Wight & Company’s sustainability director Lois Vitt Sale urges us to re-educate ourselves in our quest to solve wicked problems.
2020 has been a cliffhanger of a year. While earthquakes haven’t yet appeared on the list of shattering events causing seismic perspective shifts, many of the year’s happenings have called into question the fundamentals on which we rely to produce built environment solutions.
Questions
The pandemic has raised many questions. Should we continue to design open offices? Should operable windows be required by code in all building types and climates? Are underfloor air systems going to make a comeback? Is the suburban office community going to have a renaissance? What is the ideal solution for delivering a healthy indoor environment? How do we resolve the potential conflict between ventilation and efficiency? Should existing office buildings be renovated to accommodate live, work, learn, and play environments? Will public transportation survive the abdication of its use during the pandemic, and what will be the long-term impacts on its use in the future?
These questions go deeper than the assumptions we rely upon in answering questions at building scale. Natural disasters sparked from climate change continue to shine a spotlight on development patterns. In response to wildfires in the western U.S., we ask; “Should we continue to develop communities that press into the edges of natural areas? And if so, how? When will resilience be a mainstream thread in the work we do?” The urge to flee urban areas in response to the pandemic is resulting in a spike in home sales outside major US cities. Technological advances have made work anywhere possible. Does getting out of cities conflict with preserving more open space? Haven’t we already condemned sprawl and urged urbanization as the answers to a sustainable future?
The Black Lives Matter movement surged this summer as the country confronted more instances of police brutality and forced Americans to confront institutional racism in a way not contemplated since the late 1960s. As architects and practice leaders for our industry — the designers for the social stages upon which our modern lives are conducted — we have been forced to ask ourselves how our actions have contributed to the inequities engrained in our society.
These questions have pushed to the front of the line in response to current events — the tapestry of questions that are top-of-mind for most sustainability leaders. Since the beginning of this century, many architects have focused on issues of health and climate change. Thankfully, their work has influenced the development of products, technologies, and practices that address these issues. But the questions, once surfaced, do not remain fixed. They evolve, revealing layers of intention and impact. In the early 2000s, we were concerned with defining net zero energy. Now, we are discussing building and municipal electrification, embodied carbon, net zero carbon, net positive energy, and more. Do you remember when a building couldn’t qualify for an EnergyStar label if the HVAC system was all electric?
How do we grapple with these issues? How do we gain the knowledge we need to responsibly address them in our work?
In our day jobs, architects plan, design, and assist in the execution of projects in response to client demands. But as a profession, we also take responsibility for shaping design solutions in response to these wider societal and technological questions. Like doctors for their patients, we believe our profession should prescribe antidotes to the ills that imperil the health of the occupants in our buildings. In the case of public health experts, that means the health of our communities and neighborhoods. In the past ten years, there has been growing recognition that the built environment can impact human health. Certification systems like WELL and Fitwell have emerged in response to this growing recognition. But surprisingly, coursework addressing the link between health and architecture is not yet part of the mainstream curriculum in architecture schools.
A recent article entitled, “A guide for architecture for the public health workforce,” (Public Health, January 2020) explored the links between public health and architecture.
In the article, the authors diagramed the impacts on health by architecture as a pyramid.
This diagram relates to health specifically. But we could diagram many of the pressing issues we face as similarly prioritized pyramids and consider their intersection with architecture. In most instances, architects are comfortable with the domains of the secondary and tertiary tiers. But, the tier of influence with the most potential positive impact is the primary tier. This bottom level is where we need to stretch our knowledge to position our work for the best outcomes.Past Curricula, and T-Shaped People
It has been more than thirty years since I was an architecture student, but I do not remember taking any courses on public health or sociology as they relate to urban planning. Nor did I take courses on waste management planning, supply chain logistics, watershed management, or climate change. I was absorbed in learning the intricacies of design craft. Some days in school, the amount of knowledge I was trying to cram into my head seemed overwhelming. I was not alone in feeling this way. I’ll never forget the day one of my classmates walked down the corridor exclaiming, “I wasn’t born with the knowledge!” When I heard her vent, I remember thinking, “Yeah! Me neither!” I realized I didn’t need to be omniscient, but I did need curiosity and a desire to continue to learn.
Today, when students or young professionals seek me out for guidance, I share something I learned years ago during a visit to IDEO, a firm well-known for their design thinking. Their CEO, Tim Brown, says they look for T-Shaped people. “T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics. The vertical stroke of the ‘T’ is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist, or a mechanical engineer.
The horizontal stroke of the ‘T’ is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective — to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-Shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.”
Farther Afield?
While it’s nearly impossible to cram all the learning an architect needs into four or six years of schooling, architecture programs could prepare their students to be conversant in many different disciplines outside of architecture and engineering. While programs like the solar decathlons create integrated design teams to design and build solutions, they are generally still within the building industry bandwidth. How about stretching the integration farther afield? Interdisciplinary teams of biologists, sociologists, economists, public health students, or others could join architecture students to design solutions for problems in studio. This kind of work could engender a habit of looking outside the practice for solutions with greater depth and impact.
In addition to interdisciplinary projects, perhaps a core of courses could be developed to help future professionals think outside the lines. Courses in the curriculum might include public health, government and policy, biology, ecology, sociology, climate science, et al. Those courses could build bridges between each discipline’s unique subject matter and the built environment. Undergraduate architecture students do take general education courses that venture beyond the boundaries of architecture, but they are not being asked to integrate various domains of knowledge. Could students be encouraged to make cross-disciplinary connections to enhance their work in architecture and beyond?
Design professionals are required to fulfill a certain number of continuing education hours to maintain our licensing requirements. When we marry our need to think outside our profession with the need for continual multi-disciplinary learning, the mandate becomes more than ticking off a requirement. One source of our continued learning is at conferences.
As someone who has worked in reviewing and selecting educational content for conferences for years, I know attention is paid to the content and quality of the education. Often, these conferences’ most exciting content is the “outsiders” who come to share their perspectives and broaden our horizons. At this year’s Summit on Leadership in Environmental Responsibility, we were invited to think of our planet from outer space — where geopolitical boundaries disappear.
What percentage of the architects in our practices routinely attend these conferences? I would venture to say the larger percentage of our profession earns their CEUs from product manufacturers who trade lunch for an hour’s attention. While manufacturer product lunches offer valuable technical learning, they offer diminished chances for networking and the deeper collaboration that in-person conferences offer. But maybe we can get those in other ways? As a byproduct of the current reality in which we are living, we have an opportunity to invite more of our number to take part in the webinars that are the currency of continuing education in a pandemic world. Our firms’ investment is limited to lower subscription fees unburdened by travel. And the opportunity cost of lost work hours is far less.
We have a pressing need to un-shutter our thinking and answer the issues that threaten our world. Education is always a point of beginning in fixing any system. But we can ill afford to treat this issue as if we have time to take small steps. Instead, we need to intervene at multiple points in the profession – from student to practitioner – in substantive ways.
Technology is our friend in this landscape of need. It can deliver content at minimal cost and connect us across distances. Just months ago, the value put on physical proximity was a barrier. Driven by COVID pandemic adaptation, distance has now been dematerialized as a learning barrier. Even as we define education as the process of learning, we can blur the boundaries between learning and doing by collaborating with partners who widen our perspectives and assist us in framing the solutions we devise in designing our world. Our profession is a practice. A practice implies continued learning.
These kinds of boundary-crossing, continued-learning opportunities are the foundation on which we must evolve to bring relevant solutions to the built environment.
Seize them.
Lois Vitt Sale, FAIA, LEED Fellow, is Wight & Company’s Chief Sustainability Officer & Senior Vice President. Her 32-year career as a practicing architect has focused on sustainability as intrinsic to design, aided by the application of green technologies and sustainable planning. At Wight she has led the design effort for five buildings meeting the criteria for Net Zero Energy. Her work continues to raise the bar for high performance healthy buildings for work designed and built by her firm. She has been adjunct faculty at Northwestern University since 2005, educating, volunteering, and promulgating an understanding that creating places where people thrive demands deeply sustainable built environment solutions.