Episodes
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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 Stephanieâs story is about how she came to think that âdesign is everythingâ and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. âWhat we are doing can happen anywhere,â Stephanie says. âIt requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.â
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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 Itâs 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. âWe are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,â she says, âand put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.â -
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Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundationâs 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. âWith Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. âThis 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.â -
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 humanâs and human settlementsâ 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. âPeople say âbuild back better,â but I donât want to do that anymore,â she says. âI want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.â Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. âWe 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?â
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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 âclimate 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.âJanice 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. âIn 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.â
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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.
âWe have problems that are caused by people being in silos,â Paula says, âand not being able or willing to communicate. We need to be thinking about people skills and processes in new ways.â She adds that progress in the movement really demands a lot of soft skills. âWe are all engaged in change management as much as we are engaged in the mechanics of our specific discipline or sector.â
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. âWe are asking the right questions and beginning to break down those barriers that have given us 75 different net zero standards,â she says. âWe're having the right conversations, and I'm excited about that.â
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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.
âWhen we talk about climate adaptation, I want people to point to built systems all over the country that are rooted in nature-based solutions,â she says. âIt's time we move out of the textbooks and into our streets and communities and build these systems.â
Reducing risk, she points out, is a whole slate of activities. âInsurance should not be our first line of defense,â she says. âIt should be a complement to a property or a facility or an infrastructure project that has risk reduction baked in.â She adds that communications is critical, and weâre still lagging in that area. âWe need to break all these topics down. We need to talk about how to communicate in way that everyone can understand.â
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Noorie Rajvanshi is Director of Sustainability and Climate Strategy at Siemens USA, part of a multinational technology company.
Noorie talked to us about her familyâs 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. âThe movement is not as exclusive as it once was. Some folks might scoff about the notion that âeveryone is a sustainability professionalâ 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 whatâs ahead because of the sustainability movement. âThey are becoming experts on heat pumps and EV chargers and more -- and thatâs inspiring to me.â -
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.
âIf you work on buildings, you're actually working on health and justice, even if you didn't think about it that way,â she says. âGreen 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.â
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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 Berkeleyâs Center for the Built Environment. If you are interested in the field of human health and buildings, Seema advises you to âcollect data and be curious and discerning and honest. We have evaluate impact and ask what we do not know.â 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 âwhen we bring researchers to our communities of practice.â
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, itâs 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.â
She is excited for the frontiers that are now being explored in the movement. âHealth is different than energy, so weâre using different methods than we did for the other pillars,â she says. âThe community today has many tools and appreciates the need for urgency and scale.â
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Materials maven Annie Bevan is a facilitator, consultant, and collaborator focused on creating large-scale change and leveraging sustainability as a strategic business enabler. Sheâs 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 â a system for thinking about products and holistic impact.
âWe want building product manufacturer to hear a consistent language," Annie says, "so they can respond. Sustainable products should be the norm, not the option.â
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 weâre getting carbon tunnel vision. âWe need to bear in mind how broad this challenge is,â she says. âWe have to attend to social health, equity, circularity, and biodiversity. We have to -- and we can -- solve these problems at the same time.â
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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, âseveral brilliant students who have become inspiring disruptors in the building simulation industry. Thatâs immensely rewarding.â
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 sheâs part of a movement, Ale didnât hesitate: âIf speaking up and disagreeing with the status quo is being part of the movement, I'm definitely a member..â
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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 Victoriaâs 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. Iâm energized to be on the âhowâ side of things, helping to bring these solutions to fruition.â
Through Kompas, she is advancing innovations towards decarbonization that include technology such as AI and robotics to increase efficiency throughout the value chain. âI think the private sector has a responsibility to operate well in advance of regulation to prove the possible and show it can be done,â 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.â -
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. âI hope that 200 years from now, historians will look at this moment as the fulcrum, the moment everything changed,â she says. âWe are shaping a regenerative future.â
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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. Sheâs 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. âWhen we change our electricity system to be based on wind and solar, we need to integrate with demand side systems,â she says. âGrid-scale storage is important, but flexible demand can be much more cost effective.â And she points out that this is part of a significant gap in current built environment conditions. âIf we are are going to accelerate progress, we need to understand and utilize the feedback between design and operations.â
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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.
âWe wanted to craft clear examples of the mindset shifts -- we identify five as new or rediscovered -- to move away from degenerative thinking,â Sarah says. âWe wanted to be direct about the need for a cultural shift, not just technological- or innovation-based change.â She says the book is the beginning of the conversation, which now includes collecting stories of regenerative practice. âThe scale of the challenge can feel overwhelming. We need relationships where we can be ourselves and be honest ⊠and then channel them constructively.â
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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.
âWe need to be teaching more about collaborating across disciplines,â she says. âAnd we need to help our students think about agency and knowing their roles. Many architects donât feel well trained for the âconductorâ 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.â
Of her work on the AIA practice guides, RenĂ©e 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: âWe 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.â
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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. âThe floor has been raised, through codes and other policy and market work,â she says. âBuildings 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?â
As for whatâs next, Fiona is inspired by growing dialogue around water, both as a human rights issue and a technical issue. âI think this topic is far more visceral to people than questions of energy or carbon ever can be,â she says. âAnd I think it could be the topic that really connects us to the subject of planetary boundaries in a meaningful, actionable way.â -
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 NAACPâs 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. âI am part of a movement,â she says, âbut I am also just an ordinary person. I can relate to anyone," which she says is important in her role."I am a connector,â she adds. âBeing a missionary is not the thing. We are trying to empower self confidence.â Marnese is especially proud of the Coalitionâs Equity Summits; last yearâs was focused on Self Determination.
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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.
âI feel like buildings are the center of all the other topics I have worked on,â she says. âItâs exciting to work on buildings because they interact with everything -- utilities, energy, site, transit. And there is a whole human health component, too.â Stephanie says she feels like she is part of a building decarbonization movement âLike 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.â
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