Introducing Ourselves

Thanks Nadav!  Here's my story... For over 25 years, I've been a designer, architect, and sustainability leader for SmithGroup. In 1998, I was the project architect for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Headquarters - the Philip Merrill Environmental Center, which became the first in the world to achieve LEED Platinum.  That opportunity gave me exposure to an inspiring sustainable design community, where I got to meet luminaries like Nadav, Bill Reed, Gail Lindsey, Joel Ann Todd, Mary Ann Lazarus, Henry Siegel, Kira Gould, Lance Hosey, etc. I became the defacto sustainability director for SmithGroup as we pursued more and more sustainable projects.  I led a pilot project in Maryland that influenced one of the first Executive Orders mandating all State-funded project achieve LEED Silver mimimum.  In 2006, I served initially as a "friend of the COTE Advisory Group", then a member of the AIA's Sustainability Discussion Group (2008-2009), and then a member of the COTE AG (2009-2011).   With the AIA Large Firm Roundtable, I helped to co-create the AIA 2030 Commitment, and then served on the 2030 Commiment Steering Committe to help launch the program.  I served as co-chair of the AIA 2030 Commitment Working Group when we were tasked with shaping the development of the DDX. Back at SmithGroup, I acted as co-director of sustainability with Rus Perry until he retired, and Corporate Director of Sustainability from 2017 to the present.  I was the project designer and manager for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Brock Environmental Center, the 10th Living Building Challenge certified project in the world.  During my career, I have been involved in the design of three AIA COTE Top Ten projects.  I'm not sure when I attended my first SDL summit. 2012?  Guessing here, but I've been to so many and always enjoy reuniting and finding inspiration with my colleagues. I've had an exciting and fulfilling career, but I am retiring in the Fall of 2024.  I want to travel, to build a cabin, and to spend more time outdoors.  I am not exactly sure how sustainability will be part of my post-SmithGroup life, but am interested in teaching again, continuing to advocate to the profession to embrace sustainability, and to keep my hand in design.  I was excited about the Green Sages opportunity because it's the perfect outlet for me as I begin my next chapter.  Above all, I value the connections I've made with my fellow sustainable design leaders.    Happy Holidays all! 

Thanks Nadav.  These will be fun to read.  I'll enjoy learning more about people I admire.  Here's my offering: I'm a military kid that grew up moving frequently and spent several formative years living overseas.  Traveling, experiencing other cultures, and seeing great cities likely drove my passion for architecture and design.  I was also lucky to have the range and freedom to spend a lot of time playing with the "loose parts" of nature and exploring in the outdoors - a "last child in the woods".  This gave me a deep and meaningful connection to the natural world and shaped me as an environmentalist. I attended UVA for architecture school.  In 1990, I took a course called Environmental Choices, a very early course in sustainabilty and the ethics of design.  It showed me a way to bring together these two passions in an effort to make a difference through design.  After a few years of work, I went to the Harvard GSD, where I was the long-haired, hippie-freak supplementing my MARCH with courses in Sustainability, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental Ethics. After graduation in 1997, I worked for Payette and then William McDonough + Partners before landing at VMDO, where I became their first Director of Sustainable Design and designed the first LEED Gold school in VA and a COTE Top Ten award winner, Manassas Park Elementary School. In 2008, I had the opporunity to serve in a similar capacity at a national level for SHW Group.  It was a challenging (and sometimes lonely) role, working to turn a larger ship.  It was then that I first became involved with this group, who welcomed, mentored and supported me through retreats, forums, and radical transparency.  Being a part of this group, and that time in particular, remains a highlight of my career.  During that time, I worked to spread the gospel of sustainability through project work, firm-wide policies and operations guidelines, sustainability consulting in China and Central America, and industry leadership.  As Chair of the Large-Firm Roundtable Sustainability Committee, I advocated for broad adoption of the 2030 Commitment and organized efforts to leverage the collective voice of the largest firms to maintain LEED as the rating system for government projects and for manufacturers to provide architects with Health Product Declarations for materials specification and selection.  Members of this group were the champions in those efforts!  In 2014, SHW Group became part of Stantec, a multi-disciplinary design firm with a global reach.  I continued my work as a sustainable design leader and as a planner and designer working broadly throughout the education sector, initiating and supporting projects while exploring opportunities with emerging technologies and rating systems. I made my way back to VMDO in 2017, where I serve as a Principal and the K12 Market Leader.  I come from a family of educators, and I have always believed in the power at the intersection of sustainability and education - that a high-performing 
building supports high-performing people, and that a sustainable future requires educating generations of environmental stewards. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to finish this career where it really began, as part of a teaching practice where I can encourage, support and create opportunities for a new generation of sustainability leaders. I've got enough gray hair to not feel too self-conscious about being called a "sage".  I've got less than 10 years before retirement and I'm thinking about my next evolution - hopefully finding purpose in opportunities to serve and share what I've learned, much of it from all of you, in places where it is needed most.

Oh my, I am finding this challenging but here goes … I started life in northern California, Berkeley to be precise. My father was an architect and a curtainwall consultant when that was pretty novel. I offer that because architecture and design has always been an ordinary part of my life experience. (It took me about ten years to work through the “it’s okay to do the same thing as my father” issue, but I did.) Sprinkle in an artistic sensibility, an appreciation for nature, a passion for the craft of making things, and a healthy dose of activism and you have the main ingredients for my career. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy at UCLA. I’ve a master’s in architecture from University of Illinois at Chicago. My career started in small firms doing a wide range of projects from childcare centers, town halls, park buildings, and fun projects like a soil ecology exhibit at the Field Museum. I transitioned to the large firm world at the turn of the century, about the time that LEED hit the streets. I’ve settled in there. I think partly because I see the big firm as the hard problem and where the change we need must happen. I recall an Angela Davis lecture from my undergraduate years where she quoted Che Guevara, “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.” Okay, the context is different, but I think of design within large firms similarly. And maybe a little perversely, I get some personal satisfaction from the struggle. That attitude helped me to focus attention on architecture industry wide impact. This, along with many others in this forum, took me into AIA 2030 Commitment leadership, COTE-AG leadership, and a number of local and national USGBC roles. Working with and learning from so many passionate and committed people has definitely been a highlight of this work. I’m at the tail end of my career with retirement in sight. Working in the Chicago office, I am currently Chief Sustainability Officer at HKS, which has been a rewarding role. I work these days leading the DesignGreen team and being a part of the HKS ESG Leadership team bringing together firmwide leadership advancing sustainability, public interest design, and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The firm is the project. HKS signed the U.N. Global Compact in 2020, and in 2023 we offset our carbon footprint to become a carbon neutral firm. Amongst you all I will say that I’m proud of getting the firm to commit to that annual investment. Now I need to shift that thinking to the work we do for all of our clients. Any thoughts? Like others, I’m not totally sure about the “sage” term but will say that I am greatly appreciative for the vision, insight, schooling, and comradery of this group. To see what has grown into the Peer Networks is truly amazing and has changed the profession. I recall the gathering at Colorado Springs and the uncertainty of what this might be. At the core of it all was the creation of a common purpose, friendships, and personal trust. I am certain that this has influenced my career in ways that I never would have foreseen. Thank you. I look forward to the Sages forum. Cheers, Rand Rand​​​​ Ekman , FAIA, LEED Fellow Chief Sustainability Officer Partner [HKS, Inc] 125 S Clark St, #1100, Chicago, IL 60603 +1 312 262 9750 | m +1 847 420 5577 | www.hksinc.com From: Nadav Malin

Hi Fellow Sages (love the appellation!): It's nice to hear from you all again. I'm definitely an old-timer SDLer attending the first of the retreats thanks to our younger founders. Was it in Colorado? Someone remind me. My roots in sustainability started when I attended architecture graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis in the mid-1970s and studied with Charlie Brown before he went to U. of Oregon to influence generations of sustainable design leaders. (I consider myself a first-generation GZ Brown student.) There we studied "environmentally responsible" design, built solar collectors and studied intensive gardening. This was after completing my undergraduate degree in Russian Languages and Literature from Mount Holyoke College in western Mass. and an 18-month stint at the Boston Architectural College. I ended up staying in St. Louis for the rest of my career mostly at HOK which was founded there. I had the incredible good luck of landing at HOK when my colleagues Bill Odell and Sandy Mendler were starting a firmwide "Green Team" which allowed me a chance to mix my passion for environmental sustainability with my work. This led eventually to my shift to the role as HOK's first global Sustainable Design Leader in 2001 and shortly after becoming part of this wonderful group. I also had a chance to co-author with Sandy and Bill the Second Edition of the HOK Guidebook of Sustainable Design. A learning experience indeed! (I have so much respect for Corey Squires who just did a fantastic book on his own.) Being a member of SDL completely changed my life including providing me with the most wonderful group of friends and colleagues. This esteemed group became the core members of the task groups that were the outcome of the Sustainable Leadership Opportunity Scan I completed for the AIA in 2013 which, over time, was the foundation for the AIA's current commitment to Climate Action. I also had the wonderful opportunity to work with Alex Wilson on resilience after Hurricane Katrina and have focused mostly on resilience and adaptation since then. And the impact of this group goes on!  Thank you Building Green for being the glue that brought us together and continues to provide a catalytic impact. 

Hi everyone! My life began in West Philly in blocks of boxy row houses with faux brick veneer and fake shutters.  The one highlight was visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Beth Shalom Synagogue and realizing that Architecture could inspire people.  I was hooked. When it came time for Architecture school in the late 80s, my limited 16/17 year old brain only looked at local schools (Penn, Drexel, Temple).  Without knowing better, I stayed near home and chose Temple, which at the time was overrun with Post Modernists (thanks to Venturi), and a few remaining Modernists (thanks to Louis Kahn).  

Obsessed with Wright's work, I started writing away to former Taliesin apprentices and they became my first mentors. The passive solar pioneers of the 70s were out of fashion, but I was seeing connections with Wright's work and their work.  Malcolm Wells really helped me understand siting and our responsibility in what we build.  Bart Prince gave me an understanding of materials and form that opened my mind.  The input from these mentors carried me through school (I used to send them bluelines and get crits over the phone!)

In 93, I randomly met Beverly WIllis and started spending weekends in New York working for her on projects, while also working at a "regular" firm during the week. The day after graduation I moved up to New York to work with her full time and learned how to run a sole proprietor visionary practice.  A couple of years later, I was offered a job in Santa Fe, New Mexico with a former Taliesin apprentice and moved out there.

Santa Fe allowed me to work with alternative building materials:  adobe, pumice-crete, strawbale, rammed earth, even an earthship!  This blending of Wright's organic principles and this way of building just made sense to me.

By 1997 I was restless and moved out to San Francisco and within 6 months was able to launch my own one person firm.  On my own I grew organicARCHITECT to 8 people, but struggled with running the business alone.  Large firms didn't know what to do with me, or relegated me to outside sustainability consulting.  We did small boutique design projects and lots of sustainability work.

I wanted way to scale my impact and started speaking, writing, and teaching as a way to reach more people.  My first book, "Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies" came out in 2007 and for a while was trying to keep up with Jerry Yudelson and publish a book a year (Jerry had me beat!)  Now 12 books written, lectured all over the world, and taught thousands of students.  But still it wasn't getting me an opportunty to design more impactful projects.

Through countless conversations (with many of the SDLs actually) I looked for a place to call home.  Jason McLennan was also feeling restless around the same time (he wanted to get away from non-profit work and back into design) and so he offered me a role at Living Future as VP (2014-2016) where I helped launch Living Product Challenge.  A conversation with Rob Bennett at EcoDistricts convinced me to join him to help launch EcoDistricts Certification (2016-2018).  After seeing my TED talk, a stint with the XPRIZE Foundation (2016-2019) taught me the power of exponential thinking. Again, these mentors were saving my sanity while teaching me change management at scale, but I was still looking for a home.  Soon I found it.

CannonDesign went through a strategic plan effort and found a need for a sustainability leader.  At a meeting someone suggested, "you know, like an Eric Corey Freed type."  Another person said, "Oh I know Freed, let's just ask him."  I called Rand for his input and advice (always appreciated). And that, dear friends, is how I found my final home here as Director of Sustainability at CannonDesign.

BuildingGreen and the SDL has been an invaluable support network.  I'd always felt a bit of an outsider with this group having come from a small firm for most of my career, and appreciate everything that Alex and Nadav (and the BG gang) have built here.

Rives Taylor has more than 40 years’ experience in institutional and commercial architecture with 35 years spent focusing on strategic planning, programming, and sustainable design, scaled from facility operations to campus and city planning.  A Texas-practicing architect/educator, Rives has lead Gensler’s Firmwide Design Resilience Task Force and now leads the Gensler Research Institute Resilience Center.  He casts a wide net in elevating both the why and how of sustainable design, including students, faculty, professionals, public officials, and the public. He is on the Board of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute   He is part of the editorial team that produces the annual “Climate Action Through Design” (https://www.gensler.com/sustainability/climate-action-through-design-2021) In 2015 Rives led Gensler’s delegation to the Paris Climate Conference/Agreement and led the editorial team for the “Impact by Design” ( https://www.gensler.com/research-insight/sustainability  ) publications annually (recent publication: https://www.gensler.com/research-insight/sustainability/2018 ).  He is also part of the leadership team rolling out the Gensler Cities Climate Challenge (GC3: The Gensler Cities Climate Challenge (GC3) | Gensler) and the Gensler Product Sustainability Standards (GPS: Gensler Product Sustainability Standards | Gensler). In over 30 years as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston and visiting professor at Rice University, Rives has influenced more than 6,500 students in his technical and high-performance design studios and seminars. 

Hello Fellow Sages! I have a 40+ year  history working as an architect. For the last 20+ years as a Principal at SERA Architects, I was focused on reducing and mitigating the climate change impacts from the built environment. I retired from SERA in September 2023, and now serve as a Principal Emeritus. I have extensive experience serving on boards, working groups and committees related to green building and climate change. I'm currently serving on:

• The Board of Climate Solutions (OR & WA clean energy policy focused NGO)
  • Note, I'm currently on leave form this position while I am paid to conduct some research for them, see below)
• The Advisory Board for the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) 
  • Note: Previously I was a Founding Board member of ILFI
• The National Government Affairs Committee (GAC) for the AIA
• Co-Chair for the Policy Committee for the ZERO Coalition
• Recently appointed to the Oregon Building Performance Standards Rulemaking Advisory Committee
• SDL Climate Smart Wood Committee

Within SDL circles, I think I might be known for being passionate about a few things:

• Policy & Advocacy
  • specifically teaming with Chris Helstern on the Green Commons "BUild Back Better" letter that was sent to the Biden administration in 2021
• Climate Smart Wood, and the associated grassroots tools and public policies that we're going to need to scale climate smart wood, similar to the efforts that centered on Healthy materials and the HPD a number of years back
• Embodied Carbon 
  • I facilitated the Carbon Leadership Forum's Strategic Plannning retreat in 2022
  • With Nadav in 2023, I co-facilitated the ECHO project working to harmonize measurement and reporting for embodied carbon in Buildings
• District Scale Infrastructure 
  • I was an early advisor for the EcoDistricts Institute and got to do a fair amount of paid research on district scale infrastructure, which has turned me into an advocate for the appproach
• Decarbonizing the built environment
  • I'm currently on contract (with Climate Solutions) doing research on what it might take to launch an "accelerator" for building decarbonization 

I'm based in Portland, OR, and when I'm not serving on committees or facilitating, I enjoy gardening, playing disc golf, hiking, sea kayaking and cycling. My partner and I have undertaken multiple long bicycle tours, and you can learn about our most recent (17 months in South America) at www.brockfolk.com.

I have been working in this industry for 30+ years.   Since 1994, I have been working in SOM, Chicago office.  One of the most memorable projects was Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world, which I spent almost 4 years full time working on it as the lead building services engineer.   My professional involvements have been:

• ASHRAE Director at Large
• USGBC Illinois Chapter, Board of Directors
• Task Force for Building Decarbonization, ASHRAE
• Chicago Decarbonization Task Force
• ECHO
• Epidemic Task Force, ASHRAE
• MEP 2040, founding members
• Envrionmental Health Committee (past-chair, ASHRAE)
• NREL Wells Fargo Incubator Program, Industry Advisor
• I taught at different universities, including Berkeley, MIT, IIT, Penn State, Stanford, etc.
• DOE research funding reviewer

In this group, I helped

• Policy & Advocacy
  • specifically helpfing Clark and Chris Helstern on the Green Commons "BUild Back Better" letter that was sent to the Biden administration in 2021
  • work with MaryAnn, Joyce Lee, and others in crafting an open letter Nearly 700 built environment experts from more than 50 nations petition WHO, urging global adoption of indoor environment best practices to combat COVID-19.

My interest has been how we can integrate with nature to minimize entropy and create a symbiotic future.

Hello all, It is so cool to read the stories of people I have known for years (in some cases, going on decades...) but haven't really heard the whole scoop. I knew about Clark's South American bike tour, and MAL's degree in Russian literature, but who knew ECF had written 12 books?! or that Rand had a degree in philosophy (although we might have guessed)? My story starts in Baltimore, though I've lived in seven different states. When I was a kid, my folks hired an architect friend to design a house for us, which is when I discovered buildings were things that people made. I liked to make things, so years later I put that together and decided to study architecture. I got my undergrad arch degree at UVa, then worked for a couple years before my first venture to Texas, where I got my MArch at Rice. I married an architect, Rick, who decided HE needed another degree and we moved to NYC, so he could go to Columbia. I got a job with Philip Johnson, a mixed bag to talk about these days, but it was a good nine-year stint for me. I can tell stories, if you're interested. When had a kid, then 2 more (twins) and NYC wasn't such a good fit. Rick and I became partners in a firm in Dallas, Urban Architecture, which in 1999 merged with a construction company to form an integrated firm called The Beck Group. It was about that time that I heard Ray Anderson speak about his commitment to making Interface an environmentally responsible company and decided that was important. I needed to do that. I started focusing on everything I could do to make Beck's work sustainable; as others have mentioned, a lonely effort at times. My fellow principles at Beck said I should take the title of Director of Sustainability. No one, least of all me, had any idea exactly what that meant. When Nadav called a few years later to ask if I wanted to join a bunch of other folks to form a "Sustainable Leaders Group" it was the answer to a prayer! Being part of that group gave me the contacts, the support and the resources I needed to actually do the job I wanted to do. It changed not just my professional life, but my personal life. I'm so thankful to Meredith and Nellie for bringing us together! In 2007 I had the chance to help create a new degree in the engineering school at SMU, a Masters in Sustainable Development. I wrote the courses, then they wanted me to teach them. I was still working as Dir. of Sust. at Beck, and teaching nights and weekends. I left Beck in 2012 to open my own consulting firm, then in 2018 was asked to join the Cameron MacAllister Group. I was doubtful until I talked to Mary Ann Lazarus and we decided we could join as a team. The chance to work with her as a partner was a good enough reason for me. Mary Ann is still part of the group, but in a reduced capacity as she has so much other stuff going on. I now get to work with great firms on a consulting basis, on issues like the structure, culture and resources needed to achieve goals in sustainable design, as well as more general consulting like strategic planning and goal-setting. (what does this firm want to be when it grows up?) I get to work with people I like, on things I think are important. I have more time to be involved in local issues, and I get to live in a fabulous place. During COVID I came to Asheville, NC, to take care of my elderly parents, and when they moved into senior living, we bought and renovated their house. We're on a mountainside, 15 minutes from town, with great views and plenty of space. Here's an open invitation to come visit!

Ok, my turn. I grew up nowhere in particular, started in England (emigrated at 6weeks) then went through Montreal, Toronto, Milwaukee, upstate New York, and landed in Minnesota when I was 10.  It was in Minnesota where I decided to be an Architect – I liked drawing/making pictures, but I tended to fill in graph paper a lot, so I figured I needed the help of straight lines. By the time I graduated from college (Iowa State) my family had moved (again) to New Jersey, so I found my first job with Peter Lokhammer, who had a small firm (I was employee #2) and he had a history of working for Michael Graves.  He had been the project manager on the first attempt at renovating Michael’s warehouse into a home.  I was there for 3 years, centering absolutely everything, designing pomo housing and small scale commercial buildings, coloring with the sides of colored pencils, drawing lots of cedar trees in elevations, pretending we all lived in the south of France.  Then I went to Michael’s office for a year and headed to UVA for graduate work. Upon graduation I headed to Baltimore (I was dating a guy) and had the joy of looking for a job in the recession of 1991.  It took a while, and I managed to fit in a quick temp job designing Christmas displays in shopping malls.  I took a job with a firm I had never heard of (ha!) Kieran Timberlake and Harris cause I needed a job.  That lasted a year or two and then I found my way back to Baltimore. I was technically oriented, and I figured out relatively early that if I was a spec writer I could work anywhere (Block Island was the goal).  But then I had my two boys, so I had a better reason to want flexibility.  The annoyingly caustic spec writer at my firm decided to mean-quit (with no notice) but I had heard from someone that it was imminent, so I went to the boss ahead of time and said, “you know, my dream job is spec writer.”  So, one thing led to another, she quit, and walla, I had a new job description.  Tradition had it that as she covered sustainability, maybe I could cover that too? I launched my new career, and I had a blast.  Spec writers basically shop for a living, so I just kept choosing colorful new things for Architects to consider.  I steered people to better materials, lectured folks about what to avoid, and learned the craft. And I cut my time in the office to 2 days/week.  15 years pre-COVID I knew that showing up 40 hours/week was over-rated. I had heard about this sustainably focused group of Architects that this entity BuildingGreen had developed reading one of the magazines.  Hmmm I said, how can I figure out how to join THAT group?  I actually showed up at a conference with a list of everyone in the group in my pocket, thinking I could find one of them.  Ok, that didn’t work, but at some point, I gained a connection.  I reached out to Greg Mella (who I had just met when he did a Arch 2030 event), he introduced me to Nadav and I was off to the races. My connection with SD Leaders was the bombdigity, it led to so much opportunity that I will always be thankful for, but it has also formed a great group of friends and comrades. I attended my first summit in 2011. By 2013 I was co-leading a summit event with Mary Ann, and that led to my first AIA volunteer opportunity – the Materials Knowledge Working Group.  After 5 years with that group I went on to helping with the COTE top ten toolkit, then joining the COTE LG, then the Strategic Council, becoming the 2023 moderator of the Council, and last fall I was elected to the AIA Board of Directors for a 3 year term. And due to the wealth of contacts I have from this group, I had the confidence to start my own spec writing concern. Long Green Specs is now in its 8^th year, with a long list of clients, most of them in this group. And as everything is just one big circle, I just agreed to do a talk on better building materials at my old firm on earth day.  (side bar: I met a guy and I now know why Earth Day is April 22). So, I look forward to more camaraderie, more insight, and improving our built environment with breakneck speed.  I look forward to meeting those of you I don’t know, seeing those of you that I do know again and again.  I truly believe that this group can really accomplish just about anything. So, Let's get started!

Hang in there, y'all. This is a bit of a rambling story... Back in college in the ice age, I met a couple of folks in the Architecture Dept. who were looking to build a research building to test some theories of passive solar design. I signed right up. That was Tim Johnson, a pioneering MIT researcher in passive solar, and my later biz partner Brian Hubbell, now a fellow in the Maine Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (really!). We spent a year building an all glass building at MIT, filled with phase change material, to prove that a totally passively heated building could work... in Boston. The glass was the first production run of Low-E coated glass. I learned a ton. (Pick available online). In architecture school, I fell in with the (hippy infused) design/build crew. This was my peeps. Studios with Dave Sellers and Steve Badanes among others. This led to starting a design/build company in Cambridge (Houndstooth Construction). Ran that company for 15 years with the aforementioned Brian Hubbell. Yup. worked the trades for 15 (actually 17) years. The time in school also led to teaching at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, VT for 25 years. That was a thing too! Somewhere in all that I met Nadav and Alex. I think I really got to know Nadav in the '80's when he and Sandy Mendler and I cut class at a conference in Florida to go to the beach. The bond was sealed. When my wife Sarah finished her PhD at MIT (in Civil) we moved for a few years to Lehigh Univ. where, working around taking care of the kids, I got a Management Masters. The kids survived. After several years, we came back to Cambridge so that Sarah could take a professorship back at MIT. When we got back to town, my old MIT roomie, Dan Leary, who had left his Philosophy PhD at MIT to go work for Oracle, got hold of me to help him start a software company. I had a management degree didn't I? We did that together in various arrangements for another 12 years. Now THAT was a wild ride. Boy did I learn a lot! Even made some money. Which led me to BuildingGreen in 2003 to help Nadav and Alex build out the web products. That's when I met all of you! You have been an awesome source of thought, love, and caring. And some really serious friendships. Somewhere in the 2000's Sarah and I started hosting monthly dinners for Boston area sustainability people. Those turned out to be pretty valuable in creating a real community of sustainability professionals. Many of y'all came by. Kira, ECF, Meredith, so many amazing folks. After 8 years at BG, it was time to move on, so I started Linnean Solutions with Marcus Springer. Marcus really wanted to be doing architecture, so he wandered off. But Linnean has just grown and reached more than we imagined. Our work now is built on the regenerative and developmental paradigms and grounded in equity and justice. It is kind of amazing how we are able to bring our clients along to new ways of thinking.  So there. Long story full of twists and turns, and lots of really amazing people to learn from. Peace.

You all are such amazing people with interesting journeys, that I am embarrassed to say, my path was fairly simple (boring). I never – except at 1 years old, left the west coast. Yep, boring. Born in Kowloon Hong Kong, left at 1 on some freighter boat that my parents managed to get on. A mix of Portuguese, French, Chinese and who knows what else. My parents and grandparents and their parents are sooooooo much more interesting than me. But I digress. Loved to draw. Loved to daydream. Comfortable with criticizing everything. Sounds like an architect right? Thought I would be teacher (like my grandmother) or secretary (like my mom) but my dad convinced me that if I was an architect I could do that at home while taking care of the kids (HA! so many assumptions in the seventies) So that I did. Got into UCB without knowing what a T-square was. Managed to work at the campus bookstore while at school. This was the dream job because I could read while at the register (always taking the early shift) and I could order architecture and art and photography books. So cemented my love for architecture. Took some classes on passive solar with Ed Mazria’s first book, grad classes on Community Design (remember that?), working in tough parts of Oakland, engaging community and did some intern work for an office that did work for SRO (single room occupancy buildings – really one room rat holes) and low income housing in the Tenderloin and Chinatown (cemented – ok low carbon cemented - my understanding that architecture is more than a building, it is a process) Got out of college right when the recession hit. I have a knack for great timing. Walked with my H and F leads and tools to any architectural firm in the SF area. I had consistent lettering skills so that was my “edge”. Got a job and then another through a friend moved to a 2 person firm where I got to answer phones, learn to draw, send out invoices and handle CA. kept going to slightly bigger more diverse firms. That mix of experiences came crashing in around the mid-late ‘90s when I learned about SBS and toxic materials and NOBODY in the AIA local chapters or CSI local chapters could (would) help me understand anything more about it. Something about liability….Continued to practice in the traditional (stupid) way until I found classes (and friends) at the Pacific Energy Center and attended EnviroDesign conferences – helping to man some of the HBN booths and there I met Nadav! And learned about BGreen. Life changing. Started making waves with my office and clients. With two little ones, this had suddenly become personal and not just professional. About that time the USGBC had a horrible website and a conference somewhere in Arizona I think, that I took a redeye flight to (on my own nickel, no I am not bitter) where the sessions were 12-15 people just talking and expertise abounded. Inspired inspired, inspired. Kept meeting good folks till that lovely day when I got the call to ask if I would go to Utah – and met all of you smarter, funnier, more creative troublemakers. I am ever grateful for your generosity and the fact that you don’t prejudge nor judge. That you have made me a better architect and person and I have benefited from all that you do. Thank you for making me a better trouble maker. Sorry that was longer than I meant it to be. Sunday and lots of coffee infused. I too am excited to reconnect and figure what we can do together. I am frustrated by this profession that doesn’t seem to know that this is urgent, personal, and possible. Changing habits seems to be the wall we cant break down. I agree – lets get to it. Cant think of a better set of trouble makers. I think Z said it in a linked in post…its now up to us Happy Sunday, Pauline From: Jim Newman

Hello, all, I was alerted that some of my previous post didn’t stick. Possibly it was user error; I am no digital native (and raising one does not seem to be amping my tech savvy). Probably this is just too long. (Nadav, you know all of us; surely a word limit would have been advisable…) I am a writer, convener, connector, and strategist. I was raised (in Lawrence, Kansas) by an architect and an artist/interior designer. I studied journalism (at the University of Kansas), and did a master’s program at Parsons (focused on writing -- it was an MArch program with writing instead of studio).  The first part of my career (1990-1998, while based in NYC) was at magazines, including a few years at Metropolis. I started cultivating a volunteer side gig with AIA -- who knew that would be a Forever Thing! I helped get the AIA New York COTE up and running and soon started interacting with COTE national.

I shifted gears to work in architecture firms: My first stint (1998-2007, while based in NYC, then Boston) was at Gould Evans (now Multistudio), where I also helped the green team get off the ground (we were using the comb-bound notebooks that HOK shared, which included material that would become part of LEED and their Guidebook). Starting in 1998 I was a remote worker; I would never go back to full time in the office! A seven-year stint in Boston was pivotal: so much gratitude for how that community welcomed me and nurtured me. It felt like grad school 2.0 with food.  Side gigs picked up: I joined the national COTE advisory group in 2004, wrote Ecology and Design (about architecture education) in 2005, and co-wrote Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design with Lance Hosey -- a project that tapped into a vibrant conversation about diverse leadership styles and more. It came out in 2007, the same year I joined William McDonough + Partners as Director of Communications (2007-2016, while based in Boston, then Bay Area). The Cradle to Cradle Kool-Aid was delicious, especially at the start, the work was compelling, and the people were amazing.   Phase three, consulting, kicked off in early 2016 and have been refining that effort ever since (2016-2024, while based in the Bay Area, NYC-for-one-year, Bay Area again, and now Kansas City!). I do communications strategy, messaging, thought leadership, and media work for a few architecture firms and nonprofits, including Architecture 2030 (where I am also a Senior Fellow) and ILFI. I still volunteer with COTE (writing, editing, convening), but that’s gonna wrap soon. Since 2020, I have co-hosted (with Lindsay Baker) the Design the Future podcast.  I aspire to write and speak more and better. I want to advance progress toward deeper mind shifts and tangible climate action -- to make things better. Our community can communicate more clearly than we do about the value of such progress and the potential of its benefits and beauty. I am honored to be a part of this group. As a communications professional (who routinely introduces myself in the negative, as in “I am not an architect”), I have never been a part of the Peer Network groups (so I am often asking friends to “post something to SDL for me.” The FOMO, y’all … it’s been intense! I look forward to learning from and collaborating with you all and to all the good trouble ahead.  Warmly,
Kira

Kira Gould, Hon. AIA, LEED AP​​​​
415.690.0182 | kiragould@kiragould.com
now based in the Kansas City area! writer / ​consultant​, Kira Gould CONNECT
senior fellow, Architecture 2030
​podcast co-host, Design the Future  
​co-author, Women in Green​
​​volunteer​, AIA Committee on the Environment ​Make things better.​ --Lance Hosey, The Shape of Green
consider ​supporting the​ Lance Hosey Scholarship Fund to Make Things Better
at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation  

These are amazing to read! Here's mine. I went to a small  hippie high school in the SF Bay Area, that wasn’t very good, but we got to do some amazing things. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the SF Zen Center came and ran the school as a Zen Monastery for a few days and started a lifelong interest in Zen. I got to spend 10 weeks in some small, remote villages in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico, assisting the guy who went on to write the book "Donde No Hay Doctor".  I camped on the Washington Mall for 6 weeks, during the Poor Peoples Campaign in 1968.   The things I was learning weren’t happening on campus, so after two years, I dropped out and worked as a carpenter, traveled, got involved in anti-war activities during the Vietnam war and spent a week in jail for my efforts. When the war ended, I spent time at Evergreen State College, and built pole framed structures out in the woods, made methane digesters out of inner tubes, solar collectors out of copper tubing. I left there to design a small, off the grid, passive solar, rammed earth block house for a friend (not built). It even had a compositing toilet.   I got interested in what we were calling appropriate technology, discovered E.F.. Schumacher and Ivan Ilyich, and went to the Farallones Institute, to help build some passive solar staff cabins. (Sim van der Ryn who founded Farallones, described it as “a live-in collective of hippie-scientists who built an off-grid rural research and education campus in Sonoma County known as the Rural Center”), sort of like a west coast New Alchemy Institute. I left there to help start a solar design and installation company in San Francisco, and after 4 years of installing solar collector on roofs, I left to get an MArch from Berkeley.   I ignored sustainable design and appropriate technology while I was in school and focused on learning how to design, which was probably good for me to do,  but I cringe at what I learned and didn’t learn in school. After I graduated, I worked at Bill Turnbull’s office and then at Lyndon/Buchanan Associates before co-founding Siegel & Strain Architects in 1990.   After a few years of designing too many fancy kitchen remodels,  Henry and I  decided to focus on making a sustainable design practice. Environmental Building News had started publishing their newsletter and we got a grant from StopWaste in Oakland to write a GreenSpec to make it easier to specify and use the cool products that Nadav and Alex were turning us on to. StopWaste also funded an early whole building LCA for a small affordable housing project of ours. We’ve worked with Strawbale and Pise’, and Optimum Value Framing, and gotten to do some cool projects, mosly community projects and a lot of work for the Park Service.   I really started to focus on embodied carbon in 2009 on our Portola Valley Town Center Project. I decided to try and track all of the carbon emissions from the project. This was a few years before Tally, so I used the ICE data base out of Bath, England. I discovered that without trying very hard, we had reduced the embodied footprint by about 30%. This led to the aha realization that, while embodied emissions weren’t that significant over the  life cycle of a building, they made up about half of the total carbon emission over the first 20 years of a building’s life, the years the Ed Mazria was telling were so important.  After working on the Embodied Carbon Benchmarking Study with CLF, I began looking at building reuse as great way to reduce embodied emission compared to new buildings.   Which brings me almost up to date. In 2019 I had the idea of carbon calculator that could compare the emissions of a reuse/remodel project to a new building.  I made a crude tool in excel and called it the 2Build or not 2Build Carbon Calculator. Erin McDade of Architecture 2030 got involved and made a much more sophisticate excel tool, Lori Ferris joined us and we got the same web developer who brought us the Zero tool to make us a free, open access tool that we launched in early 2022 with a new name – CARE Tool (Carbon Avoided Retrofit Estimator), A clunky name but a great acronym, because that’s what it’s all about - caring for what we have. I have mostly retired from Siegel & Strain, but I am still working on the CARE Tool.   I went to my first SDL Retreat in 2012 or 2013, and got to meet and talk to and be inspired by an amazing group of smart, passionate and very funny people. We have all been practicing sustainable design for a long time, and have seen amazing progress over the last 10 – 20 years; clearly we have a lot left to do. You are what sustains me.  Thank you. Larry

Reading these bios is a delight! Who knew Clark became an architect at age 10? How else to explain the 40+ years career? And how many guys did AHH date? and WHO was Larry in jail with? and more importantly, did he get a tattoo? Great stories which lead to more questions which, hopefully, we can answer in person at our own gray/green gathering although some of you aren't very gray.  I never went to jail for participating in demonstrations, but I did get called to the principal's office and suspended for wearing culottes (a split skirt), which was a dress code violation and the principal accused me of being a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) because of my radical attire and a recent article I'd authored about school integration. It didn't take much to be radical in Jackson, Mississippi in 1970. In May of that year, less than a mile away from my tiny rebellion, two black students were shot by the State Police and 12 other students were injured. We remember Kent State, but not so much Jackson State. It was bleak violent times and I was pretty soured on education and the south, so I didn't go to college. I followed my first career path of being a professional equestrian which led me to riding at Santa Anita racetrack. I was good enough to get paid for riding, but not good enough to enjoy the broken arm, then the broken leg and the resulting surgeries. While the leg was healing I could still drive, because I could throw the full leg cast to the other side of the Pinto console and use my left foot for the pedals while I tootled up Highway 1. On that trip I met the Rogue River in Oregon and (nod to AHH) a "guy". So I did a back-to-the woods thing for a while with the Whole Earth Catalog - learning how to skin a deer and that I would rather BUY vegetables than grow them and triple that for how I feel about chickens. So after a while I became a white water river guide and I enrolled in the Honors College at the University of Oregon and figured out how to get a degree without taking classes (it was still the 70s!). I wrote my thesis on how many ways humanity negatively impacts small protected watersheds like the Rogue River. I sat in on lectures that interested me with people like Ed Whitelaw and yes, Charlie Brown, but mostly I focused on political science. I think my parents hoped I would become. . .anything other than a wilderness guide, like maybe an environmental lawyer who shaved her legs.   I followed a "guy" east to Baltimore while he pursued his Ph.D at Johns Hopkins and I drove back and forth on I-80 to run rivers in the summer. Eventually, he went on to other things and I stayed in Baltimore, working in an art lovers dream job at the Walter's Art Gallery and auditing architecture history classes taught by Phoebe Stanton who took us on field trips to Falling Water and Columbus, Indiana. At some point I fell in love with architecture and announced I was going to grad school to be an architect. Everybody laughed. I went to the summer program at the GSD, applied to schools, got into a few I couldn't afford, went back to Oregon because it was a state school and, with a little creativity, I could claim residency. In architecture school it all came together - my passion for saving the planet, my love of history and the stories held around us, and the joy in solving complicated problems. I antagonized John Reynolds, but he forgave me, and my lab partner in his class became my husband and father of my two children. We graduated in a recession. We had no money. We were both in our 30's and had never worked as "architects". We moved to Boston because we needed a place with public transportation (we sold my little red toyota pickup AND kayak to pay for the move). We got jobs! and thought we would stay for a few years before going back west.  Having lived in 10 states and moved every few years as a child, I have now lived in the same house for 34 years. During the renovation we added grab bars in the shower. I am never moving again. My heart places, other than Boston, are Oregon and New Mexico. I am lucky to stay connected to both through family and friends. I didn't mention New Mexico, but my great great grandfather settled there and it was a regular visitation as a child. I realize now how lucky I was. We went on jeep rides across the White Sands with the ranger under the full moon after the gates shut and my grandfather took me to Pueblos long before they became tourist destinations and we ate Posole so spicy we'd cry as we ate. It offset living in Mississippi and Alabama and moving moving moving.  But about the SDL - I remember Beth Heider asking me if I was part of it. I figured a club with Nadav and Clark was VERY worth joining, so I found a way in. I was guiding sustainability at Goody Clancy and I was a LEED Fellow and I may have already published my Wiley textbook on Sustainable Preservation, I can't remember, but I was and am a huge fan of Meredith Elbaum and Barbra BatShalom and BuildingGreen and many of you who have already provided bios. I got to at least one of Jim and Sarah's amazing dinners and I had the extraordinary honor of being in Kira and Lance's book. I think I am more of a groupie than a member because I only went to a few of the summer gatherings, but the people I have met through SDL lift my spirits and inspire me to do more.  I met Carl Elefante long before SDL after a lecture I gave at the National Building Museum in 2003. This led to founding a technical sustainability committee with the Association of Preservation Technology and a 2005 symposium in which Carl said, "the greenest building is . . " and Wayne Trusty from Athena talked about the sunk environment costs of existing buildings and the avoided costs from reuse. In the preservation community we began calculating embodied energy in the 1970's. It's lovely to see "embodied carbon" going mainstream, but the wonderful tools we keep honing to understand and quantify GHG or GWP only underline what is a silent duh. A sustainable world values what already exists.  So the question for me continues to be how to help the world value existing buildings and memories, i.e. heritage, that are so essential to our physical and emotional well-being. I can and will continue sporadic writing (if only Kira could edit everything) and speaking and teaching. I continue in a small role in Goody Clancy encouraging younger people in explorations of circular economy, material re-use and transformative design. I am co-leading a study group for the AIA Strategic Council challenging how architects can be more effective in climate action around water which ties to resilience, carbon, and equity. If I am even a tiny bit as effective as MAL was with her SC study group, I will consider it a success. I am peripherally involved in the Climate Heritage Network. Lori Ferriss, once a mentee, is now my mentor and is including me in things like the World Buildings and Climate Forum in Paris in March. I am meeting Beth Heider at the Innovation Zero Conference in May for her session on water.  I try to offset my carbon hypocrisy footprint with handprints, but know I am running a deficit! At least if I go to GreenBuild this year, I'll be able to take the train. I have had and am having a wonderful life. I never forget that I am among the most fortunate people on the earth. Being a part of this group is a rich and selfish joy that brings me laughter and energy. I believe we are changing the world, but I want to do more. Ideas welcome. Jean  either jean.carroon@goodyclancy.com or jean.carroon@gmail.com 

Jean. What a wonderful adventure you’ve had. I love these descriptions of our diverse paths all leading to this wonderful supportive community. I now want to rewrite mine to make it more interesting!    Mary Ann

Reading your words has been intimidating.  And inspiring.  And a big reason that I am so grateful to have been asked to be a part of this collective. Like several of you, I have had a peripatetic life, moving a lot as a kid, and somewhat less so as an adult – something on the far side of a couple of dozen different places, as disparate as Spain, Brazil, Texas and Florida – and now, Nashville.  The reason I moved so much as a kid is that most of my family has been in the oil business (mostly in the dirty and dangerous drilling and exploration end of things, not the make a lot of money and smoke big cigars end) since the great East Texas Boom of the late 1920’s – I’m the third generation, both mother and father’s sides.  To put myself through college the first couple of years I worked as a roughneck in the Permian Basin of West Texas during breaks in the school years.  It may seem a little strange for someone of my background to have dedicated his professional (and personal) life to sustainability, but I was 14 years old on the first Earth Day, graduated from high school the year of the first Arab Oil Embargo, and got my engineering education during the Carter administration, when the whole country was trying to figure out how to get off our fossil fuel addiction. My master’s thesis work was on the Crosbyton Solar Power Project, a DOE-funded solar-powered steam-cycle power plant – Google “fixed mirror distributed focus” – you’ll find a reference to my thesis if you follow the thread far enough.  I graduated before Reagan came along, killed the project and took the solar panels off the White House roof.  These days, at family gatherings, we don’t talk about what I do – I’m the green sheep of the family. I’ve had an interesting life, a rewarding career, and blessed with good fortune.  Not the least of which was crossing paths with Nadav, at an EEBA conference presentation by Joe Lstiburek, in 2000.  I bet Nadav doesn’t even remember that, but I was already devouring the content in EBN and when I saw his name badge, it was like seeing a comic book hero IRL.  It was in that presentation, nearly a quarter century ago, Joe inspired a line that many of you have heard me use in one context or another, “Not even the dumbest of the Three Little Pigs would have built their office building/hospital/airport out of glass.”  [Shout out to Ann Edminister, too - Chris, tell her I said hi] Like Kira, as someone who is only architect-adjacent, I’ve been on the outside looking in, enviously, at the SDLs for quite a while.  My dear friend and SDL alum, Kirk Teske, even snuck me into an SDL summit at Greenbuild Chicago in 2010, where we did a short version of our new then, but now somewhat dated, Energy Modeling Game Show (which has come to be known as the “Wizard Show”).  I pleaded with Nadav to let me join the SDLs, but he stayed true to the founders' creed that the great unwashed (another way to say, “engineers”) must be excluded.  Which started a years-long, on-again off-again effort to create a parallel group of sustainable engineer leaders.  It finally came together about 5 or 6 years ago as the SMEPLs – which sounds like it might be a doughy fried delicacy if you try pronouncing it as it is written – the donut is our spirit animal. If you want to see a more traditional list of stuff about me, shuffle over a few pages of the BuildingGreen website to  https://www.buildinggreen.com/user/1254/

Amazing stories from an amazing group of people.  I’ve enjoyed reading all of them.   Here’s mine: I grew up in a forest in Illinois and our family renovated houses in our spare time.  Today, I mostly work on renovation projects and continue to integrate lessons from the forest into my work.  Seems like a straight line, right? At age four, my parents gifted me a workbench and tool set with a real hammer, saw, and chisel. I have the scars to prove it!  Learning how to use sharp tools at a very young age is actually much safer than ‘giving chainsaws to monkeys’ (a memorable quote from one of the SDL summits).  Buy the worst house on the best street, renovate while living in it, then sell high and upgrade.  On one of the upgrades, my parents bought a house and 10 acres of forest in the middle of a state park.  The parcel was originally planned as a hotel.  After the bricks arrived on site, the developer abandoned the project, bulldozed the bricks over the hill, and built four spec houses instead. A highlight of my childhood was spending time with my 70-year-old neighbor Maynard, a retired factory worker who grew up during the great depression.  One of our favorite activities was to go over the hill with a pry bar and shovel, dig for bricks, and build things with them.  The next property over was an abandoned roadside motel.  With the owner’s permission, we took apart the main house, removed and straightened the nails, stripped the copper wires and sold it, then built a modest cabin on the edge of the forest.  He taught us how to turn wire coat hangers into door latches, and old barrels into a pot belly stove. In the early 80s, my parents decided to build a passive solar house in our back yard.  We spent many weekends staking out the location of the house between the trees to optimize the solar orientation and future building performance. A frugal and practical upbringing in sustainability and construction.  Becoming an architect was logical choice. Undergrad at the University of Illinois and grad school at Berkeley.   In my first year at Berkeley I took a design studio with Galen Cranz, designing a more sustainable alternative to Trump’s proposed development in the Upper Westside of Manhattan.  Galen lived in NYC part-time and knew some of the sustainability greats who worked there.  One night we had dinner with John Todd who was working on the urban waste problem.  He had come up with a low-tech way to decompose household garbage into potting soil within two weeks (the living room of his SOHO loft was filled with aerated garbage cans).  We also met William McDonough.  He had just written the Hanover Principles and shared his adventures discovering the unsustainable forestry practices in South America.  Brief interactions, but meaningful. While at Berkeley, I lived at the International House where I met my future wife.  On her urging, I applied for and won a one-year architecture traveling fellowship, which led to a life-long addiction to travel (and a chance to visit my I-House friends in their home country).  On my travels, I crossed paths with a number of cultural icons that influenced my thinking: I met Mother Theresa in Calcutta (I still have her business card), watched Pope John Paul II give his Easter morning address from the Vatican, and was in the presence of the Dalai Lama who was staying at the same hotel as us in Bangalore. I returned to San Francisco, got married, worked in New York City for a couple of years while my wife went to grad school, then back to San Francisco, eventually landing up at Ratcliff Architects where I met Kit Ratcliff. He was working on all kinds of sustainability ideas, most of them I told him would never work.  This led to a long and healthy relationship debating ideas and helping each other grow and improve our work.   Kit attended the first SDL summit in Colorado but said that he was becoming too old for that type of engagement and thought that I would benefit more.  I attended my first SDL summit in 2010.   Around this time, I started attending the PG&E Energy Center evening lectures, presenting once, and using their daylight simulator.  I think that’s where I first met Pauline. The BALSA group had also just started, which introduced me to Mara Baum, Brad Jacobson, Jean Hansen and many others.  Larry Strain presented to our office a very detailed spreadsheet that he had created to track the embodied carbon for a project.  To increase my impact, I started to expand my thinking beyond the individual school building, looking at the energy performance of the overall campus, and then our client’s overall carbon impact including operations and transportation.  Continuing to expand my reach, I started a charter school in East Oakland with a team of urban educators, giving me the chance to understand how an organization can more directly impact the sustainability and health of a larger community. After spending ten years renovating our house and caregiving for my mother-in-law (who had a severe stroke), we needed a change.  An opportunity came up for my wife to lead one of her teams in Bangalore, India.  We thought this would be good opportunity and might be a better environment for her mom who was originally from India.  Sadly, her mom died only a few months after we arrived. In May, we will have been in India for 10 years.  During this time, I’ve worked on projects on my own in India and US, managed the charter school remotely, continued to work with Ratcliff as an SDL and architect, and had extra time to spend with our daughter, watching her grow into an amazing young person.  When she starts college in a few years, we will likely follow her back to the US. What a ride so far.  Life is definitely not a straight line!  No gray hairs yet.  I still feel like I have a lifetime of opportunities ahead. Brian

I was raised in the Seattle suburbs when Seattle was a place that was mostly known for airplanes and lumber.  I got an undergraduate civil engineering degree from Stanford University that was about structures and water but for me was mostly about environmental science and energy systems. After a year as a caretaker for a camp in the Sierra Nevada, I worked several years doing building energy research and policy work.   I lived in Seattle and then followed a woman (later my wife) to San Francisco. Eventually I decided to add design to the research and policy mix so I got an MArch from UC Berkeley.  While I was there, and after graduation, I had a research position at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. When my wife and I returned to Seattle for her PhD program, I decided to actually try the practice of Architecture.     Being a 35 year old architecture intern with a knowledge of building science and a general “sustainability” emphasis was a tough sell at the time, even in Seattle.  I eventually landed a job with a small firm where I stayed 10 years.  We tried to do all the right things - daylighting, natural ventilation, building with wood and local and natural materials.  My previous experience helped some, but my real superpower was my growing collection of Environmental Building News going back to the first issue - neatly organized in 3 ring binders in my basement library.  I would read each issue cover to cover the day it arrived in the mail, and would continually refer back to articles when working on a new project.  Working for a small firm eventually led to burnout, but I decided to give this "career" one more shot when Miller Hull took me in.  I was real lucky to spend time working on projects with Bob Hull before his untimely passing.  I then transitioned to being the firm’s Specifier, which I did for 3 years.   When the Bullitt Center came to the firm, I jumped at the chance to be part of it.  During the design of that project I was given a full time Sustainability position - the firm’s first time doing this.  I kind of had free rein to define what to do.  So I worked on lots of projects while also trying to figure out more intentional ways of delivering sustainable design and improving firm processes.  Then I was offered the chance to join SDL.  My first summit was 2013 in St Louis and it could not have come at a better time. SDL has changed so many firms I am sure, even ones that are already seen to be leaders. At SDL I found so many brilliant people.  I came back with so many ideas I almost didn’t know where to start.  But I quickly moved to prioritize - implementing new ways of working and also building knowledge base across the firm.  I attended summits from 2013-2017. During this time, Miller Hull's sustainability program was established as one of our 3 core operational missions, with a small team providing expertise.   I continue to work on many of the firm’s significant projects, including our Living Buildings, overseas embassies, single family residential, and public sector work, while also being the firm’s sustainability leader.  My design focus remains "building performance" - energy and emissions, daylighting, ventilation, mechanical system integration, comfort, health, etc.  As the firm's sustainability leader, one of my priorities is to develop a broader base of sustainability roles and to help move younger staff into leadership positions in project work and in the firm itself through expertise in sustainable design. Sages comes at a good time for me - it is time to let others be the Sustainable Design Leaders and to think of what comes next.  

Hello all, It has been very interesting to read everybody’s stories, and sorry it took me a while to write mine. I was born in Venezuela to a family of university professors, and since my parents were both in academia, that is the world I lived in as I grew up. Both were law professors; my father did his doctorate in La Sorbonne and was one of the first law doctors in Venezuela. He went on to become dean of the school of law, rector of the University, and then Supreme Court Justice. As a child, we traveled a lot on their sabbaticals, and I lived in Vancouver, Switzerland, Sweden, and NY, where my mother worked at the UN for a year. My mother also had a big appreciation for art, especially contemporary art, and folk art. We opened a gallery together in Venezuela and did exhibits of Venezuelan artists. The gallery design was one of my first projects while I was still in architecture school. We would travel around western Venezuela, visiting artists, which further developed my passion for vernacular art and architecture. I was always impressed with the work these artists did without training and loved the inspiring locations where they lived, in the Andes mountains, in the desert, or by the lake. All of this was many years ago but, of course, impacted who I am now. I did my undergrad in Venezuela. This was free, we paid nothing for college, and we had great faculty, many from Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, who were fleeing right-wing dictatorships. This is where I first became interested in bioclimatic architecture and designing for those with the least resources. After I finished architecture school, I worked briefly in the Architecture division of a State Agency. I designed several projects, including a community center, a health center, and a small chapel for the Paraujano community that lived in a lagoon in western Venezuela. I used local materials, such as mangroves and thatch roofs. After that, I got a scholarship from CONICIT, the National Research Council, for a master’s in architecture and computer systems. My master's thesis was a software to study energy flows in a building. There is a fun fact on that that I will leave for later. I began teaching architecture in Venezuela with an emphasis on sustainability, but always with a strong interest in providing decent housing to those who lived in the favelas. At the university, we had a team that did community design work from the university. I was on a team of three architects that designed an 800-unit housing project that could grow over time, much as they did in the favelas, but with basic services and control of the outdoor space, organized in pockets owned by the residents around them. I was also one of the designers of a small town that we designed to move people away from a petrochemical project and won a competition in Spain for a net zero building in Tenerife that took a while to build. In 1998, I won a Fulbright and came to UCLA to do my PhD with the people who wrote the books I used in Venezuela: Baruch Givoni and Murray Milne. UCLA was a great learning experience; what I learned with them was life-changing and humbling. Doing a PhD, you realize how little you know about a topic and how much there is to learn. I now considers myself a lifelong learner. With Murray, I did a lot of coding, learning Java, which was more advanced than the Pascal and Basic I had used (no grasshopper then), and developed a smart ventilation system, which I built and tested. At the same time with Baruch, I was doing more research on Passive Cooling systems. They always pushed me to build and test my ideas, and the roof of Perloff Hall at UCLA was full of my experiments with other PhD students in sustainability. Afterward, I started teaching at Cal Poly Pomona for what I thought would be a short time, and I have been there for 20 years. At the same time, I also missed the practice of architecture, and I got a position as sustainability director at HMC and later at RTKL, which became CRTKL and is now part of Arcadis, where I am the sustainability services Director for the Architecture and Urbanism Division, which is about 4000 people. At the same time, I continue teaching, currently teaching Environmental Controls and Design Studios. I have adapted the syllabus of ECS to be less about mechanical systems and more about the architectural strategies we can implement to reduce our carbon footprint, focusing on what we can do with climate analysis, passive solar, daylight, shade, etc. I teach them tools and building physics, and I wrote a book based on this, Carbon Neutral Architectural Design, published by Routledge CRC Press, with a third edition coming in April. I remember hearing about Nadav and Building Green from the Society of Building Science Educators, where I was the president for a few years. Nadav and Building Green were very well-regarded and respected. I have only been able to attend one of the retreats, even though I always want to go. I look forward to getting to know all of you better and continuing our mission together. I thought I would write just a paragraph; I hope this is not too long…LOL (as my daughter would write).

Hi Sagers!  I will give this a go! I think I may have gone overboard here….but alas, had some fun walking down memory lane…  I started my career in sustainability through a child labor program my parents put me through.. ha!  At the age of 12, we moved in to the basement of our house to be, with no electricity, gravity fed water, and an outhouse. Over a five year period, we peeled the logs one summer, built a floor the next, and arrived at a 1 1/2 story semi passive solar house (1500 sq.ft./floor), with a composting toilet, a 12 volt lighting system, and a generator to charge batteries and to play my classic rock albums.  This experience taught me about design, construction, and that it is wicked cold in Vermont, and wood has an R value of 1 per inch  (averaging R-8), and infiltration is a real thing (fiberglass sandwiched between the logs did not perform... ).  We heated with wood, and my upstairs bedroom was far from the source, and my water glass would freeze by the side of my bed at times... a great first lesson on the need for high performance envelopes. I did my undergraduate at UVM, and after trying business, and engineering, I landed on Environmental Studies - with a self designed major in Solar Architecture, graduating in '87.  I worked for a year for an architect, and swung a hammer building for a summer, and then ended up in Warren, VT working part time for David Sellers (the father of Design/Build) and John Connell (Founder of the Yestermorrow Design/Build School).  They opened my eyes to the wonders of design/build, and I applied to architecture school, and ended up at the University of Oregon for a three year Masters (MArch '92).  While there, I lead a student initiative to create a design/build program that continues to this day, and headed the Solar Energy Information Center + Lecture Series that years later turned in to the HOPES Conference.  Each summer, I went back to Warren, VT to be a teaching assistant to John Connell for a 6 week long design/build program at Yestermorrow. When I graduated in ’92, there were few architecture jobs, and I landed at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Boston co-leading a national education campaign on renewable energy, and co-wrote the book "Renewables are Ready". From there, I was invited to apply as the Executive Director of the Yestermorrow Design/Build School - they had little money, so needed a sucker to come work really hard for little pay. Sounded great to me.  I was the ED for three years and doubled the enrollment of the school, advanced the sustainability agenda by bringing in the likes of Bill McDonough, Steve Loken, John Picard, Pliny Fisk, Alex Wilson, Marc Rosenbaum, Bill Browning and more! I met many of them when I was invited to participate in the Greening of the White House back when Clinton said in his 1993 earth day speech, "I'm going to do in my house, what I want you all to do in your house".  It was an amazing gathering of 100 top professionals from around the country (I was the lucky one to know one of the organizers…). Three years prior, Bob Berkebile founded the AIA COTE, and slightly after, David Gottfried, Rick Fedrizzi, and Mike Italino founded the USGBC. At yestermorrow, I officially burned myself out after 3 years, and had an invitation from Bill Browning to join him at Rocky Mountain Institute to work in their Green Development Services. This got me working all over the world, and is where I caught the consulting bug. I recall a great consulting trip to Singapore with the late Greg Franta, Nancy Clanton, and Ron Perkins.  I worked there for two years, then decided I would need and want my architect license in order to have a bigger impact as a professional. So I headed to San Fran. After a short stint with Sim Van der Ryn, I joined forces with U of O Colleague Ned White, and we formed an architecture practice called McCoppin Studios - where we shared an office space with Lynn Simon! All this while, I kept involved with the development of LEED and the USGBC. In fact, had a part-time stint at USGBC helping recruit members.  I met my wife in San Fran, and after 4 years in the bay area, and the birth of our son, we decided to move east, and landed in Portland, Maine.  I bridged between architecture and sustainability consulting for a few years, but then, with LEED really kicking in to gear, switched my focus to just consulting.  One project led to another, and when I won the 5 Million Sqft Block C of the CityCenter project in Las Vegas with KPF, Studio Daniel Libeskind, JAHN, Foster + Partners, and with Gensler as client rep, and Adamson as AOR…It led to opportunities all over the world consulting on amazing projects. I too became a LEED Faculty, which I held for ten years, and that helped bring me to China, Dubai, Stockholm, San Paulo – and oh so many other places! Fast forward to 2012, and Thornton Tomasetti came knocking on my door. They saw what I/we were doing with building science, energy modeling, daylighting, and yes, certification, and they wanted to diversify their offerings.  I agreed to be acquired, and have not looked back since.  A year later we acquired Simon & Associates, and the group has grown to have staff in SF, NY, Boston, Portland (Maine) and London. At the start of 2024, the sustainability practice merged with our resilience practice, so we are now 45 people strong within the 1700 person global engineering company. We continue to grow, and I am blown away by the opportunities we have had in higher ed, to aviation, to mixed use, to commercial, to life sciences, to affordable housing. I pinch myself at times at the range of work, and people we have the privilege of working with.  My role has shifted to be more outwardly focus to build the business more, and message our company commitment to climate action through decarbonization (mitigation) and resilience (adaptation) One last nugget – In Maine, I was on the board of the AIA, and co-led the COTE group for a whole bunch of years. This triggered an idea to host a larger whole New England Leadership Summit that many of you participated in. Maine, Boston, Vermont, and NH each hosted the events targeting an invite only list of ~100 key professionals. Many great impacts came out of these event, but the one that stands out is the draft language for the Architects Code of Ethics & Professional Conduct to include the environment: Canon VI – Obligations to the Environment. I was part of a handful of people to get the language in front of the AIA legal team - and then it was voted in by the AIA Membership.  About this same time,  I applied, and was accepted, for the national AIA COTE Advisory Group for a three year term, and was actively involved in the Framework for Design Excellence. I believe I have gone on long enough!  It has been so great to collaborate with so many of you over the years! And I will expect many more!  Go OF’s!  I mean, Sagers!