Women in Sustainability - Design the Future

Kaarin Knudson is an architect, a writer, and an educator with more than 25 years' experience in design, sustainability, and community building. Trained as a journalist before becoming an architect, her work has always focused on people and place. In 2017, after a decade in architectural practice, she organized the public-interest project Better Housing Together to address Lane County's housing crisis. This work supported the creation of Eugene's Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Lane County's first Affordable Housing Action Plan, and Oregon's landmark middle housing reforms. In 2024, she was elected as Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, with 73% of the primary vote and 96% in the general election. Kaarin teaches planning and urban design at the University of Oregon, and she speaks at regional and national conferences about sustainable cities, housing, and the work of guiding community change. She is co-author, with Nico Larco, of The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook (2024).We discussed what this moment is calling us all to do. “I think we are building new muscles and new relationships and new patterns of behavior with one another,” she said. “This is challenging us to think about how to work in different ways and how to stay focused on the future that we want to build. The framing of the problem is going to determine the solutions. We have to be the people who are framing the problem in a way that allows the solutions to be more connected, more productive, more about advancing into this future together.” 

Kayleigh Houde is an Associate Principal and Global Computational Projects Lead at Buro Happold, where she is responsible for the harmonized development of new technologies within the open-source coding platform BHoM. Her leadership extends to chairing the MEP 2040 Commitment, participating in the ECHO Project and ASHRAE Center of Excellence for Building Decarbonization. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Parametric Life Cycle Assessment. We spoke with Kayleigh soon after the MEP 2040 and Carbon Leadership Forum had released The Beginner's Guide to MEP Embodied Carbon, a critical resource that was eagerly awaited in the community. Naturally, we spoke with her about that effort and about the broader question of why embodied carbon is important for MEP practitioners. “We have coalesced a lot of data to to bridge gaps for the MEP disciplines and provide clarity about the MEP impact,” she says.Kayleigh's technical leadership is paralleled by her deep commitment to collaboration across disciplines, evidenced in many ways, including her work on the ECHO effort to harmonize data across disciplines and certification programs. “Computers aren't the thing,” Kayleigh says of the potential of computation in climate work and the built environment. “They are the thing that gets you to the thing. Really, what computations helps you to solve are some of issues that we have in human collaboration. Sometimes we think we're connecting but we are not really speaking the same language. Getting people to talk and collaborate is a big part of the solution in the computational work.”

As the Head of Sustainability for Henning Larsen, Kritika Kharbanda spearheads the global sustainability team's initiatives, goals, and growth. She serves on the ULI New York's Climate and Sustainability Council and is the co-chair for AIA New York's Building Science Committee. We talked about her journey from India to Japan, Denmark, and the U.S. We discussed storytelling and negotiations; evidence-based design; and her role with Pathways AI,a climate-tech startup using AI to automate Environmental Product Declarations; and her Substack. We also asked her about whether she feels like she's a part of an industry or a movement (a question that feels more important now than it has since we began asking it in our first episodes in early 2020). “If I were just part of an industry,” she says, “I'd probably be doing my nine to six, designing buildings, and calling it a day. But in my head and heart, I feel called to join with others in learning and collaboration and advocacy. We are building relationships and working together toward tangible outcomes. This is a movement. I am part of it, and I think everyone should be a part of it, because just being part of the industry is not enough anymore.” 

As VP of Building Resilient Futures at Enterprise Community Partners, Krista Egger stewards the nonprofit's national environmental programs, including Green Communities, Health Action Plan, Resilience Academies, and Decarbonization Hubs. Krista went to Oberlin and and studied physics and architectural history. After college, a stint with AmeriCorps introduced her to a kind of applied building science. “I had the opportunity to identify root causes and then make things better,” she says.  Sometimes making things better means dismantling long-held beliefs. “For too long,” she says, “there has been a perceived predicament of whether people can build affordable housing or green housing, whether there can be a standard way to operate buildings or green ways of operating buildings. Those are false choices.”The programs that Egger leads are leveraging capital and policy and resources to solve for barriers that prevent all housing from being affordable, healthy, and resilient. “We are centering the needs of people who live in housing to make decisions about housing.”related links:Health Action Plan framework Green Communities Criteria

Dr. Upali Nanda is Partner and Executive Vice President at HKS. As the firm's Global Sector Director, Innovation, she oversees HKS's Research, Advisory, Sustainable Design and Cities & Communities services. Based in Ann Arbor, Upali has extensive experience leading research projects in design practice with a focus on the impact of design on human health and perception. Upali believes that the big problems will be solved by getting many disciplines together in conversation. One example, the FDA Home as a Health Hub Idea Lab, brought together housing designers, developers, technology developers, investors, healthcare providers, and others. All such work is rooted in Upali's deep commitment to the integration of research into practice. That commitment has prompted to her to ask deep questions about people and place. “How can we design for humans without knowing how humans are designed?” she asks. “That question got me interested in how humans perceive and behave, and then over time, that evolved into this interest in human health itself.” 

Shannon Goodman is the Executive Director of the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta, which has redirected nearly 13 million pounds of usable materials away from landfills and generated over $6 million in community savings, including 450 in-kind material grants to nonprofits. Shannon also serves as Board President for the nonprofit Build Reuse, representing reuse-focused organizations across the U.S. We talked to her about running a nonprofit and about the changes afoot in the AEC field. “We are in the midst of a massive mind shift,” she says. “It's only going to work if people actually see that there is value. We have to stop thinking about these materials as waste. They are resources.”Shannon's vision for the reuse work is that “the entire process of what we do gets really sexy for people,” she says. “I look forward to a time when people are compelled by the stories they are hearing of what has been saved and reused. They will think, ‘I want a piece of that for my work.' That is only going to happen if we make it really easy to tell those stories.”

Jonsara Ruth is co-founder and Design Director of Healthy Materials Lab (HML) at Parsons School of Design, where she is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the MFA Interior Design program. Alison Mears is Associate Professor of Architecture, Director and Co-Founder of HML and Director/Co-Founder of HML EU. Alison and Jonsara published “Material Health:Design Frontiers” exploring the intersectional and complex nature of material health. They also co-authored a chapter of The Regenerative Materials Movement (Living Future/Ecotone, 2024). This year is the Healthy Materials Lab's tenth in operation. Alison and Jonsara's close collaboration has been central to the Lab's development and to its success in engaging people and changing minds and practices.“Jonsara and I have a lot in common,” Alison says, “including a drive to use our design skills in the service of a higher goal to produce place for people that meet all their needs. We want to raise the bar. And we want to invite people in to do this work.”Jonsara says their partnership works well because they have complementary skill sets and they've always been willing to hear one another out. “We value intuition and we respect each other's experience. We are both committed to always learning and evolving,” she says. 

Meghan Lewis is the Program Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), where she leads strategy, research and resource development to execute CLF's mission to eliminate embodied carbon in buildings, materials, and infrastructure to create a just and thriving future. Meghan joined CLF in 2020 to lead their efforts to inform public policies targeting embodied carbon, from Buy Clean to building codes and beyond. Previous to joining CLF, Meghan was an architect and launched a global supply chain sustainability program at WeWork. We talked to her about embodied carbon (of course), changing practice, the realities of research, and translating knowledge to meaningful policy. “It's really important for people to remember that a lot of the progress that has been made was led by states and cities, and will continue to be led by states and cities,” she said. “Progress is not going to stop, but now there's an even bigger opportunity for local action. I recommend that people think about the groups they're a part of as part of how you think about policy in the next four years.” We talked about books, too. Meghan shared how reading science fiction fantasy helps her bring optimism to her work. 

Billie Faircloth, FAIA, is a design leader and educator who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. Billie was a partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake, where she guided the collaborative development of award-winning studies, technology, and architecture. As co-founder and research director of Built Buildings Lab, Faircloth represents the value of existing buildings in the public consciousness, global sustainability practice, and policymaking. She recently joined Cornell University as an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. We talked to Billie about the value and benefits of shifting platforms and about the richness of working across realms -- practice, policy, and academia. We asked her about the communities of which she is a part. “When I look at the green building industry, I see a whole range of communities engaging in movements,” she said. “They are advocating for decarbonization and energy transition or reducing emissions with embodied carbon, or advocating for supply chain equity or carbon neutral design or regenerative design. I see a movement of movements.” 

Joel Todd has been working in the green building field for more than 30 years, most recently as a USGBC Senior Fellow focused on social equity. Her career focused on green building methods and metrics development; she contributed significantly to LEED's earliest versions and co-founded the LEED Society Equity Working Group (an effort for which she was recognized with USGBC's prestigious Malcolm Lewis Impact Award). She describes how she came to work in this movement and how the people made her stay: “That's really the key to finding your path, I think: Find people you respect and enjoy working with and then keep learning from them.” Joel has a long view on the arc of progress and some pointed opinions about both the progress so far and what may be ahead. She notes, for example, that the deep knowledge in the industry has had some unintended consequences. She urges the community to “get out of our detailed, speciality comfort zones to have those conversations about the whole and how it all fits together. Otherwise, instead of working synergistically, things are going to start clashing.”

Efrie Escott is the Decarbonization Technical Program Leader for Digital Energy at Schneider Electric. As a licensed architect and life cycle assessment practitioner, Efrie's previous experience in reducing carbon in the built environment was as an environmental researcher within the KieranTimberlake Research Group, where she was a core member of the development team for Tally, an award-winning BIM-integrated life cycle assessment tool.We had a lively conversation with Efrie about research in the built environment field, Tally, her leap to Schneider Electric, and what kind of impact she is having in that context (including a recently launched internal tool). We also got a little nerdy about ASHRAE standards and others and how they are addressing (and tabulating) whole life carbon. She celebrated the immense gains on technology and knowledge, but she also acknowledged her disappointment that we have not yet hit peak emissions. And she voiced a concern that seemed poignant this season, about how we need to bring more people along in the movement and the industry. “We are doing a great job accelerating the front end, but we need to work on the middle more," she said. "We need to spend more time talking to other people -- not just each other. This pains me, because I love spending time with people in this community. But if we are serious about really scaling the progress, we need to do a much better job bringing in others. The science tells us that we need to sprint the distance of a marathon. This means we need to carry each other, and we need to be intentional about who we are bringing into the work.”

For our latest podcast, we talked to Myrrh Caplan, who is Senior VP for Sustainability at Skanska and leads the construction company's national sustainability team. Since joining Skanska as a Project Manager in 2005, Myrrh has helped shape Skanska's national approach to sustainable building. She established the company's first national Green Construction program and chaired Skanska's first National Green Council. Myrrh has advised on nearly 300 certified projects and projects seeking LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL, Envision, and other certifications. She sits on the board of mindfulMaterials, serves on several industry committees, and participates in research with key partners. We heard from Myrrh about her passion for weaving a positive legacy through the work, and how she brings that to the projects and to the overall enterprise. She speaks about her team as a family that is “in it together” and she is proud of how shared success, to this group of people, “comes before egos.”  She told us about a recent accomplishment, her work on the Associated General Contractors Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in construction (https://www.agc.org/climate-change-playbook). And we couldn't resist asking Myrrh to talk about some notable recent projects, including PDX (the new airport in Portland, Ore., designed by ZGF) and the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station (in New York City, designed by SOM). 

Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University's School of Architecture and Yale's Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd., in Accra, Ghana. As an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. This year, she joined the board of the International Living Future Institute.She references the importance of breaking boundaries between silos and communities because, she says, “the materials that we work with surely do.” She is proud of her many collaborations across and between academic, industry, and communities: “We are are advancing top-down and bottom-up approaches to getting these biobased materials not just known but normalized” in the AEC community. Throughout her work, Mae-ling is inspired by the stories of how biobased materials were used over long periods of time in different societies, “which offer us clues for how they could be used today and in the future.”

Lu Salinas has been working in the green building industry since 2006 -- with firms and on projects in the US, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, where she works today. Her consulting firm, THREE Environmental Consulting, has worked on everything from small affordable housing projects to large infrastructure projects such as the New International Mexico City Airport in Texcoco. She grew up in Mexico in a family of civil engineers, and happened upon the James Wines book, Sustainable Architecture, in the early 2000s, which sparked her awareness of and interest in the field. She sees the international green building industry from Mexico and has built THREE to help advance the level of the work in that region. “I am especially proud of our company's rule,” she says. “We always do what's right. I think we have held to this -- doing what is right for the most people.”Salins is proud to be a part of the movement, which she sees as “an infinite one -- in which people are passing the baton to others.” Salinas takes issue, however, with the idea that the next generation will be the one to address climate change. “The responsibility is with every generation that is currently living,” she says. “We all need to be doing something.” 

Cristina Gamboa is CEO of the World Green Building Council, an influential local-regional-global network focused on “the transformation to sustainable and decarbonized built environments for everyone, everywhere.” She is an economist with a background in sustainability, policy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships; as such, she is a trusted convener in international settings such as UN Climate Change summits and the World Economic Forum. Cristina is from Colombia and lives in London. Before she came to this work, she was an academic economist with a focus on international affairs and a passion for communicating. “Collectively, we've had a huge win, getting buildings on the global climate agenda. But with visibility comes responsibility,” Cristina says. “Now we have to make sure that the private sector is empowered to deliver progress.” She says that the finance community understands that buildings are the largest global asset class, and this is an opportunity. “If we get this right, they can invest in better assets,” she says. “If we work with the finance community and we find ways to delink emissions from growth and, for example, make sure that the retrofit economy really lifts off, we could unlock the benefits of a carbon-free and circular economy.”Great strides have been made, she says, but there is work to do: “We still don't have aggregated data to show change at scale. This is a gap that makes our movement vulnerable. The sooner we can quantify benefits, the better.” 

Stephanie Phillips leads the City of San Antonio's Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program. Housed in the Office of Historic Preservation, the program prioritizes building material reuse as a tool for affordable housing repair, traditional trades revival, economic innovation, equitable access to high-quality resources, and cultural and community resilience. Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio and is a 2023 J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize awardee.Her work aims to foster collaborative partnerships that get us closer to creating a regenerative built environment. Part of Stephanie's story is about how she came to think that “design is everything” and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. “What we are doing can happen anywhere,” Stephanie says. “It requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.”

Sandeep Ahuja is co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an AI-first consulting platform that aims to break down barriers in the design and construction cycle, creating a new network of shared information, interoperability, and accountability across projects and teams.In addition to running cove.tool, Sandeep has recently co-authored a book with Patrick Chopson. Build Like It's the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction is due out from Wiley by the end of 2024.Sandeep is passionate about transforming the AEC industry with intelligent and innovative solutions to reduce risk and boost transparency. “We are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,” she says, “and put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.”

Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundation's Ethical Materials Director. She works to advance the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the built environment. For the past two decades, Nora has been dedicated to creating change in the built environment through sustainability, resilience, and social equity work. Nora described the traction around the Design for Freedom work, and shared her excitement about a new public exhibit at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut. “With Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. “This exhibit is focused on the idea of ethical decarbonization," Riszzo said. "It  is exploring the link between the climate crisis and the embodied suffering that is happening in our built environment.”

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons designs environmentally conscious, energy-efficient, and resilient architecture that reflects a deep reverence for nature and human interconnectedness with the world. She has degrees in structural engineering and architecture and specializes in Building Information Modelling. She also works as an advisor for the Spinnaker Group, a division of SOCOTEC, focusing on sustainable certification of buildings in hot and humid climates. Her affinity for hot and humid stems from her home: Alyssa-Amor is from Barbados, an island nation, and she lives and works there now. She thinks that growing up with an acute understanding of human's and human settlements' vulnerability to nature and weather cycles has framed her thinking about design. She is exploring how best to leverage her cultural and design knowledge in an age of warming. “People say ‘build back better,' but I don't want to do that anymore,” she says. “I want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.” Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. “We are inviting people -- everyone! -- to engage, via VR, AI, and other ways. We are asking, can you code/build a city of the collective imagination?”

Dr. Janice Barnes is founder of Climate Adaptation Partners, a NYC-based partnership that focuses on climate adaptation. With technical training in architecture and organizational behavior, she helps clients to understand risks and evaluate adaptation pathways and link these to design and financing options. She works at the intersection of climate change, design, and public health and uses the question "how might we?" to frame her work. We talked with Janice about her advocacy and education work, her current client and project work, and more. She insists that “climate adaptation is part of design. We have a professional obligation to consider climate projections, explore what those mean, and then decide what you are going to do about that.” Janice uses a musical metaphor to talk about team collaboration. She says that she plays rhythm guitar -- and takes responsibility for bringing a lot of unconventional bandmates to the session. “In this way, I have found that I can contribute design thinking and bring climate science experts and epidemiologists to the table. What we come up with together is so much better -- a richer, more rooted system of solutions that do multiple things for stakeholders, ecosystem, and community.”

Paula Melton is the Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, which supports the international sustainable building movement with learning resources, community building, and other services. She works with editorial teams to develop and deliver webcasts, long-form analysis, and other guidance on BuildingGreen.com and LEEDuser.com. “We have problems that are caused by people being in silos,” Paula says, “and not being able or willing to communicate. We need to be thinking about people skills and processes in new ways.” She adds that progress in the movement really demands a lot of soft skills. “We are all engaged in change management as much as we are engaged in the mechanics of our specific discipline or sector.”  Besides bringing deep knowledge and humor to the table, Paula is optimistic, despite being rooted firmly in a lot of data about the reality of the climate imperative and the challenges that face the built environment community. “We are asking the right questions and beginning to break down those barriers that have given us 75 different net zero standards,” she says. “We're having the right conversations, and I'm excited about that.”

Laurie Schoeman is the Director of Climate for Enterprise Community Investment and has served as senior advisor at the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Her aim is to develop and implement innovative policies and solutions that enhance the climate adaptation and physical resilience of communities across the nation, especially those that are vulnerable and underserved. “When we talk about climate adaptation, I want people to point to built systems all over the country that are rooted in nature-based solutions,” she says. “It's time we move out of the textbooks and into our streets and communities and build these systems.” Reducing risk, she points out, is a whole slate of activities. “Insurance should not be our first line of defense,” she says. “It should be a complement to a property or a facility or an infrastructure project that has risk reduction baked in.” She adds that communications is critical, and we're still lagging in that area. “We need to break all these topics down. We need to talk about how to communicate in way that everyone can understand.” 

Noorie Rajvanshi is Director of Sustainability and Climate Strategy at Siemens USA, part of a multinational technology company. Noorie talked to us about her family's sustainability roots, her mechanical engineering background, and how her fascination with quantifying environmental impact led to her role at Siemens. She is proud of her work on performance tools to support cities with ambitious GHG reduction goals and of her current work on carbon pricing.Noorie calls herself a climate optimist and a climate realist. And she says that she feels part of a movement -- one that is changing for the better. “The movement is not as exclusive as it once was. Some folks might scoff about the notion that ‘everyone is a sustainability professional' but I think that is the goal we are working towards. Sustainability is not an additional thing, it is part of our everyday work."Noorie told us that the people who inspire her most right now are the people, such as electricians, who are changing their jobs to do more of what's ahead because of the sustainability movement. “They are becoming experts on heat pumps and EV chargers and more -- and that's inspiring to me.”

Dr. Veena Singla is Senior Scientist with the People & Communities Program at the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). She seeks to address health disparities linked to harmful environmental exposures using an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating environmental health, exposure science, public health, and policy expertise. Her research investigates how toxic chemicals and pollution related to systems of materials use, production, and disposal threaten the health of communities. “If you work on buildings, you're actually working on health and justice, even if you didn't think about it that way,” she says. “Green building has influenced health and justice in both positive and negative ways. I've seen the movement expand from a more narrow focus on energy and greenhouse gasses to a more holistic approach. We are now thinking about how buildings fit into our lives, and trying to better integrate health equity and justice.”

Seema Bhangar is a Healthy Buildings & Communities Principal at the US Green Building Council; she focuses on research and innovation. She is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for the Built Environment. If you are interested in the field of human health and buildings, Seema advises you to “collect data and be curious and discerning and honest. We have evaluate impact and ask what we do not know.” Seema is working with a new team to rebuild a dedicated research function at USGBC. She is fueled, she says, by the magic that happens “when we bring researchers to our communities of practice.” Seema is deeply proud of the network of people she has cultivated during her career so far, "people who value having a vision, who ask questions at the right scales, and who voice their opinions," she says. "In buildings and health, it's not about the individual superstar. The nodes are people. Each one has a set of expertise and knowledge, and we really advance when we connect and share.” She is excited for the frontiers that are now being explored in the movement. “Health is different than energy, so we're using different methods than we did for the other pillars,” she says. “The community today has many tools and  appreciates the need for urgency and scale.”

Materials maven Annie Bevan is a facilitator, consultant, and collaborator focused on creating large-scale change and leveraging sustainability as a strategic business enabler. She's effecting this through two roles: she is CEO of SMS Collaborative and CEO of mindful MATERIALS.The mindful MATERIALS organization began as steward of a library tool. (That tool started at HKS, which gifted the idea to the built environment community.) Today it is a nonprofit convener, aggregator, and aligner centered on the Common Materials Framework — a system for thinking about products and holistic impact.“We want building product manufacturer to hear a consistent language," Annie says, "so they can respond. Sustainable products should be the norm, not the option.”Her consulting firm provides staffing solutions, mostly to manufacturers who are trying to do this work and talk about it effectively. Annie says that she worries that we're getting carbon tunnel vision. “We need to bear in mind how broad this challenge is,” she says. “We have to attend to social health, equity, circularity, and biodiversity. We have to -- and we can -- solve these problems at the same time.” 

Through her consultancy, AIRLIT studio, Alejandra Menchaca provides expertise in mechanical engineering and building science to owners and design teams. One of her current projects will be the first performing arts facility in the US with full natural ventilation.  Ale holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and has taught at MIT and Harvard GSD, where she has mentored, she says, “several brilliant students who have become inspiring disruptors in the building simulation industry. That's immensely rewarding.”We talked to Ale about growing up in Mexico and her shift from aerospace engineering  to environmental stewardship and building science and her time at Payette and Thornton Tomasetti before starting her own firm. Ale co-founded Project StaSIO, a community of building performance simulators (consultants, architects, in-house building scientists) that strives to teach others how to ask the right building analytics questions and convey the results in ways that are beautiful and impactful (not tables!).When we asked whether she feels like she's part of a movement, Ale didn't hesitate: “If speaking up and disagreeing with the status quo is being part of the movement, I'm definitely a member..” 

Victoria Burrows is a manager of portfolio development and industry partnerships at Kompas, an early-stage venture capital firm backing innovations for decarbonizing the built environment and manufacturing. Decarbonization has been the focus of Victoria's career to date (her prior role was leading Advancing Net Zero at the World Green Building Council), and she lives it, too. She is renovating her own net zero home in France. Victoria is  excited to be working in venture capital right now because, she says, "the market needs a suite of solutions for every part of the problem -- solutions that are cost effective and reduce emissions. I'm energized to be on the ‘how' side of things, helping to bring these solutions to fruition.”Through Kompas, she is advancing innovations towards decarbonization that include technology such as AI and robotics to increase efficiency throughout the value chain. “I think the private sector has a responsibility to operate well in advance of regulation to prove the possible and show it can be done,” she says. This is part of creating confidence in governments so that they can set policy roadmaps and regulations. Activating the flow of sustainable finance to the solutions is critical. I want to see all finance linked to performance outcomes.”

Ariane Laxo is Sustainability Director at HGA, an architecture and engineering firm of 1,000 people in 12 offices. We talked to Ariane about her work, what she draws on to lead, and how she finds strength in the purpose of sustainability. She advises others to listen to the curiosity that pulls them and cultivate an introspective mindset. In addition to stewarding projects at HGA that demonstrate a holistic approach to design and deeply integrated sustainability, Ariane is also working on change management at the firm, which includes cultivating an inclusive culture and a distributed network of intelligence around sustainability, equity, and community action. The company has prioritized transparency and and is engaged in research internally and with outside partners.Ariane appreciates the progress she is seeing in transdisciplinary thinking and would like to see greater advancement toward a circular economy in the building industry. “I hope that 200 years from now, historians will look at this moment as the fulcrum, the moment everything changed,” she says. “We are shaping a regenerative future.”

Mary Ann Piette is the Interim Associate Lab Director of the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She manages a research enterprise comprised of 700 staff and affiliates, including 120 principal investigators working across a broad set of technology R&D programs to accelerate decarbonization ranging from demand-side energy efficiency and grid integration to hydrogen technologies, energy storage, and renewable energy systems. We had a terrific time talking to Mary Ann about her mechanical engineering background and how she thinks about buildings, energy, comfort, and grids. She's focused on four pillars of decarbonization: energy efficiency, electrification, grid integration, and distributed energy resources.She wrote a chapter for a new book, Women in Renewable Energy (by Katherine T. Wang and Jill S. Tietjen (Springer, 2023) about using building loads dynamically for low-carbon energy systems. “When we change our electricity system to be based on wind and solar, we need to integrate with demand side systems,” she says. “Grid-scale storage is important, but flexible demand can be much more cost effective.” And she points out that this is part of a significant gap in current built environment conditions. “If we are are going to accelerate progress, we need to understand and utilize the feedback between design and operations.” 

Sarah Ichioka is an urbanist, strategist, curator, and writer currently based in Singapore. She leads Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy. Her latest book, Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, co-authored with Michael Pawlyn, proposes a bold set of regenerative design principles for addressing environmental and social challenges. We talked to her about the book and related podcast, her wide-ranging career, and her abiding interest in cities, which was first piqued in her eighth grade year through the Future City competition. She and Pawlyn started working on the book when they perceived tension between  evolution in the built environment community and growing awareness that such progress was not nearly sufficient for the necessary transformation. They sought to tangibly and meaningfully integrate perspectives from outside the built environment, such as Kate Raworth on (doughnut) economics.  “We wanted to craft clear examples of the mindset shifts -- we identify five as new or rediscovered -- to move away from degenerative thinking,” Sarah says. ”We wanted to be direct about the need for a cultural shift, not just technological- or innovation-based change.” She says the book is the beginning of the conversation, which now includes collecting stories of regenerative practice. “The scale of the challenge can feel overwhelming. We need relationships where we can be ourselves and be honest … and then channel them constructively.”

Renée Cheng is an architect and dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. She pioneered research surrounding the intersection of design and emerging technologies and is a leader in the American Institute of Architects around equity in the profession and practice. She led the research effort for AIA guides for equitable practice. She  sees students as partners, and notes that the practice environment they face is radically different from the one their teachers experienced. “We need to be teaching more about collaborating across disciplines,” she says. “And we need to help our students think about agency and knowing their roles. Many architects don't feel well trained for the ‘conductor' roles that we need to address complex issues. For a project today, a design team might need to talk to an oceanographer and a native community that is relocating.”Of her work on the AIA practice guides, Renée says that she now understands why some things are slow to change and that she has more respect for the role of culture and the importance of alignment and trust. And of evolving practice within conventional economics, she says: “We are a values-based movement and we are also a capitalism-based industry. But there are different ways to think about ROI -- in terms of prosperity or wellness or life expectancy or collective benefit.” 

Fiona Cousins, a mechanical engineer by training, is the Americas Chair for Arup, guiding a 1,900-person engineering, design, consulting, and planning firm with a focus on collaborating and innovating to shape a better world. Fiona and her teams take a broad view as they pursue value for clients, considering climate change, social equity, and biodiversity. As a longtime leader in the field, Fiona has a keen perspective on the arc of progress. She says that the market transformation that has occurred in the past 30 years means that it feels a bit less like a movement now. “The floor has been raised, through codes and other policy and market work,” she says. “Buildings have to work harder now. But at the leading edge, it still feels like a movement. And now we are asking harder questions, such as: What does it mean for a building to have a biodiversity net gain?” As for what's next, Fiona is inspired by growing dialogue around water, both as a human rights issue and a technical issue. “I think this topic is far more visceral to people than questions of energy or carbon ever can be,” she says. “And I think it could be the topic that really connects us to the subject of planetary boundaries in a meaningful, actionable way.” 

Marnese Jackson is an environmental and climate justice activist, advocate, trainer, and educator in Pontiac, Michigan. This mother of two is the co-director of the Midwest Building Decarbonization Coalition, which focuses on inspiring and educating Midwesterners to end new installations of fossil fuel equipment in residential and commercial buildings by 2030, and to achieve zero emissions from these buildings by 2050, with integration of equity and labor justice. Marnese started her her career doing energy audits in homes, learned about poor air quality in certain areas, and became a regional organizer with the NAACP's environmental justice program. She worked with Mothers Out Front, a moms' group focused on working toward a livable climate, and then transitioned back to the buildings realm at the Coalition. “I am part of a movement,” she says, “but I am also just an ordinary person. I can relate to anyone," which she says is important in her role."I am a connector,” she adds. “Being a missionary is not the thing. We are trying to empower self confidence.” Marnese is especially proud of the Coalition's Equity Summits; last year's was focused on Self Determination. 

Stephanie Greene has just stepped down from a role as managing director at RMI, where she led the Buildings Program. She also helped launch RMI's building electrification initiative, which is focused on enabling a cost-effective, sustainable, and equitable path to building decarbonization, with work spanning the U.S., China, and India. We talked to her about this work, her previous work at PG&E, building teams, and about how crucial systems thinking is to working on climate issues and the built environment. “I feel like buildings are the center of all the other topics I have worked on,” she says. “It's exciting to work on buildings because they interact with everything -- utilities, energy, site, transit. And there is a whole human health component, too.” Stephanie says she feels like she is part of a building decarbonization movement “Like many of us, I think, I alternate between frustration and despair and hope and optimism. But that is to be expected -- this is a tough industry. The movement context means that what any one person or team does can have a ripple effect -- and we are seeing more and more of that.” 

Davida Herzl is co-founder and CEO of Aclima, where she leads a team pioneering a new way to diagnose the health of our air and track pollution. A Public Benefit Corporation, Aclima measures air pollution and greenhouse gasses with block-by-block resolution. The company's enterprise software, Aclima Pro, translates billions of scientific measurements into analytics for companies, governments, and communities to reduce emissions and improve public health. Aclima has been driven by two questions: Where is pollution coming from and who is it impacting? Today the company operates the largest mobile sensor network on Earth, creating datasets of hyperlocal greenhouse gas levels and air pollution never before available. David is proud of the work that the Aclima team is doing. “Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time,” she says. “And there are so many intersecting problems -- environmental justice, infrastructure, and more. Our data is a critical part of the solution because transparency ensures accountability and also enables actors across society to take informed climate action.”

Rochelle Routman is Chief Sustainability and Impact Officer of HMTX Industries, a resilient flooring manufacturer. She has been passionate about the environment since a young age, and brought that into her work through corporate sustainability.She saw an opportunity to bring greater transparency into flooring products, helping to advance industry-wide disruption. Today, she is working on ESG; HMTX will release its first Impact report soon. The company's new headquarters in Connecticut, designed by McLennan Design, is expected to earn Living Building petal certification later this year. “I definitely feel like I am part of a movement,” Rochelle says. “I see sustainability as an activist career. Thinking about the arc of progress, I had hoped we'd be farther ahead on responding to climate change by now. But I am inspired by progress on many fronts, such as the growing understanding of biophilia.” Rochelle was recognized with a Women in Sustainability Leadership Award in 2014 and is now President and chair of the board of that network. 

Sandy Mendler is an architect, planner, and researcher focused on creating new models for healthy, sustainable living. She is a design industry thought leader and dynamic project leader; at Gensler, she is a principal, studio director, and regional practice leader for education. She previously worked at Mithun (where she was part of a Bay Area Resilient by Design team in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund competition) and HOK (where she led the influential EPA HQ project and co-authored the HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design). Throughout her career, Sandy has been asking big questions about complex topics and developing solutions that demonstrate the value of sustainable, equitable design, which she calls “prototypes for the positive future.” She is dedicated to research and deep collaborations. “We are systems thinkers,” she says. “We work as teams to create solutions that do many things at once -- and have positive, ongoing impact. Part of this is that we can -- and must -- co-create with communities. We have to catalyze investment in under invested areas because it's the right thing to do but also because it's part of the equation around emissions and healthy places.” 

Lakisha Ann Woods is the executive vice president and CEO of the American Institute of Architects, a network of 94,000 architects and design professionals (in 200 chapters) who are committed to enhancing the built environment. Woods previously served as president/CEO of the National Institute of Building Sciences and as senior VP/CMO at the National Association of Home Builders. Architects are naturals at addressing complex or multifaceted issues, Lakisha says, and she points out that today that means addressing climate and equity as interconnected issues. She also talked about the AIA's  renovation of its HQ in Washington, a reuse project that involves numerous teams and high aspirations around embodied carbon, materials, and healthy workspaces. Lakisha is inspired by architects and their passion -- and the profession's increasing agency around climate and equity. Some of that comes from advocacy, she points out: “If we want our initiatives to move forward, we have to be an active voice in codes and on the Hill.” 

Carrie Meinberg Burke is an architect, designer, artist, and inventor whose work is infused with research into light, ecology, health, human sensory perception, and biomimicry. She runs Parabola Architecture with her husband, Kevin Burke. They work at all scales, and one recent workplace project was described, by its Google owners, as “a building with a soul.” Carrie is co-developing an innovative heating and cooling unit that applies biomimicry principles to optimize form for thermal comfort and energy efficiency. Carrie is a believer that you have to design the design process itself, in order to give any project the space and time for analysis-synthesis resonance. The home that she designed for her family in Charlottesville, Virginia -- Timepiece -- is a manifestation of her work in grad school exploring the tension between structure and light.  “I did not actually draw or conjure the roof form,” Carrie says. “It is a mapping of natural forces.” The entire process was transformative, she says: “The ability to take a theoretical idea and not only build it but live in it has been the greatest learning experience. It has deeply informed my point of view about nature and our place in it.” 

Marsha Maytum is a founding principal at Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects. Her career is steeped in a passionate belief in the value and power of architecture and design. With her husband, Bill Leddy, and their partner, Richard Stacy, Marsha has created a teaching practice structured to focus on mission-driven work. They are co-authors of Practice with Purpose: A Field Guide to Mission-Driven Design (ORO Editions). At the heart of the matter, Marsha says, “Sustainability and equity are embedded in good design.” She was a key player in the 2019 resolution that helped establish the American Institute of Architects' holistic Framework for Design Excellence and cement climate action as part of the AIA's mission and Strategic Plan. “Everything is all linked together under the climate crisis,” she says. “The pressures on every issue are greater in the context of climate. We need to understand the power we have. Focus on good design -- reconnecting to the natural world, making places that are healthy, beautiful, and safe. This is important for continuing to have a civil and equitable society. Also, we need everyone involved -- all hands on deck right now.”

Nakita Reed is an architect with experience in preservation, restoration, and adaptive reuse of historic buildings with a focus on sustainable strategies; she is an Associate with Quinn Evans Architecture and works from their Baltimore office. She is also the host of Tangible Remnants, a podcast exploring the intersection of architecture, preservation, sustainability, race, and gender.For Nakita, preservation and architecture have always gone hand in hand. “Just like I can't say I'm more black or more female, I am not more preservationist or more architect.” But those silos, and others, are everywhere in our industry, and Nakita has been trying to dissolve them throughout her career. Nakita is co-chair of the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for Existing and Historic Buildings, known as ZNCC. These collaborations are critical, she says, to advancing the industry. “It's time we recognized that we are not going to build our way to net zero,” she says.Nakita observes that we have gotten a bit better at realizing that sustainability is part of good design. She feels she is apart of a movement, too. “But in the future, I hope that it will be like breathing. It will feel normal and natural to make something sustainable and beautiful, and the impulse will be to reuse and restore, not tear down.”

Chandra Robinson is a principal at LEVER Architecture, a Portland, Oregon-based design practice recognized for material innovation. She came to architecture by way of geology, physics, and kayaking. She is passionate about creating beautiful spaces that are accessible for everyone and enjoys working closely with clients to create designs that express their values -- and we had a great time talking with her about access, equity, and identity. 

Bomee Jung is co-founder/co-CEO of Cadence OneFive, a public benefit corporation with a climate justice mission. They are developing, Momentum, a software to enable city-scale acceleration of existing building decarbonization. Before this role, Bomee was the first VP for Energy and Sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and before that she led the climate mitigation and adaptation programs of the New York office of Enterprise Community Partners. She serves on the board of the Institute for Market Transformation and the loan committee of Capital For Change. With Momentum, Bomee and her co-founder and team are focused on change at scale. “We deliver a way for owners to understand their options around climate response, using building science and climate data,” she says. Instead of the bespoke consulting service model, the Momentum team proposes that many owners with conventional properties can benefit from a dataset-empowered playbook. “There are lots of options for doing climate responsive construction today. This is a way for people to understand methods and technologies, not just about emissions but also about housing quality and other factors.” Bomee suggests that the industry is facing a traditional tragedy of the commons problem. Sharing information could generate broad positive impact. With construction pricing, for example, sharing fresh information widely could rapidly reduce risks for many. This is where software has a unique role: “These are known problems and we offer transparency to help solve them.” 

Frances Yang is a Structures and Sustainability Specialist at Arup. In addition to her work on projects defining embodied carbon leadership, she has been a mobilizer and leader in the movement, serving on the Carbon Leadership Forum Board, vice chairing the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment, and co-founding the All for Reuse Initiative, among a host of other advocacy work. Frances talked about the importance of collaboration across disciplines. “No single profession can tackle climate change alone,” she says. She is dedicated to setting ambitious and achievable targets and frameworks to help disciplines meet them. She sees potential for cultural change around waste associated with construction. Frances cites the intelligence in the community and points to Bruce King as an inspiration (he and Chris Magwood have a new book out: Build Beyond Zero). “I am also very inspired by the young people -- they want purpose-driven careers. Seeing more and more of this gives me hope.”

Jane Abernethy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Humanscale, started as an industrial designer. As such, she has always thought about sustainability, which she sees as part of the inherent challenge of designing for what people really want (no one wants a toaster; they want toast). Jane has spent a lot of time thinking about how to evolve a company from within. She is a pragmatist in that she prefers to talk about results rather than aspirations; in this era of hyperbole and greenwash, that gives Jane a rather restrained profile, but it also keeps Humanscale honest.We had a fascinating discussion about the complexities of supply chain management including the challenges of what to measure. We touched on circularity, which Jane says that she has long found compelling. If we could get it right, she says, “it could be ‘recycling, for real this time,' as it was once described to me. ”But today, Jane says, “We are not adapting our systems to accommodate faster progress and more effective collaboration, both of which are needed. And we also need to shift from thinking about how we ‘preserve' our way of life to thinking about how we can adapt our way of life.”

Claire Maxfield directs Atelier Ten's San Francisco office, which works, as a consultant to architects or owners, on an incredible range of large, complex, and environmentally ambitious projects —  buildings, landscapes, and master plans. She has been integral to many significant green building milestones in the US and beyond. We talked to her about what it is like to be a full-time green building nerd. She described how she uses a broad range of skills — analytical, technical, artistic, communications, and even persuasion — in the work. Her teams are leading the big decisions around leading-edge projects. And the woman-led office that she started (in a global recession) is growing and thriving. Claire sees that significant changes have transpired and the potential of emissions impact in the built environment sector. “We have all the technology that we need,” she says. “Where we are lacking progress, it is a lack of will. It's our job to demonstrate the power of what's possible.”Talking to Claire offers a peek into her roots in the humanities side of environmentalism; she cites William Cronon's work as a major influence, especially the books that explore the notion of humans as a part of nature, rather than separate from it. 

Architect Adele works at the intersection of public health, climate change, and the built environment. She is co-authoring a book, Architectural Epidemiology, which lays out a methodology for designing and operating buildings that respond to the specific environmental and human health needs of people in individual neighborhoods. Adele has been working in the green building movement for years; early on she was involved in the Green Guide for Health Care. Today, she senses that there is a feeling that we're not making the impact we wanted to. “I think that one part of the problem is that is that we are not prioritizing things enough based on site.” Her book, due out in 2023, walks through how to do health situation analysis in a smart, layered way that helps teams prioritize the top key issues that will make the most difference in that neighborhood and understand which strategies have the most co-benefits. Adele is currently doing research through an AIA Upjohn grant to test her hypothesis that if project teams had data specific to their sites and evidence based strategies, greater alignment between entities would be possible. These metrics, she suggests, would help everyone get more of what they want. 

Architect Laurie Kerr is a national leader in sustainable building and climate policy. She is Principal Climate Advisor at USGBC and the president of LK Policy Lab. She was NYC's Deputy Director for Green Building Policy under Bloomberg, and helped develop the city's influential sustainability plan and policies. Laurie was an early advocate for the idea that “buildings matter” in terms of energy and carbon footprint, and helped create policies and framing that have stood the test of time. “We changed the conversation from cars and power plants to buildings, and existing buildings.”Laurie was full of great stories about what has happened in the green building movement, but also very pointed ideas about what needs to happen next. “We have to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We have to sharpen our pencils and see what's large and what's small. We have to get the math right. We have to be more nimble and hard-headed and weed out the policies and strategies that aren't working. One example is our energy codes don't address carbon. It's 2022. When will they?”

Architect Arathi Gowda leads ZGF's East Coast Sustainability Practice. She is an advocate for collective climate action and is the current co-chair of US Architects Declare and a member of the American Institute of Architects' Committee on the Environment Leadership Group. Arathi was at SOM for 20 years in Chicago before moving recently to her new role, and her move to DC reflects her ambitions around climate and advocacy as part of architecture. Arathi is a keen observer of the architecture profession and the real estate and financial realms in which it functions. She notes that following the persistence of NIMBY-ism for years, “we are finally getting to a moment when there is no more Someone Else's Backyard. Those of us who have some political power and institutional capacity need to do whatever we can to amplify that.” She  points out that designers, as the optimists in the house, need to be rendering a post apocalyptic future that is beautiful and beneficial. “We need to show how positive the solutions for the collective good can be,” she says. 

As VP of Sustainability Consulting at Stok, Devon advises clients on sustainability for their building portfolios, consulting with major organizations on carbon, ESG, and more. She recently authored Stok's Sustainable Real Estate Program Handbook, a multi-year, collaborative effort focused on driving faster change. “This work can be heavy,” she says. “You have to stay hopeful and be curious.” She is encouraged by growing awareness about embodied carbon and increasing collaboration across the industry at this critical time. “We need more transparency and more advocacy and policy," she says. “Data collection is still a struggle. We are just beginning to recognize the impact of the supply chain.”Devon suggests that art and poetry nurture the introspection and creativity we need to tackle daunting challenges. Here's the opening line from a David Whyte poem she shared with us: “Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.”