Design the Future

Katie Ackerly, a principal at David Baker Architects and the firm’s sustainable design lead, is committed to elevating the critical importance of high-performance, equitable housing as the essential core of a successful, resilient future.  Katie would like to see more focus on the big questions. “What is the value of housing to society?” she asks. “And why is it so expensive to build? If we can ta...

Marta Schantz is senior vice president at the Urban Land Institute, where she has been building ULI's Greenprint Center for Building Performance -- a community of practice -- into a vanguard of real estate sustainability.  ULI is tackling transformational initiatives including net zero and decarbonization. “I’m proud that a real estate industry group is declaring decarbonization a priority,&q...

This week, we turn the spotlight on host Lindsay Baker who has just been named CEO of the International Living Future Institute. Lindsay is a building scientist, market mover, and climate activist focused on transforming the built environment to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis. Most recently, she was Global Head of Sustainability and Impact at WeWork; before that, she grew a smart buil...

Dana Bourland is committed to solving our housing and climate crises in ways that advance justice. Dana led the creation of the environment program at The JPB Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the US. Before that, she helped create the Green Communities program (at Enterprise Community Partners), a set of criteria now required by 27 states. Dana is also the author of a new book...

“We are energy social workers,” says Daphany Rose Sanchez. She founded Kinetic Communities, which advocates and implements strategic energy equity market transformations for New York communities, to respond to a representation gap in the energy sector.  She got interested in this as she studied sustainable urban environments and redlining and other policies. “I started to see a correlation between...

Johanna Partin is Deputy Director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, which works to help electrify California with clean energy. “We are not going to be able to counteract emissions or have healthy cities without getting off fossil gas,” she says.  Johanna studied microfinance abroad but migrated from international development to a hyper local focus, working with San Francisco Mayors Newso...

Martha Campbell is a Principal in RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings Practice, focused on decarbonizing the U.S. building stock using standardized, affordable, attractive building construction methods and innovative business models.  Martha has worked in the ski industry and for Goldman Sachs and doing field organizing in Northern New Mexico. A stay at an off-the-grid hostel in Australia prompted her to...

Landscape architect Pamela Conrad is a principal at CMG Landscape Architecture and founder of Climate Positive Design. She grew up in rural Missouri, has a background in plant science and regenerative design, and today is focused on climate mitigation and resilient design in the public realm.  The role of landscape architects in  carbon sequestration is something she explored as a Landscape Archit...

Architect and structural engineer Kate Simonen is a leader, teacher, researcher, and convener -- and a big believer in the collective impact model. She is also executive director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (a network of 25 regional hubs and thousands of practitioners) and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. She has been a force behind collaborative initiati...

Michelle Moore is a social entrepreneur, former White House official, and current CEO of Groundswell, a nonprofit that builds community power by connecting clean energy with economic development, affordability, and quality of life. Reflecting on 25 years in the sustainability space, including a stint at the USGBC, Michelle notes that the focus on metrics and goals has fostered is a very technocrat...

Chandra Farley is the Just Energy Director at the Partnership for Southern Equity where she leads a team developing local and regional strategies to advance energy equity. “Activism is about trust, respect, and partnership,” she says, “This is personal work.”  While some of the activity around utilities and how they are regulated can seem wonky, the influence is significant. PSE focuses on how equ...

Jasmin Moore serves as the Sustainability Director for Douglas County, Kansas, and the City of Lawrence, Kansas. This role encompasses everything from energy systems to food policy, and she recently led the integration of sustainability and equity into funding criteria for the Lawrence Capital Improvements Plan, a first in the state.  Jasmin is pleased that, as she puts it, “equity has finally com...

Renée Lertzman is a researcher, educator, and strategist who uses psychological insight to change our approach to the environmental crisis. She works with organizations to harness the creativity needed to solve big problems.   We spoke with Renée about her work, including Project Inside Out, which she created to help people in all sectors explore psychological concepts and expand changemaking pote...

Kirsten Ritchie is a Global Resilience Leader and principal at Gensler, where she brings her civil engineering background to big discussions about innovation, wellbeing, and high-performance design.  Being a trailblazer throughout her career has given Kirsten a confidence that’s crucial for the persuading that is part of that role. She points out that advancing sustainability in the AEC industry d...

Daniele Horton is passionate about the role of real estate in tackling climate change. Trained as an architect, she is an influential sustainability leader; her company, Verdani Partners, manages sustainability for portfolios totaling more than 720 million square feet.  Daniele grew up in Brazil with an appreciation for the natural world. In the work world, she shifted from architecture to real es...

Architect and educator Wanda Dalla Costa is a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation, the Principal of Tawaw Architecture Collective, and a Professor at Arizona State University, where she is also Director/Founder of the Indigenous Design Collaborative. Her approach to architecture is rooted in her perspective on how communities support people and their cultural lifeways. “We integrate a full indi...

Jennifer Leitsch is VP of Corporate Responsibility at CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm. Jennifer has an engineering degree and became captivated by the notion of business as a force for good. Under her leadership, CBRE recently announced a new set of emissions reduction goals with science based targets. “As the largest commercial real estate firm, we ar...

Architect Michelle Amt is Director of Sustainability at VMDO Architects and previously worked at William McDonough + Partners. She is serving on the jury for the AIA COTE Top Ten Awards in 2021, and cites that program with merging design with high performance in a way that no other does. Michelle says she feels like she’s part of a movement within an industry. The industry is baseline, championing...

Dr. Whitney Austin Gray is Senior VP of Research at the International Well Building Institute and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown School of Urban and Regional Planning and the School of Nursing and Health Studies. Whitney was captivated early on in her studies by the notion that buildings can promote health, productivity, and wellness, which inspired her to create a career path that combine...

Lynn Simon is head of Real Estate and Workplace Services Sustainability at Google, a role that includes health, wellness, food, transportation, placemaking, amenities, and more. The built environment is central to her work, but it also includes all the systems that connect people to place. Recently, Lynn convened the Regen Lab to address what they called “radical resilience beyond the perimeter.”...

Adrienne Johnson is a mechanical engineer with Point Energy Innovations, where she focuses on helping clients realize high performance buildings, including net zero projects. Her interest in sustainability is broad; she has researched water and energy issues and won the USGBC’s Malcom Lewis IMPACT! award in 2017 for her work on a school in Parkwood, outside of Capetown. That experience has informe...

Architect Anica Landreneau leads HOK’s global sustainable design practice and serves on the firm’s board of directors and design board. Anica has been involved at the local and Federal level with policy and advocacy, including providing Congressional testimony. As Anica says, “We need those who are doing the work to come to these hearings and bring our experience and expertise to the table. Code c...

Heather Rosenberg has an ecology background and has made a career of systems thinking applied to climate change; she currently leads Arup’s resilience discipline in the Americas. “To me, the most fascinating aspects of this work is the fitting together of the economic, social, and environmental systems.” We talked about how she got into the green buildings industry and started exploring questions...

Vivian Loftness is a professor in the architecture school at Carnegie Mellon University who also serves on the board of the AIA and ILFI, among others. We talked about the value of standards, as goals and metrics, and the critical pull they provide for industry. We talked about improvements to architecture education, including making sure that all studios address environmental and equity issues, i...

Architect, affordable housing expert, and leadership cultivator Katie Swenson joined MASS Design Group early this year, after years at Enterprise Community Partners, where she expanded the Rose Fellowship, bringing design expertise into collaboration with communities. While Katie was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard GSD, she asked: “What role do love and kindness play in urban design?” Love is also at the...