years ago, I added the word restraint because I felt like that had something to do with the willingness to embrace the limits that we find in our world and to address those tough issues that we find in every aspect of our lives. Over the last twenty years, I’ve noticed that other people in the firm have adopted that language and put it into PowerPoint presentations. It’s a little bit like Lance’s slide from last night, where sustainability blinked on and off.

It’s actually difficult. It’s our firm dealing with that issue that Lance also brought up last night. It’s the ego in architecture.

It’s the sense that restraint can be seen as a negative if you think

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about it in terms of limiting your self-expression, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, I would argue that for the discussion we’re having today, it’s necessary that we change that paradigm and get over ourselves and think about humans’ place in nature and our appropriate humility, which may be actually a better word than restraint, as I’m coming to think about this more, and that we understand that we are not dominant over nature, and if we think we are, we are going to ruin our own nest. We’re going to create problems that we can’t solve in the future. In fact, all the unintended consequences of our actions today are coming back already. We can see them every day, but with the appropriate humility moving forward, I think that we can tackle some of these issues in a better way.

A little bit of context here. Thirty years ago when we started the practice, there wasn’t very much in the central Texas region, in the rural landscape, at the residential scale. Our first project that ever got any kind of recognition in a broader sense was this house near Austin, and it was the redevelopment and reconstruction of some abandoned buildings in San Antonio that had been torn down and reimagined as a home. You see on the right-hand side a screen porch so that natural breezes can flow through the building, and it can be low energy—our mantra at that time was connecting to the land. It was a bio-intuitive approach toward understanding how to do good things in the world of architecture in connecting to the land. As our practice grew and our sites became more diverse, we often found ourselves in brownfields and other types of project sites. Connecting to the land quickly became healing the land or mending the land, various versions of that. That really required that we become a little smarter and more deliberate about specific strategies that we employ when we consider architecture and what we do.

This was Carraro Residence was our first Honor Award winner. The World Birding Center was either the second or third, but this was my first project as the lead designer at Lake/Flato.

I believe back in the middle 90s we started the project, and really what it required was for us to think outside of the traditional ways of thinking about regionalism and actually start to think more about the systems that can support restoration, or more

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Arizona State Polytechnic

World Birding Center

Connecting Design and Regeneration Sustainability is Dead

dramatically reduce the cost of building. Of course that translated as the firm grew into more complex sites, more urban sites.

At this campus at ASU, that same sense of connecting to the land is still there. It’s the idea of transforming the campus quad into a place that’s more than just a meeting ground for people, which this certainly is, but it’s also an ecological habitat and a micro climate that’s been intentionally created using native landscape appropriate to that climate. It’s also taking the idea of the building further and imagining the campus building extroverting itself, turning itself inside out.

That’s another big part of what we were discovering as we evolved as a firm, the influence and importance of people in the process and how we address the needs of creating environments that suit their needs. A little less than ten years ago, we had won the architecture firm award, and we were just about to unknowingly go into the recession. We had taken a moment to pause and say, ok here’s where we are, some of the things I just described to you, but where are we headed in the future? There were three things that came out of a firm-wide discussion.

One was that we felt like we needed a deeper dive into sustainable design. We wanted to pursue ideas around prefabrication and modularity in construction, and we wanted to create a greater emphasis on community service. We were starting to get very spread out across the country, and we felt like we needed to circle back to our own communities and start to build those relationships and connections even stronger than they’d been before. So first was a deeper dive into the, what I’ll call art and science of sustainability, the idea of design that is taking on more of the task of being serious about metrics and data and going deeper into the things that we classically think of as sustainability today. But one of the most important and fundamental things that we first did was to create a very rigorous system toward integrated design that went beyond just the idea of getting mechanical engineers to talk to landscape people. It really went to the idea that Tom mentioned earlier, that once you start to think about design as a problem-solving exercise for people’s needs rather than just an ego-driven idea or sort of self-expression as an architect, you realize that your biggest mistakes are

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made on that first day. If you haven’t engaged the whole building system, the whole building ecosystem, which includes the people who are the users, the people who pay for it, the people who are going to be maintaining it, and everybody in that dialogue, in a way that they understand their own their goals and can really get behind these things from end to end, then they can’t become champions and owners of that process. That has been a fundamental change. Lance alluded to this last night as well. For those of us who are designers, once we have the pencil and the pencil hits the paper, we have the greatest amount of control over the outcome of that design. If we haven’t stopped and given ourselves the pause that’s necessary to create an atmosphere of listening and goal setting with others, we’ve missed so many opportunities that we shouldn’t be missing.

Another thing we focused on is in the context of metrics, which have been talked about a lot. We really feel like metrics are a huge bonus to what we do. We committed to the 2030 Challenge, and we’re among the 23 percent of the respondents that provide full accounting. Over the last five years, we’ve been able to chart our progress on sustainability, not because it’s the end goal, but because it holds us accountable. It makes us understand where we are. We’re very proud that we’re exceeding the average of the firms that report by about 20 percent, but we’re also nearly that much below the targets that we’ve set for ourselves. Every day we can be reminded of that and put that into context. It’s not the end goal, but it’s the basis for doing more.

In building a sustainability team, we started to expand our team, and we recognized pretty quickly that two or three people within a core sustainability team can’t have the impact on the projects as a whole that we need. We can’t just rely on other people to advise us on how to do things. We really need to have that culture and those values and that knowledge embedded in every project effort. Lately, we’ve tried to create a system where we can reinforce the knowledge that we brought from the core sustainability team. These people are not just the minions that we’re directing to do various tasks. What we’ve asked them to do is come along and actually create the task, to create the agenda, to actually transform who we will be in the future, and

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to make us better than we’ve been in the past. This has happened really kind of remarkably. This group meets once a month, and they create their own agenda. They create the material they’re going to discuss, and then they set the trajectory for us on achieving more in sustainability with the firm. It’s a chance to give younger people in the office authorship over their work, leadership opportunities, and a chance to direct us in ways that we hadn’t been directed before.

We’ve seen this now reverberating into exercises where we’re becoming better connected to the community. For example, they’ve set up a system where we have a Bike for Breakfast event once a month. For one Friday a month, anybody who wants to ride their bike downtown can come and have a free waffle and some fruit at the front door of our office. There is a huge gathering on the Bike for Breakfast Friday mornings, and that is tremendous. One of the things they’ve done that has actually moved us beyond where we were with some of the veteran leadership in the office is to take us out into the community in deeper ways than we’ve been before. I come from a very hardcore environmentalist perspective, and in a lot of ways I’m a little antisocial in my attitude toward how we deal with the built environment because I think, to hell with the people, let’s save the planet, let’s fix the rivers, and do all that kind of thing. Then what I see in the ethic of the young people in our office is a response of no, there are some fundamental issues in each one of our communities that we can be addressing. We see them involved with organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters or the Texas Nature Conservancy and doing a whole range of different things in the world to contribute and give back. That gives them leadership opportunities, but it makes us feel as if we’re better connected to the community and doing the right things.

We’ve taken that into a program that we formalized that we call One Plus, which means one-plus percent of the time at our office is dedicated to providing architectural services and other benefits to nonprofits in local communities. You can see a listing here of some of the projects we’ve been involved with and renderings of some of the architectural things that have been done in the community to that effect. It’s not always easy. Even with

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Ulery’s Cabins

Bluffview House

Josey Pavilion

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one of the latest COTE Top Ten winners this year with the Josey Foundation, where we had a client with a mission related to water conservation, and we went to them and said, look, we’d really love to do a living building here, are you with us? And they said no. They said that their deal is prairie restoration and how it saves water. They were not all about this living building system, and we sort of had to step back and consider Lance’s point from the other night, if we’re not addressing their problem, if we’re just bringing them our own issues, we’re not going to get very far. So we decided that we’d take a step back. What if our building could do the same things that the prairie does? What if we could show that a building actually can be regenerative and create the same ecological benefits in a way that the prairie does in conserving water and all the related ecological benefits in that arena? They basically got that and decided to go for it.

I’ll talk about this a little bit more, but afterwards, after we finished this project, we ran carbon analysis on it and found that the building offsets as much carbon as two hectares of prairie in a whole year. When you start to tie those threads together with people’s environments and natural environments and draw those parallels, there’s a lot of potential for growth.

We’ve all heard about all the architects and the trail of tears when it comes to the idea of the holy grail of prefab and modular construction. I’d say we’ve had mixed results, but we’ve had a lot of success as well in trying to create what we call the porch house, which is an attempt to modularize construction and create an alternative smaller environment and more affordable environment in which people can live. This is a house in the center of Dallas. I’d say that one of the things that we found through this process was that while we had these great ambitions, we’re really finding that the homes are really not that much smaller than what you’d find in standard construction, once the owner has all the things they want and we have the modular systems the way we have designed it. The first house I showed you is probably 3,500 square feet. The second home at about 1,500 square feet.

We are excited now that we’re developing some homes that recall our early porch house that are in the northern climate

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Josey Pavilion

where we have three bedrooms and three baths in less than 1,000 square feet. Sixteen of these are being built in Moonlight Basin in Montana currently, and we’re very excited about where that will take us.

The COTE Top Ten Award, I would say that we have won ten of these in the last ten years, and it’s really taken the Honor Award off of our radar screen. Honestly I don’t hear anybody talk about the Honor Award or buzz around the office about the Honor Award, and I really love that, because the great thing about the COTE Top Ten Award is that it honors design and sustainability as one. That’s something that we take a lot of pride in and I’m glad to see that we’ve made some progress in that area, and I hope that will continue. Although it’s not the award systems themselves, but I do think that those goals, those targets, those things that we hold up as our highest aspirations matter to what we do.

In the Josey Pavilion for the Dixon Water Foundation, 5,000 square feet, we were net positive energy, we were net zero impacts on water, healthy building, zero contaminants and toxins, and all those things are really wonderful. In fact, we’re actually generating twice the amount of energy we consume every year in that building. When you get right down to it, one of the beautiful things about the Living Building Challenge system is that Beauty is a petal along with Energy and Water.

What is interesting to me—now and where we’re headed in the future, and what I hope we can start to become better at as a collective group dealing with sustainability—is that idea that

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understanding the role of beauty and people’s perceptions of the world, of what they value and love. We believe that beauty exists at the intersection of the natural and manmade worlds. It’s not like they have to be different. They can be merged and unified in a way that we have never seen traditionally in the way we think about architecture. As Lance said in his book, The Shape of Green, “We don’t love things because they are nontoxic and biodegradable. We love them because they move the head and the heart.” For us as a firm and us as a profession and as a group of people concerned about the planet, if we can hit the tone of understanding how to reach people’s heads and hearts with the work we do, that’s what’s going to get us to regenerative design.

Julie Snow Hi. Now for something different. It is great to find that each of us has taken very diverse directions based on Richard’s identical description to each of us, so off we go into a completely different territory.

I’m Julie Snow from Snow Kreilich Architects. I’d like to talk about our design process and how we think about the design agenda for each project. When we approach our work, we start with a blank slate. We don’t start with an agenda but instead we carefully research the project’s conditions, developing a project specific approach.

Recently we have noticed a distinctive expansion in our client’s expectations. Particularly as we move from more private work to public work, we’re seeing interconnected dynamic layers of expectations that extend into social, cultural, economic and political performance. Back in the day, we thought about our projects as having programmatic aspirations, but saw their contextual operation solely in terms of their landscape and immediate urban context. Economic expectations were limited to meeting construction budgets and schedules. Now we are seeing a whole new set of expectations, and within them new possibilities including metrics around sustainability and green design.

We investigate the social context of our projects as well as our client’s aspiration for social impact. The Saints Ballpark provided a very intensive social opportunity in the Lowertown

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CHS Field. Photograph: © Paul Crosby

District in Saint Paul. The project was about creating an open, inclusive social environment, and to provide the opportunity for people to come to the ballpark and to feel included in a larger community.

Certain of our projects operate in within a shifting political context. We find that this, in particular, is the most dynamic context in which our work takes form. We may start in one political context and end in another context completely.

We are intrigued with how our work as operates within its cultural context. For us that is means representing the highest ideals of the communities we’re working within. That comes down to really understanding, in a vivid way, how we can represent our clients’ current values as well as their cultural history.

Those are the big buckets that we think about, and I was struck by the idea of list-making and the box-checking that we have in green design and thinking that, basically, by broadening that list to expand more territory, that we might end up finding more design possibilities for both green design and for design as a whole.

I want to provide yet another list, from the Lafarge Holcim Foundation, formerly the Holcim Foundation. When we applied for their award about four years ago—which we received, for our Land Port of Entry, in Van Buren, Maine we were intrigued with the breadth of how that they talked about sustainability and design.

The first criteria was progress, with the idea that innovation should be transferable. The second criteria was about people;

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the idea that social responsibility as a natural evolution of green design as must address the larger social good. Planet was about minimizing the buildings’ effect on our resources—prosperity related to economics—and finally the last issue was aesthetics, critical to any definition of sustainability.

Within that larger framework for project performance, I want to briefly present how some of these ideas played out in the design of the Saints Ballpark, CHS Field. First, some of our ballpark design colleagues are here. Bob Close was our Landscape Architect, and some of our colleagues from Ryan Companies, the Architect of Record, are here.

We thought of the ballpark as a part of a chain of green spaces that occurred in St. Paul along Fifth Street, and that the project was, in fact, a park first, and a ballpark second. This was a park for the people of St. Paul. Further its location in the Lowertown District raised cultural questions about how to create a new ballpark in this historic neighborhood; a very different project type than the surrounding warehouse buildings from the 1800s. Our response was to keep the scale low and locate the concourse at about street level, with the seating bowl and the playing field below. That, and the porosity of the structure— opening views both from the ballpark to the city, and to the city from the ballpark—were ultimately the strategies that allowed the ballpark to fit gracefully within this district of warehouses without becoming one another opaque brick volume.

The 360-degree concourse level enhanced that sense of social community, allowing guests to walk around the park while maintaining full view of the field. At any one time, it seems that about 30-percent of the people are up walking around. That speaks to a need we have as social beings to get up and move among one another, to meet and to just watch one another. We have a fascination with ourselves and our own behavior together.

Here is our favorite “bros and beers” photo, beer being a big part of the game, for many. The grass berm, the drink rails.

We certainly have the usual sustainability diagrams delineating energy use, resource consumption etc., but the real opportunity of the ballpark was using its big green field to collect, retain, filter and use water runoff. Clay tile below the field and a

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CHS Field. Photograph: Š Paul Crosby

large cistern are the centerpieces of the system. We developed interpretive signage graphics to explain the performance of the park to visitors.

The Saints were committed to supporting a sense of community at the ballpark. The ballpark is consistently used for Hamline Baseball as well as league play and baseball camps, building the next generation of fans. You have to love the look on this kid’s face as his buddy socks the ball. Then of course a community favorite, the Cat Video Festival, movie night and even the Saint Paul Super Slide, a huge sledding run that descends from the

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Club Level to the playing field during Saint Paul’s Winter Carnival. Mike Veeck, one of the teams’ owners, wrote a book entitled Fun is Good explaining their philosophy. Our hope is that, together with the Saints team, this ballpark creates a powerful demonstration that their philosophy enhances and celebrates community engagement.

I’ll end with our work with the Leatherback Trust in Costa Rica, an organization to aid in the conservation of endangered Leatherback turtles. We were called by Olin Studio several years ago to visit Costa Rica and assist the Trust with relocating their biology station to a site further from the turtles’ nesting beach.

The station protects Leatherback turtle nesting sites during the nesting season. Biologists and volunteers patrol the beaches all night to find nesting turtles. As they find a nest, in addition to their scientific work and data collection, they call local guides who bring tourists to see the turtles come out of the sea and make her nest. In this way, they create an income stream for locals. Some of these guides are replacing turtle egg poaching income with income earned as a guide. The Trust created a social and economic balance to conserve an endangered species. The Leatherback Trust has been in Playa Grande for over twenty years, and is finally seeing some of the turtles that they released mature and come back to nest on the site.

Here is the smaller first site that we worked on, and then the larger 13-hectare area that is our current site. The move from the current beach setting was important in order to maintain a dark sky at the beach. Nesting turtles and hatchlings move toward light as they return to the ocean, as for centuries, the surf on the ocean reflects more light than an unoccupied beach. With beachfront development and the associated bright lights, turtles are disoriented, moving inland rather than toward the surf.

The design of the station was primarily about creating a community experience for biologists, EarthWatch volunteers, and school groups. In addition, there was incredible sensitivity to sustainable water use on the new, previously grazed, dry grassland site. We added rigorous requirements to minimize grading and to retain and treat all water on the site. We quickly developed a design and rendered images that would reduce energy costs,

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Center for Marine Conservation. ŠRend Rockview.

Center for Marine Conservation. Site Plan

create a community of biologists, students, and volunteers, optimize site hydrology in treating and retaining storm water. In addition, the Leatherback Trust will construct a new Playa Grande community building where guides and tourists can meet. These images are used for fundraising to eventually design and build a new station.

Both of these projects were conceived within the broadest definition of sustainability. The context within which they perform includes political, social, and economic layers. While the making of lists may seem simplistic and unspecific to the opportunities of each site, more and more we are finding that we must measure our projects’ successes against broader variables. Criteria generated by Holcim, COTE, LBC, and others, offer new possibilities

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for design narratives that demonstrate the interrelated constellation of ideas that go into each project.

James Timberlake I feel a little like the fifth runner in a four-person relay race. One of the things that is interesting about this panel is that you’re seeing a kind of cultural snapshot across each of the firms and how they go about their work and what they do. I think certainly some of what I’m going to talk about is a little bit in that vein, but each of us has a different approach.

As you know, Steve Kieran and I and many of our partners and staff teach, so I’m going to take you briefly through a project we’ve been working on at the University of Pennsylvania for the last eight years that’s based in Dhaka. We haven’t gone to Dhaka this year for the first time in many, many years, but our experiences there are chronicled in our book, Alluvium. The reason I’m taking you here, rather than grounding you in some projects that I’ll show in just a moment, is because I want to take you through a project that is both beautiful and energetic, but also incredibly ruinous all at the same time.

Bangladesh is about the size of Iowa. Iowa has a little over three million people in it. Bangladesh has 160 million people. On this site, about 15 miles away from Dhaka, every inch of land has been touched by humans. It has been dug and regenerated. It’s been born again through planting and farming rice paddies and so on, but humans are constantly working the land. That snapshot is changing very rapidly, and part of what’s changing rapidly is that half of Bangladesh is underwater at any one time of the year. It’s a river delta. It sits at the tip of the Bay of Bengal where typhoons wash up and often flood the coastline at the same time that water is washing down from Nepal and some of the countries surrounding Bangladesh. Here you see a snapshot of some of the research that our students have done over the past ten years mapping the floodplains of Bangladesh and recording some of the interferences on life each and every day. We’ve undertaken a series of queries over the past eight years, and this is one of the road maps of those queries. We’ve gathered lots of facts and figures that I’m not going to dive deeper into because

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Alluvium

I’ve got lots of other things to show you, but here is one of the braided rivers after a flood season. I think this is the Ganges in this particular case.

Sediment deposits formed by flooding and the redistribution of silt create new inhabitable land. It becomes farmland. It becomes a home. Then it gets washed away, and this happens season after season after season. Meanwhile there’s tremendous migration. Bangladesh is one of those countries where people are moving from rural lands into the cities, and you can see on this chart that after over a century of migration, almost half of the population now resides in cities. What we see is a land regenerated, repurposed, and remade to support life, but those lives are actually rather short because they’re under intense critical stress all the time from toxins, pollution, trash, and the strain of trying to sustain 160 million people on the small island.

Water is one of the major highways in Dhaka. The main river is constantly crisscrossed by ferries and boats full of people, and the water there is about as dark as any architect’s black suit.

It’s completely toxic, full of tannic acid and other pollutants that are not washed out of it. And this water is not only a highway, but a sewer as well. Waste is thrown into the river with the expectation that the river will flush itself out, but it doesn’t.

What’s we’re seeing is that rural migration comes into Dhaka and deeply stresses water and housing. Dhaka is an area of about the size of Philadelphia. Philadelphia has about five million people in the statistical metropolitan area. Dhaka has about 15 to 16 million right now and will rise to about 20 million in the next five to six years. Dhaka slums occupy five percent of the

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city’s total land but accommodate nearly 40 percent of the total population. Slums in Dhaka are also ingeniously designed. They use found materials repurposed into shelter, and they’re beautiful in their own way. You’ve got these wonderful rice paddies but then you have this architecture without architects, people using what has been found to create shelter and raising it above the land to minimize flood impacts and create ventilation around their dwellings. But this housing is substandard by any stretch of imagination.

Potable water is an incredibly difficult problem that continues to stress the population. Deep wells have taken all the water out of the underground systems and exposed deep limestone caverns that start releasing arsenic into the remaining water system. You walk around Dhaka and see different complexions that are often a result of the amount of arsenic that people consume from their water.

We in the United States talk about carbon neutrality or reducing our carbon consumption, but brick factories dot the landscape in countries like Bangladesh because it is the main economy. This was something that Louis Kahn found when he went to Dhaka to design the main capitol complex. 15,000 people per year die from just the pollutants from these brick fields.

You can see in this particular picture what the air is like just on a daily basis. I can remember, as a child, going to Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia and seeing these kinds of smokestack industries in these cities, and it’s only been in the last 40 years that we’ve begun to clean up our own environment. In Bangladesh, silt and sand are taken out of the river and pumped to create higher land. Here you see massive pipes pushing sand from stows to raise the land to create more developable property.

This is what Kahn found in 1960, this beautifully serene rural landscape that was beginning to enter into urbanism. He interpreted this context into the capitol complex that really marries program, environment, and an idea about people and culture and embodies them in this particular building. But we know that there’s more to architecture than just a simple idea.

One of the things that KieranTimberlake has always been is a firm that asks hard questions and takes the position that

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Pointelist

Kieran Timberlake Office Section

simplistic notions of making have deeper underpinnings. We plan, do, monitor, and learn. We are an ISO-certified firm, so we have to monitor what we do every day working in an old brewery bottling plant. Our practice is an intense collaboration amongst folks in research, communications, and design, and we integrate those fields into everything we do.

Here is the naturally ventilated space that our firm occupies.

We experiment on ourselves because we understand we can’t pitch an idea to our clients if we haven’t experienced it firsthand.

One of the things that we’ve learned from Bangladesh and Dhaka is adaptation. Rather than using the terms “green architecture” or “sustainability,” terms that you’ve heard torn apart over the last day or so, Steve and I have tried over the past 32 years to develop an environmental ethic that is about doing the right thing. Doing the right thing comes along with each and

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every project. I think you heard that from my colleagues as well, that those right things have to do with the alchemy of site, value, economics, money, regulation, and code, but they’re all part of design. Steve and I grew up being mentored by Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. We realized that there were only certain projects they really wanted to work with, and they would call those design.

One of the things that we do in our own practice is invent.

We invent things like a wireless sensor network that you’ve heard my partner Billie Faircloth talk about here at the University of Minnesota. We’ve deployed nearly 400 of these sensors all over our studio that give us hard data to react to and design with.

We’ve calibrated our building over the last 20 months in order to find that our staff operate best around 79 degrees. We found that the mechanical system wasn’t doing enough to dry the air.

We had to supplement that in our building, but we don’t rely on 120 tons of air conditioning to do that. What we do is boost the mechanical system in warmer weather so that when we turn it off and open up the windows, we’re flattening out that temperature swing from one part of the day to the other.

We’ve developed software. Some of you have probably been using Tally, our widely available LCA plug-in for Revit, and we’ve used that to quantify many of our buildings’ impacts.

We’re also working in India on affordable housing for the Indian middle class. We’ve calibrated everything from logistics to climate to cost to resource conservation. We’ve mocked different models up in our office, planned the logistics, and built a team in India, all to understand how to employ those logistics before building a full-scale prototype. Regeneration needs prototyping. We need to make things, and we need to fail early and fail fast rather than every one of our buildings being a first-time experiment. When we design them and put them up, we ought to be failing during prototyping and three-dimensional design integration.

We’ve studied our own work well beyond completion.

We’ve conducted a thorough study of green roofs over the last five years that has mapped all the green roofs that we’ve done throughout the United States and watched how they’ve changed.

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Yale Green Roof Study

One of the benefits of the study is we can see how we design green roofs like they’re our canvases, and we make a wonderful tapestry that in five years matures into a pixelated, Pointillist painting very different from the original vision. Flora and fauna picking up seeds, certain species persist while others die. Green roofs change and adapt, and that’s about regeneration as well.

Our architecture, all of our architecture, is not designed for one point in time, but is designed to adapt over the years. When we think about what we’re doing, we have to think very deeply about whether it’s for 15 minutes or 15 years or 150 years, and that’s really how we end up calibrating what we do.

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Contributors

Dr. William W. Braham, FAIA Professor, University of Pennsylvania William W. Braham, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he previously served as Chair, and is currently Director of the Master of Environmental Building Design and Director of the Center for Environmental Building & Design.

He has worked on energy and architecture for over 30 years as a designer, consultant, researcher, and author of many articles and books. He recently published Architecture and Systems Ecology: Thermodynamic Principles for Environmental Building Design, in three parts (2015). He also edited Energy Accounts: Architectural Representations of Energy, Climate, and the Future (2016), Architecture and Energy: Performance and Style (2013), and Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (2007)

Sustainability is Dead

Richard Graves, AIA Associate Professor and Director, Center for Sustainable Building Research, University of Minnesota Richard is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Building Research and an associate professor in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. From 2012 to 2014, he was the Executive Director of the International Living Future Institute, leading the operations and strategic efforts around all of the Institute’s signature program. Before joining the Institute, he was the Senior Vice President for Community and Education with the U.S. Green Building Council from 2010 to 2012 and served on the National Board from 2006 to 2010. His research focuses on design for regenerative and resilient development.

Bob Harris, FAIA, LEED Fellow Lake Flato, San Antonio Bob Harris leads our Eco-Conservation studio. He has more than 20 years of project experience combining award-winning design with sustainable solutions. His passion for environmental issues ranges from land preservation advocacy to sustainable urban design. As a persistent innovator, Bob seeks to push sustainability in new directions, finding beauty in solutions and regionally-based designs that elegantly do more with less.

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His work includes the popular Hotel San Jose in Austin, TX; Naples Botanical Garden Visitor Center in Florida; and the Dixon Water Foundation Josey Pavilion—a project aspiring to be the first Living Building Challenge certified project in Texas.

Dr. Jessica Hellman Director of the Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota Jessica Hellmann is the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. She is also the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in Excellence in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences. Hellmann earned a B.S. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University. She served as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the University of British Columbia. Hellmann studies the effects of climate change and strategies for adapting to it natural and human systems, and the Institute on the Environment is scholarship and education “think tank” dedicated to translating environmental knowledge to real-world solutions. A skilled science communicator, Hellmann is routinely called upon by leading media outlets around the world such as CNN, NPR, Fox News, The Telegraph and the Chicago Tribune to provide expert input on topics related to global change and ways to minimize adverse impacts to people and nature.

Lance Hosey, FAIA Perkins Eastman Architects, Washington, DC Lance Hosey, FAIA, LEED Fellow, is an acclaimed architect, author, advocate, and public speaker whose work focuses on ways to improve the impact of design. Currently he serves as a Design Director with the global design firm Gensler, and previously has worked as a design director with William McDonough + Partners and as Chief Sustainability Officer with two of the world’s largest architecture firms. Earlier in his career, he was a designer with Rafael Viñoly and with Gwathmey Siegel in New York.

Lance has authored two books, contributed to several others, and published hundreds of essays on design for the New York

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Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. A popular public speaker, he has spoken at TED and keynoted SXSW Eco, the Idea Festival, and many other events, addressing a cumulative audience of over 25,000 people.

His design, writing, and research have been published widely and received many awards and accolades. He has won the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Sarah Booth Conroy Prize and the Michael Kalil Endowment Smart Design award, was a runner-up for Metropolis magazine’s Next Generation Design Prize, and has been featured in Architectural Record’s “emerging architect” series. In 2015, he became one of only thirty people in the world to have been named a Fellow with both the AIA and the US Green Building Council.

Lance has degrees in architecture from Columbia and Yale and has taught at Yale, the University of Virginia, the Catholic University of America, and George Washington University.

Julia Kane Africa Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard School of Public Health Julia Kane Africa lead the ecological infrastructure, biophilic design and restorative landscape areas of the Nature, Health, and Built Environment program at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, an academic research center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In this role, she examines the ways in which nature (parks and green spaces) and natural design cues (natural features in built environment settings) in urban settings support psychological and physiological health and resilience. Julia has completed graduate coursework in environmental health, exposure assessment, and sustainable design at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Tom Kubala, AIA The Kubala Washatko Architects, Milwaukee Their life-long goal as architects has ever been to make a building that smiles. With that seemingly innocuous aim in mind, Tom

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Kubala and Allen Washatko began, in 1980, an architectural practice in the basement of Tom’s rented townhouse with the help of a $150.00 ‘micro loan’ from one of Allen’s friends.

Although their studio now numbers 25 members, the quest to make living buildings has persisted, evolved and matured.

Seeking out living architecture forces one to examine the very meaning of aliveness and how it applies to the making of a building. Christopher Alexander’s recent writings, The Nature of Order series, has been required reading for the entire studio over a 15 year period. The work of ecologists, in particular because of their emphasis on larger systems, has also helped to shape the process by which the studio engages a client and a building site. Regenerative design has been a natural by-product of a life-seeking architectural practice. Maybe the most significant influence on how we approach the design of buildings has been a dramatic shift in our collective consciousness as a group of practitioners. Early in our development we realized how reductive normal professional design practice had become. Our architectural education had taught us to see the world through our own fabricated concepts. Concepts by, definition, are simplifications or models of a much more complex (and beautiful) reality. Concepts give the designer a powerful way to explain what she/he is proposing, but the cost of the reduction is very high. By filtering how one sees the client, her culture and the natural environment through a constructed concept, important information is lost, most of it qualitative. The chances that a building design might be accurately unfolded from its fully complex environment become drastically more slim. The key to overcoming the ‘concept gap’, as we refer to it, is to have a non-reductive design process.

Marc L‘Italien, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C, HGA Architects and Engineers, San Francisco Marc is a principal with HGA in San Francisco. He is an innovative thinker with a critical voice in the design of major public projects.

Much of his work has broken new ground in high-performance design. Marc was previously a principal with EHDD, where he led the design of San Francisco’s new Exploratorium at Pier 15,

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a LEED Platinum Certified adaptive reuse project expected to become the largest net zero energy museum in the United States. Other noteworthy accomplishments include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos, CA, a Certified Net Zero Energy Building with the International Living Future Institute; Valparaiso University’s Arts and Sciences Building, which is adjacent to his award-winning 2004 Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources in Indiana; and F10 House, a case-study house completed for the City of Chicago’s Departments of Housing and Environment. The Exploratorium, Packard Foundation and F10 House projects are all AIA COTE Top Ten Awards recipients.

Sustainability is Dead

Jacob Mans Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, University of Minnesota Jacob Mans is an architect living in Minneapolis, recently back in his home territory. His work focuses on the influence of large-scaled environmental systems on small-scaled building performance. He is currently researching social behaviors attached to habits of consumption and conservation with a design focus on the mediums of wood and fire.

Dr. Forrest Meggers Assistant Professor, Princeton University Dr. Forrest Meggers is Assistant Professor at Princeton University jointly appointed in the School of Architecture and the new Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

He initiated and leads the CHAOS Lab (Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems) where he directs a highly interdisciplinary research developing new technologies, methods and forms for energy systems in architecture. An expert in low exergy building systems, Meggers received his doctorate from the ETH Zurich D-Arch ITA Building Systems Group, and subsequently developed a low exergy cooling research lab in Singapore as part of the ETH Future Cities Lab. Meggers joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. He started a new PhD track in technology in architecture, and initiated cutting edge research on

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radiant energy exchange and sensing, the energy-water nexus, latent heat management and utilization, and as subtask leader in the IEA EBC Annex 64 he studies geothermal low exergy district systems. He has numerous peer reviewed conference and journal publications as well as contributions architecture journals and recent book chapters in Future City Architecture for Optimal Living and Energy Accounts. His work spans disciplines and uses fundamental science to expose unconventional design opportunities that generate new architectural potential.

Kiel Moe, AIA Associate Professor, Harvard University Kiel Moe is Associate Professor of Architecture & Energy in the Department of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is a Co-Director of the MDes program in the Advanced Studies Program, Co-Coordinator of the Energy & Environments MDes concentration, and Director of the Energy, Environments, and Design research unit at the GSD. Julie Snow, FAIA Snow-Kreilich Architects, Minneapolis Julie Snow leads a studio-based practice in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The studio’s interest in pragmatic and critical programmatic reflection results in innovative designs that expand our understanding of architectural performance. Design strategies engage issues of how architecture performs within each project’s, social, cultural and economic context.

The practice has been recognized with numerous awards including the AIA Honor Award, Holcim North American Bronze Award, Progressive Architecture Design Award, the Chicago Athenaeum’s American and International Architecture Awards, Architect Magazine Annual Design Review, the Design Distinction Award from I.D. magazine, several Business Week/Architectural Record Awards and several US General Services Administration’s Design Excellence Awards. The work of the studio was exhibited at the Chicago Architectural Foundation.

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James Timberlake, FAIA, AAR Kieran Timberlake, Philadelphia James Timberlake is a partner at KieranTimberlake, an awardwinning architecture firm established in 1984 and a leader in practice-based architectural research and innovative buildings.

With his firm of 120+ professionals, James explores some of today’s most important topics—among them, efficient construction methods, resource conservation strategies, and novel use of building materials. Examples include Melvin J. and Claire Levine Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, which employs the first actively ventilated curtainwall of its type in North America; SmartWrap™, a mass-customizable building envelope exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Cellophane House™, a fully recyclable, energy-gathering dwelling exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Embassy of the United States in London, which employs strategies to significantly reduce energy consumption and sets an agenda to achieve carbon neutrality. Under his guidance, the firm has received over 160 design citations, including the AIA Firm Award in 2008 and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2010.

Along with Stephen Kieran, James received the inaugural Benjamin Latrobe Fellowship for architectural design research from the AIA College of Fellows in 2001. Since 2002, they have co-authored six books on architecture, including the influential book refabricating Architecture.

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Sustainability is Dead UMinn Papers on Architecture 3 Richard Graves, AIA Associate Professor and Director, Center for Sustainable Building Research, University of Minnesota This publication has been produced on occasion of the symposium Sustainability is Dead held from October 27–28, 2016 at the college of Design at University of Minnesota.

The Symposium and Book were made possible with a generous gift from Judy Dayton to the School of Architecture.

Design: Luke Bulman—Office Printing and binding: Blurb Cover, frontispiece, and images on pages 2, 4, 6, 8, 12–14, 36, 52, 68, 88, and 124 are non-continuous details from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510) obtained through public domain. ©2019, the Authors No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.