Ellen Mitchell-Kozack challenges us to redefine purpose and restore balance.
These days our social media feeds are full of clever memes describing how uniquely awful 2020 has been. Regardless of your gender, race, religion, or political persuasion, this seems to be one thing we can all agree on. But what if we flip that notion on its head and start to think of 2020 differently? Not as being the worst year, but instead, as the most important consequential year of a generation? The year when we see with clarity just how out of balance we are. This staggering imbalance is evident from all perspectives, macro to micro, as it destabilizes our families, communities, and life on Planet Earth.
Current Reality
Even before 2020, the architectural profession’s growing awareness of our social and environmental responsibilities has been gaining momentum. The AIA Code of Ethics revisions in 2018 and 2019’s call for Urgent and Sustained Climate Action are both evidence of our growing awareness. Despite these steps, we still fall short of a comprehensive and systemic approach to understanding and measuring design’s collective impact. Our industry does not recognize the substantial role it plays in this imbalance.
From an environmental outlook, the AEC industry’s contribution to climate change is irrefutable. Between the energy needed to run a building (operational carbon), and the emissions attributed to building materials (embodied carbon), the built environment is responsible for 40% of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere annually. To put that into perspective, cement production, a small but energy-intensive component of concrete, is responsible for four times more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire airline industry each year. That’s just one component of one material out of thousands specified, purchased, and installed in buildings every day.
We know fossil fuel consumption is a critical factor in a warming planet, but a concurrent factor that will exacerbate this imbalance is our overconsumption of natural resources. Earth overshoot day is a point in time every year where humanity has consumed all the natural resources the earth can replenish to stay in ecological balance for that year. This accounting covers everything from the number of trees we cut down that will grow back, to the number of fish we can harvest that will reproduce, to the amount of carbon we can emit that will naturally be sequestered. Even with the COVID-19 pandemic slowing down emissions and consumption rates, Earth Overshoot Day for 2020 occurred on August 22, just two thirds of the way into the year. Every natural resource consumed from August 23 through December 31 is widening the deficit between short-term gains and long-term resilience. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists have given us roughly ten years before these two forces activate an environmental collapse from which we will be unlikely to innovate our way out.
Societal imbalances are also on the rise. Some of these imbalances are unique to our industry and some farther reaching. Our profession has been nibbling around the edges of JEDI (justice, equity, diversity & inclusion) for a few years now, wrestling with issues like pay equity, lack of diversity at leadership levels, and chronically low percentages of minorities in the profession. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked the outrage of a nation already besieged by a global pandemic. The months that followed have been a combination of soul searching and industry navel gazing. All this has led to what feels like an earnest desire to tackle some of these challenges and have the tough conversations. There is a growing recognition: we must address the systems and structures that lead to inequities in our global community. This transformation cannot simply be the responsibility of women and minorities to champion alone. It must also be led by those who have historically benefitted by the current inequalities. And we can’t stop there. We must recognize that the buildings and spaces we design will either foster or inhibit social cohesion and equity. There is no in-between.
On its face, the environmental and social impacts our profession grapples with seem disparate problems. A closer look, however, suggests a more direct relationship as evidenced in issues around environmental justice, defined as fair and equitable distributions of environmental benefits and burdens. One of the clearest examples of environmental justice, or lack thereof, can be found along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. Appropriately termed “cancer alley,” this area is home to hundreds of oil and petrochemical manufacturing facilities with predominantly poor and minority communities living in their shadows. The populations in these “fenceline communities” are fifty times more likely to develop cancer than those in the general demographic. They are significantly more vulnerable to other pollution-related health issues such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and heart disease. These kinds of co-morbidities make them less likely to fend off diseases such as COVID-19. Since the pandemic began, people living in cancer alley are more than twice as likely as the average Louisianan to die from the disease. But what do architects have to do with industrial pollution? Some of us design and build those sprawling industrial complexes. The rest of us select and specify thousands of building materials, many comprised of chemical compounds produced in those facilities. At some level, we are all part of the imbalance.
Purpose
While these challenges can seem insurmountable, there is reason for optimism on all fronts. What we must avoid, however, is an either/or scenario where we are prioritizing one set of issues over the other. The path to meaningful progress must include both environmental and social considerations manifested in the way we run our organizations and in the way we design built environments. The common denominator to both is purpose. As individuals, a sense of purpose drives us and makes us feel like we are connected to something greater than ourselves. On a corporate level, companies that have a strong sense of purpose outperform those that don’t in attracting top talent, expanding market share, and profitability.
Specific to the places and spaces we create, we must reframe the purpose of every project in the context of its effect on the greater whole. This means applying a level of whole-systems thinking that has historically been counter to our linear, siloed design process. Beginning at the earliest stages of design, we must deliberately slow down and understand the challenges, opportunities, and impacts specific to that project. This level of understanding can only come when we willingly introduce unique, diverse perspectives, consider upstream and downstream impacts, and look beyond site boundaries. Whole systems thinking can manifest itself in a variety of ways, requiring that we look at interdependencies that might not be obvious.
We must understand how a building’s systems affect each other, such as how the envelope can affect the mechanical load or how paint colors can influence the amount of light needed. When we look at each of these components in isolation, we miss the big picture and the synergies.
Perspective
We must also recognize that the building itself is part of a larger system. It directly affects its community, so we should make every effort to engage community representatives at project inception. This not only gives us a richer understanding of the nuances of a place, it also builds consensus and good will beyond the project team and the industry. We must think broadly about the upstream and downstream impacts of our decisions. For building material selections, we should be able to understand the impacts of extraction and manufacturing on workers and communities living near industrial complexes. We should be aware of a material’s impacts at the end of its useful life. Can it be recycled? What impact will its degradation have on the soil and groundwater if sent to a landfill? We can no longer be complacent with simply throwing things away without understanding exactly where “away” is and who it affects.
Tools
Fortunately, our industry is rising to this challenge. A host of tools and frameworks inform our choices and guide our processes. The most all-encompassing is the AIA’s Framework for Design Excellence. A useful overlay to any design process, it challenges teams to take a holistic approach in discovering the full potential of a project. Each of its categories prompts discussion and allows simultaneous, quantitative goal setting and qualitative storytelling. Many of its categories align with more traditional sustainability rating systems such as LEED, but they also factor in discussions around equitable communities, economic drivers, resilience and post-occupancy evaluation. The AIA Framework is flexible enough to apply across multiple project types and scales while pointing the way towards design work that meets the needs of all stakeholders including clients, building users, communities, and the planet.
Business
Beyond how we approach design, we also need a paradigm shift in the business of architecture. Outside our industry, this shift is happening quickly, spurred in large part by capital investment managers who dictate the flow of money. Asset managers like BlackRock have explicitly stated they will be allocating investor dollars into companies that are addressing their environmental and social impacts. Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has been explicit about this connection, saying, “It must begin with a clear embodiment of your company’s purpose in your business model and corporate strategy. Purpose is not a mere tagline or marketing campaign; it is a company’s fundamental reason for being – what it does every day to create value for its stakeholders. Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits but the animating force for achieving them.” Notably, this move toward the triple-bottom-line valuation isn’t being done out of some moral obligation or philosophical viewpoint. It is being done because companies paying attention to their environmental and social impacts are outperforming those that aren’t. They are poised to be more resilient, diverse, and innovative, all of which benefits the bottom line.
Except for a few mega-firms, architects are not typically beholden to the type of transparency publicly traded companies are. We are not pressured to understand or disclose our environmental and social impacts. Despite this, we are seeing more firms voluntarily quantify, and sometimes publish, performance data on these impacts. From an environmental standpoint, the AIA’s 2030 Commitment is the industry’s roadmap to eliminating carbon emissions in buildings by the year 2030. Through its Design Data Exchange (DDX), we can now understand, report, and set goals to reduce operational carbon through energy efficient design. While there is currently no similar organizing framework for measuring our social impacts, frameworks such as the UN Global Compact and its associated 17 Sustainable Development Goals can help us broaden our efforts, recognizing that environmental sustainability cannot happen without social equity.
A Question of Balance
The architecture industry is at a crossroads. Executive leaders are widely recognizing the existential forces poised to disrupt, if not radically change, the practice of architecture. But therein lies the opportunity to reframe our purpose. We must transition from relying solely on traditional work that will increasingly be commoditized to positioning ourselves as systems thinkers and problem solvers focused on global challenges. How can we create buildings that are regenerative and not simply less bad? How can we design spaces that heal the sick rather than simply care for them? How do we broaden our outreach beyond the 10% of the global population that can afford access to our services? Fundamentally, how do we lead the charge to reclaim humanity’s balance? The challenges and the tools exist.
The question is: can we bring them together to redefine our purpose and find the new balance?
Ellen Mitchell-Kozack AIA, LEED BD+C, WELL AP is Vice President, Chief Sustainability Officer at Leo A. Daly. A nationally recognized voice in sustainable design and public interest design, Ellen’s goal is to leverage Leo A. Daly’s integrated design expertise to affect positive change. She applies a humanitarian and environmental lens to architecture to benefit clients, the communities we live in, and the future of our planet. As CSO, Ellen leads Leo A. Daly’s strategic initiatives in sustainable design worldwide, including Environmental Social & Governance, alignment with the UN Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goals, carbon footprint assessment, and social impact.
Ellen was named one of several “Heroes and Mavericks” by Boutique Design in 2018, a BD+C 40 Under 40 winner in 2015, and won Emerging Leader Awards from AIA Dallas (2012) and the Design Futures Council (2013). Her work has been featured in Dezeen, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, and Designboom.