At a recent design panel I cohosted with Metropolis magazine, we talked about the fact that as designers, we have a lot of power to guide our clients and projects. But we often relinquish that power, believing that our greatest purpose is to answer the client’s needs and create the most comfortable workplaces we can.
But what if right now, in 2020, that just isn’t enough? There’s a growing consensus among climate activists that if we don’t make radical progress in the next 10 or 12 years, the earth will heat beyond a point of no return and our future will be dire. Like a lot of people, I haven’t wanted to think about this—after all, what can one person do? But last fall, a California wildfire got too close to home, and I realized at that moment that no matter what, our future lives will be different from what we have known. The question is: How different?
I decided then and there that I would no longer do nothing, I would mobilize, move, do everything I could think of. I started reading more on climate change. I attended a march. I doubled down on cutting single-use plastic and unnecessary travel. It wasn’t enough—no one person’s actions can ever be enough—but it led me to the realization that where I could really make a difference was as a designer and businessperson.
Our industry is one of the largest users of resources and contributors to greenhouse gas emissions; buildings and their construction make up36% of global energy use and 39% of carbon dioxide emissions each year. With the world facing some of the biggest challenges in human history, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to design and build projects that minimize the negative impact on climate change. Again, I will say, as designers we have a lot of power. We can guide our clients and our projects toward a more balanced relationship with the world.
All of us are familiar with, if not well versed in, LEED. The U.S. Green Building Council created the initial framework over two decades ago, a point system that made it possible for designers to make safer, healthier, more sustainable, and energy-efficient choices in their designs. Recently California has expanded on that with the California Green Building Challenge. While critics argue that some LEED buildings do not save as much energy as they could and in the end still have a negative impact on the environment, these programs have been invaluable resources and crucial indicators for where design needs to go. The new standard is “net positive,” and in 2010, the Living Building Challenge invited architects and designers to create buildings that give back more than they take to build and operate.
Last summer, the American Institute of Architects set the ambitious goal of a “zero net carbon practice” by 2030. Top of their list—to reuse buildings instead of constructing new ones. That is quite a commitment from a profession that since its inception has been defined by new building. It is a call to do less of what they do, and it essentially changes the practice of architecture. I think it is an example of the kind of radical rethinking about how we work that everyone in every industry needs to do right now.
Landscape architects similarly issued their own Climate Positive Design Challenge this past September. The profession is in a unique space to work with materials that can truly give back CO2, and their goal when designing new landscape projects is to sequester more carbon than emitted.