Platform 2021–2022: Sustainable Design—Innovation on Middle Ground

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S AT A U S T I N S C H O O L O F A R C H I T E C T U R E

SUSTAINABLe

DESIGN

CONTENTS

1 Dean’s Message Contributors 2 Contributors 5 Editor’s Introduction Global/Regional

Material

6 Katherine Lieberknecht

54 Ulrich Dangel

12 Katie Coyne

62 Jen Wong

22 Miriam Solis, Abby Randall, Will Davies

68 Francisco Gomes

City/Building

Alumni Profiles

28 Aleksandra Jaeschke

78 Shivani Langer

34 Coleman Coker

80 Marc Coudert

40 Juliana Felkner 48 Matt Fajkus and Daniel Garcia

82 PHILANTHROPY PHILANTHROPY

Platform is the annual magazine of The University of Texas at

and teaching at the School that advances more sustainable buildings,

Austin School of Architecture. It serves as a platform for the

landscapes, communities, and cities. Each article considers how

school to investigate the intersections of its research, practice, and

faculty and students innovatively navigate the complex and fertile

pedagogical approaches with a broader audience.

middle ground of dichotomies in our fields to reach results and

Each issue of Platform features articles of topical interest in the

conclusions. These contributions about planning and design through

disciplines of architecture, architectural history, community and

relationships, rather than of objects, not only connect to core tenets

regional planning, historic preservation, interior design, landscape

of sustainability, they provide a basis to show how the School of

architecture, sustainable design, and urban design. Editors selected

Architecture cuts across professional areas of expertise, expands

from the school’s faculty develop a new theme or prompt for the

disciplinary perspectives, and contributes to fundamental discourse

publication each year and drive its conceptual direction.

about the built environment through its research methods, critical

This issue, titled Sustainable Design: Innovation on Middle Ground,

practices, and teaching.

is edited by Associate Professor Matt Fajkus and features research

EDITOR Matt Fajkus MANAGING EDITOR Leora Visotzky ASSISTANT EDITORS Carolina English Julia Szeto DESIGN Tenderling | tenderling.com Cover images courtesy of EcoRise, Mary Warwick, Materials Lab, Go Austin! Vamos Austin!, Coleman Coker, Vision Galveston, Asakura Robinson, Luther Yamamoto, City of Austin and Piston Design.

CONTACT The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture 310 Inner Campus Drive, B7500 Austin, TX 78712-1009 512.471.1922 | soa.utexas.edu leora@austin.utexas.edu TO OUR READERS We welcome ideas, questions, and comments.

Please share your thoughts with us.

DEAN'S MESSAGE D. MICHELLE ADDINGTON When Associate Professor Matt Fajkus and Center for American Architecture and Design Managing Director Leora Visotzky first approached me about their intention for this issue of Platform as a series of essays posing dichotomies in sustainability, I must honestly say that I was unsure. After climate change and sustainability entered the culture wars with politically polarizing viewpoints, I witnessed too much focus on the arguments and declarations, particularly in the fields of the built environment where the demonstrative and the didactic began to supplant the deep and difficult research we needed to do. It was as if winning the argument mattered more than producing meaningful change, or perhaps, more accurately, it was as if we assumed that we had the right answers; we only need to convince the “other” side to get on board. I have witnessed five decades of sustainable initiatives for the built environment that yielded no substantive reduction in energy or environmental impacts even insofar as many countries and institutions proudly trumpet their sustainable bona fides.

Branding, rhetoric, and self-congratulation have not changed our world for the better as we continue to barrel toward rapidly increasing global temperatures.

I came to The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture four years ago because I believed it was uniquely suited to address difficult and complex questions, most especially surrounding climate change. I also knew that real change is messy, and that any tangible move forward would have to face hard questions about the mounting inequities borne by so many. So many of the solutions that our fields were putting forward as sustainable best practices were intended to preserve the lifestyle of the “haves” while drowning the “have-nots” with the consequences and the costs. In Matt Fajkus’ introduction to this issue, he reminds us of the original definition of sustainable development as put forward by the Brundtland Commission nearly thirtyfive years ago, in which the environment and human developmental needs were positioned as competing, not complementary, needs.

There has historically been no track out of poverty for our world’s most disadvantaged societies other than through a path built upon energy and environmental exploitation. As we are beginning to reckon with the impending consequences of the unprecedented building boom occurring across developing countries and economies in transition, we don’t get to circle our wagons to protect our lifestyle while pointing a finger at those who are striving to have a tiny piece of what we take for granted.

Brundtland’s commission understood this, and left us with the messy, intractable problem of making difficult choices in what is ultimately a zero-sum situation. There are no easy, win-win solutions.

As I read through the essays of this volume, I realized that rather than posing arguments pitting opposing points of view, they manifest ideas raised by Brundtland. Each essay wrestles with how the needs of human development must be worked into what has been for too long a one-sided approach. Each one wrestles with conflict — the conflict in how we balance and weigh choices, the conflict in what we choose to address and what we must forego, and the conflict between who we serve as a client and who we serve as a society. The processes of those who design the built environment are messy, even if the resultant products may not appear to be. For all those in the lay public who are quick to describe architecture as poetic praxis or as frozen music, those within the fields know that it is a process of decision after decision among a stunningly vast territory of competing needs and requirements. The dichotomies posed in this magazine lift the veil on this process.

The School of Architecture may seem like a small player in this critical problem facing the world, but we are in a unique position to lead the way forward. With disciplines spanning the full range of the built environment, from interior design to architecture to landscape architecture, all the way to urban design and community and regional planning, we know what it takes to step out of our domain of purview and fold in knowledge from far

afield. There is no other set of professions that navigates such broad territory. Rather than taking sides in what has become a polemical distraction, our remarkable faculty are foregrounding the questions we must ask, the constituents we must include, and the actions we must take. Most importantly, they are building that capacity in our students, our community, and our youth. They aren’t just operating in the middle ground, they are building bridges that interconnect diverse issues and multiple impacts.

Fifteen years ago, I invited Gro Harlem Brundtland to speak at a symposium I had organized on sustainability. After being peppered with questions from the audience asking her to declare an unequivocal solution to slow climate change — Nuclear power! Geoengineering the upper atmosphere! Electric cars! LEED buildings! — she explained that sustainability was not a problem to be solved with a heroic solution or a mandate, but rather a constant questioning and requestioning as we work through difficult, intractable problems with the hope that with each question, we learn something new, and in so doing, cause less harm. At the School of Architecture, we are here to do that difficult work.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Coleman Coker

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Katie Coyne

Ulrich Dangel

Will Davies

Matt Fajkus

Juliana Felkner

Daniel Garcia

Francisco Gomes

Aleksandra Jaeschke

Katherine Lieberknecht

Abby Randall

Miriam Solis

Jen Wong

Coleman Coker is the Professor of Practice at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and director of the Gulf Coast DesignLab. He is a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Rome Prize recipient from the American Academy in Rome. Coker is an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 2019 Architectural Education Award winner for his community-outreach work with the Gulf Coast DesignLab. Coker has practiced architecture for over thirty-five years, much of that in partnership with Samuel Mockbee at Mockbee/Coker Architects, and later as head of building studio. He has received numerous awards, including National AIA Honor awards, Architectural Record awards, and P/A Design Awards. His work has been highlighted at the Museum of Modern Art, SF MoMA, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and his work resides in the National Building Museum permanent collection. He is past director of the Memphis Center of Architecture and holds a master’s in fine arts from the Memphis College of Art where he also received an honorary doctorate of fine arts in 2008.

Katie Coyne leads the Urban Ecology Studio at Asakura Robinson. Her work spans planning and design disciplines and incorporates resilient design; landscape ecology; and plant-, health-, and climate science into parks, conservation areas, urban landscapes, neighborhood and small area plans, sustainable tourism strategies, and green infrastructure design. Katie’s education and experience in ecology, planning, and design helps her understand how economic, cultural, social, and ecological goals must be balanced across

scales for a resilient and equitable future. She has been part of the leadership team on numerous innovative projects. In 2019, Katie won the Austin Under Forty Award in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction category; was recognized by the Austin Business Journal as one of the top twentyfive women leaders in Austin; and, in 2020, won the Central Texas Planner of the Year Award. Katie serves as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee for Austin’s Climate Equity Plan, Vice Chair on both the City of Austin Environmental Commission and Joint Sustainability Committee, and is on the Board of Directors for The Trail Foundation and Austin Outside. As a former board member of Equality Texas (#yallmeansall), she continues to work on LGBTQ+ advocacy in Austin and throughout Texas.

Ulrich Dangel is an associate professor and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in design, construction, architectural detailing, and structural design. He received a diploma in architecture from Universität Stuttgart in Germany and a master of architecture from the University of Oregon.

His professional career led him to London where he worked for internationally renowned architecture firms Foster and Partners as well as Grimshaw. He is a registered architect in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Texas and maintains an Austin-based design practice. Dangel’s research and teaching focus on the use of wood in construction, its influence on building culture and craft, and how it contributes to the advancement of sustainable practices at the local and global economic scales.

Birkhäuser Basel published his first two books, Sustainable Architecture

in Vorarlberg: Energy Concepts and Construction Systems and Turning Point in Timber Construction: A New Economy, in 2010 and 2017, respectively. Dangel’s latest edited book, Time for Timber, published by the Center for American Architecture and Design, documents research he completed as the Center’s 2016-2018 Meadows Fellow.

Will Davies is an educator, advocate, and researcher based in Austin, Texas. He has experience developing and implementing educational programs from oneon-one learning to multi-district initiatives for a wide variety of ages, languages, subjects, and geographies. As a researcher and advocate, his experiences as a bilingual classroom teacher and college success advisor drive his focus on strengthening access to high-quality educational opportunities through policy and practice for those students and communities least-well served by our schools and institutions.

Will earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy from Boston University and a MEd from The University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in the same department. He is a policy and data analyst with Breakthrough Central Texas, a non-profit serving firstgeneration college aspirants and their families. He is currently part of the evaluation team for the Building a Green Texas Project, funded through a NOAA Environmental Literacy Program.

Matt Fajkus is an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, where he also leads the Graduate Program in Sustainable Design.

Fajkus holds an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is Founding Principal of Matt Fajkus Architecture in Austin, which has received

extensive recognition, including the 2019 AIA National Healthcare Design Award, and inclusion in the AIA National Emerging Professionals Exhibit at the AIA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. His designs, research, and writings have been published extensively in National Public Radio, Texas Architect, Dwell, and The Wall Street Journal, and he recently co-authored a book with Dason Whitsett titled Architectural Science and the Sun, published

by Routledge Press.

Juliana M. Felkner studied architecture and spatial planning at the University of Kansas and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. She worked for Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris before moving to Zurich to conduct her PhD research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. She is a member of the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects. She serves as an assistant professor at UT Austin’s School of Architecture, teaching courses in construction, sustainable design, environmental controls, and research design.

Prof. Felkner’s research and teaching address the societal and architectural challenges that come with the increasing urbanization of the world. She is a 2020 recipient of the Energy Institute’s grant for Fueling a Sustainable Energy Transition, collaborating on the project “Decarbonization of the Built Environment.” She is a member of the Junior League of Austin, which sponsors FIT (Food in Tummies), a program aimed at preventing weekend hunger for over 1,500 Austin school children.

Daniel Garcia is an architect at Matt Fajkus Architecture in Austin, Texas. He earned his MArch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his bachelor’s in environmental design at Texas A&M University. At MIT, Daniel

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worked as a research fellow at the International Design Center in the Digital Design & Fabrication Group and served as a teaching assistant in design computation courses and architecture design studios. Daniel’s special interest is learning from past civilizations that developed sophisticated archetypes and technologies to live in extreme climates. During his academic studies, Daniel researched Indigenous civilizations such as the Atacameños in Chile and Native American tribes in Utah, Arizona, and Colorado, speculating on new ontologies of human life and habitation. Daniel’s thesis at MIT, “Pedagogy & Space” (2020 TSA Studio Design Award Winner), revolved around defining a heuristic architecture through the adaptation of industrial rural archetypes in Texas, such as grain silos and warehouses.

Francisco Gomes is an architect, the son of Danish and Portuguese immigrants, and is extraordinarily lucky to be the husband of Dabney, with whom he is raising two kids. In addition to the design implications of construction materials and techniques, his interests include the history of radiology and surf ski racing. He has taught at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture since 2008, where he has also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and held the Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellowship at the School of Architecture.

Aleksandra Jaeschke is an architect and an assistant professor of architecture and sustainable design at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.

Born and raised in Poland, she holds a doctor of design degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AA diploma from the Architectural Association in London.

Aleksandra holds a professional

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license in Italy where she practiced at AION, an architectural firm she co-founded and co-directed with Andrea Di Stefano. In 2013, AION held a solo exhibition entitled EcoMachines at the Wroclaw Museum of Architecture in Poland. In 2011, Aleksandra received the Europe 40 Under 40 Award conferred by the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design & Urban Studies and Chicago Athenaeum.

Aleksandra’s interests range from ecological science and thought, through definitions and models for sustainability in architecture, to systems theory and cross-scalar integrative design strategies. A book based on her doctoral dissertation Green Apparatus: Ecology of the American House According to Building Codes is forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press in 2022. Jaeschke won the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2019 Wheelwright Prize, and is also the recipient of the inaugural Mark Cousins Theory Award conferred by DigitalFUTURES. Katherine Lieberknecht is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. She researches urban water resources planning, metropolitan-scaled green infrastructure planning, and urban climate planning. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked in regional land conservation. Dr. Lieberknecht was the inaugural chair of Planet Texas 2050, The University of Texas at Austin’s first grand challenge research program, and continues to serve on its leadership team.

She is the faculty lead for the Texas Metro Observatory, co-leads the Equitable and Regenerative Cities Flagship Project, and is principal investigator for a National Science Foundation Smart and Connected Communities project, among other research initiatives. She grew up in Austin where she lives with her three children.

Abby Randall is a visionary leader in the green-schools movement with a passion for deeply embedding sustainability and climate-justice education into every facet of our school systems. A former secondary science teacher, Abby has decades of experience facilitating and designing educational programs for a wide variety of K-12 science courses and alternative education programs.

Abby holds a BA in anthropology from Trinity College and an MS in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University. In 2018, Abby was selected as an ee360 Fellow for the North American Association for Environmental Educators, and she is currently the principal investigator for the Building a Green Texas Project, funded through a NOAA Environmental Literacy Program. As EcoRise’s Deputy Director, Abby oversees the implementation of leading-edge educational resources, including the sustainability and environmental justice curriculum, a workforce development program focused on equitable green-building education, teacher professional development, and a K-12 grant program that brings students’ green innovations to life. Abby also leads EcoRise’s equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives and is responsible for leveraging and streamlining technology to efficiently scale EcoRise’s innovative programs to thousands of educators across the globe.

Miriam Solis is an assistant professor of community and regional planning at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on infrastructure planning and design. Examining how infrastructure can reinforce racialized inequality, she highlights organizational, procedural, and policy strategies that advance social justice. Dr. Solis’s ongoing research projects involve partnerships with

nonprofit organizations and local government. She is a 2020–2022 UT Austin Humanities Institute Fellow for her work on youth perspectives on racial justice and decarbonization.

Jen Wong is an architectural researcher, educator, curator, and writer. Since 2013, she has served as Director of the Materials Lab at The University of Texas at Austin, where she conducts and supports material investigation in design, oversees multi-disciplinary programming and education efforts, and curates an extensive collection of architectural materials and assemblies. Wong’s research interests concern the role and impact of materials on built and natural environments from a systems standpoint, with a focus on low-impact, high-performance materials.

SUSTAINABLE DESIGN: INNOVATION ON MIDDLE GROUND EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

| MATT FAJKUS

In 1987, the Brundtland Commission, originally the World Commission on Environment and Development, coined the widely used definition of sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 1 This premise emphasizes the need to balance the dichotomy of the present and future and to find middle ground between the two.

With current global crises resulting in polarized opinions, and with both academies and industries becoming increasingly specialized, it is increasingly imperative to work between various realms. At its essence, it can be argued that sustainability is not only about work that explores multiple topics in both depth and breadth but also about finding middle ground between multiple options or perspectives.

This issue of Platform features research and teaching at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture that advances more sustainable buildings, landscapes, communities, and cities. Contributors draw upon their own work — including recent scholarship, critical professional projects, and classroom exercises and projects — and emphasize the outcomes and impacts of their efforts. Each article considers how faculty and students innovatively navigate the complex and fertile middle ground of dichotomies in our fields to reach results and conclusions.

Example relationships that call for such alignment and balance include those between city and nature, local and global, present and future, methods of analysis and techniques of composition, structural configurations and functional behaviors, lessons of precedent and needs for invention, responsibilities of shareholders and expectations of stakeholders, and constraints of materials and energy. These contributions about planning and design through relationships, rather than of objects, not only connect to core tenets of sustainability,

they also provide a basis to show how the School of Architecture cuts across professional areas of expertise, expands disciplinary perspectives, and contributes to fundamental discourse about the built environment through its research methods, critical practices, and teaching.

The UTSOA Sustainable Design program has been ahead of its time for decades. While sustainable and contextual thinking previously existed at the school, a formal and intentional focus on ecological design began in the 1970s. Pliny Fisk III taught design studios that integrated energy conservation, and he and Daria Bolton Fisk went on to found the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems.

At the same time, Michael Garrison taught passive technology integration in studios, and his research led to the construction of passive solar structures funded by the State of Texas and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as well as the publication of a book on Solar Design. At the same time, in Goldsmith Hall, Francisco Arumí-Noé taught courses on thermal design and led the Dynamic Energy Response of Buildings (DEROB) computer simulation program, one of the first national standards approved by the Department of Energy. This set the tone for later initiatives including the founding of the Center for Sustainable Development, which has secured external funding for faculty research, and supports educational programs including Public Interest Design, Texas CityLab, Texas Housing Lab, and the Thermal Lab. The appointment of Michelle Addington as Dean in 2017 — with her expertise on energy systems, advanced materials, and new technology — has bolstered the school’s presence and performance in sustainable design thinking.

While sustainable design exists as a distinct program within our school, the larger impact acts more as an ethos that threads through

all programs and the very foundation of the school’s ecosystem. The UTSOA Bachelor of Architecture program is ranked in the top ten

by Design Intelligence in both “Sustainable build environments/adaptive design/resilient design” and “Transdisciplinary collaboration across A/E/C.”2 Trandisciplinary collaboration is the work at the middle ground between each entity, and each article in this magazine demonstrates the strength in diversity of teaching and research. The writings span from addressing global and regional scales down to material technologies and much between.

Sustainable design and research perhaps function best as bridges and connective tissue, within a systems-thinking approach, in order to empower responsibility and stewardship.

The challenge of creating a sustainable future is fundamental and touches every aspect of life, providing agency to research and design thinking to make large and lasting impacts.

NOTES 1 World Commission on Environment and Development.

Our Common Future, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

2 https://www.di-rankings.com/twelve-focus-areas-architecture/

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addressing past inequities while preparing for new climate futures

community-centered climate planning

KATHERINE LIeBERKNECHT

As a kid growing up in Austin, my elementary school years overlapped with the tail end of desegregation bussing. From 1980 to 1986, kids from whiter, wealthier West Austin areas took turns with students from poorer, more diverse East Austin neighborhoods being bussed across town in an effort to finally integrate Austin’s public schools. Although Austin’s traffic wasn’t terrible then, we still had more than two hours on the school bus, roundtrip, before returning home again each day — so there was a lot of time to stare out the window and daydream.

As a fourth grader, I didn’t have the words or theoretical frameworks to describe the patterns of inequality and disparity that I saw each day on my school-bus transect. However, I do remember observing houses becoming smaller and in more need of repair, creeks changing from green waterways to concrete channels, and storefronts shifting from abundant supermarkets to modest convenience stores.

I also recall, as we drove east, front yards becoming more interesting: thriving vegetable gardens, neatly swept dirt yards with patio furniture arranged in clusters, year-round Christmas lights, and homemade yard art.

And when my family and I occasionally drove back across town to my elementary school in the evenings for programs and events, I watched how these front yards became epicenters of community life: families and friends barbecuing, sharing meals, playing games, splashing in sprinklers.

More than thirty years later, my own kids attend Austin’s public schools, which are now more segregated than when I was in grade school.1 The city itself is one of the most economically segregated metropolitan areas in the US, and Austin has experienced the fastest rate of Black resident outmigration of any rapidly growing US city.2 Gentrification and displacement intensify still-unresolved infrastructure inequity, ranging from housing and food security to sidewalk conditions.3 This infrastructure inequity has been in place since

at least the de facto segregation codified by Austin’s 1928 city plan,4 and it remains almost as severe as when I peered out of my school bus window.5 What has changed is that, today, we are preparing for an Austin where residents will experience hotter and drier summers, more intense flood events, and more exposure to air pollution from wildfire. These risks are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. Although no place is fully prepared for the damage to life, economy, and property that the climate crisis will cause, residents of neighborhoods still experiencing the legacy of inequitable infrastructure will suffer disproportionately from climate change.

For example, research I coauthored with School of Architecture students (PhD alumna Deidre Zoll and MSCRP alumna Katherine Castles) and faculty (Dr. Junfeng Jiao) found that Black,

FIG 1 Conceptual model for the codesigned climate planning data portal.

Image credit: Jenny Gray Nelson.

Flooding in Dove Springs, Austin, TX. Photo credit: City of Austin.

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Latinx, and mobile-home neighborhoods in the Houston metropolitan area disproportionately suffered more damage from Hurricane Harvey.6 While many factors likely contribute to these disparate outcomes, scholars have found strong links between climate injustice and inadequate infrastructure.7 Although I have no illusions about the persistence of Austin’s, and other cities, inequitable built environments, I believe that researchers, practitioners, and residents’ current work to make climate mitigation and adaptation planning more equitable offers an opportunity to reimagine human settlements, reallocate investment, and retroactively address conditions that have led to disparate effects of the climate crisis on marginalized populations.8 Specifically, the City of Austin’s efforts to center climate adaptation around equity — and, in particular, its work to pilot climate adaptation planning in the Austin neighborhoods of Dove Springs and Rundberg — offer one pathway to address the legacies of Jim Crow infrastructure that amplify climate risk today. I’ve had the privilege of being a small part of this work through a National Science Foundation-funded research project based in the Dove Springs neighborhood in Southeast Austin. Our team of UT Austin faculty and student researchers is collaborating with neighborhood residents, the City of Austin Office of Sustainability, and the community-based organization Go Austin! Vamos Austin! (GAVA) to advance climate disaster preparedness while increasing residents’ participation in climate adaptation strategies.

Dove Springs, along with the rest of Austin, is located in “Flash Flood Alley,” an area of Central Texas recognized globally for its intense flooding following seasonal rainstorms.9 In Dove Springs, these floods have intensified in frequency and intensity due, in part, to the region’s record-breaking growth, which contributes to the ever-expanding hardscape of rooftops and pavement added to Austin each year. In addition, scientists project that the climate crisis will amplify Austin’s “feast or famine” rainfall patterns, resulting in increased rain events matched by more severe and frequent droughts, higher temperatures,

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and increased risk of wildfire.10 All of these climate risks will result in negative health and economic outcomes for Dove Springs residents.

However, given the severity of flooding — the neighborhood regularly experiences floods that result in property damage and, during larger storms, even drownings— residents and community organizers have prioritized flood preparedness and adaptation Fig 1.

As a result, a few years ago, neighborhood residents told staff at our community partner GAVA that they thought it would be helpful to have an online portal where neighbors could access resources and information to help them prepare for, respond to, and recover from floods and other disasters. In particular, residents wanted a place where they could easily store information and documents at risk of being lost during disasters as well as a single location where they could, in real time, obtain information needed to respond to these events. At the same time, City of Austin staff identified a need for more localized information about floods and other climate-related events in hopes of incorporating this local knowledge into climate adaptation planning. For example, although the City of Austin has a suite of adaptation strategies, such as installing rain gardens to absorb floodwaters and planting trees to increase shade and reduce heat events, staff believed that more nuanced, finer-grained information was key to successful climate adaptation planning and implementation Fig 2 . For instance: Where are the stretches of sidewalk or bus stops that are so hot in midAugust that residents hesitate to use them, thereby limiting access to needed services?

Which stormwater drains always back up during large rain events, causing localized flooding, property damage, and the potential for mosquito habitat? Although existing data and models help the City identify these problem spots, City staff felt confident that information coming directly from neighborhood residents would help improve climate adaptation planning, design, and outcomes.

Neighborhood residents and city staff’s valuing of this information dovetails with planning theory, which acknowledges that local knowledge held by residents contributes

to more robust planning solutions.11 But how do we, as researchers and practitioners, incorporate local knowledge into the complex decision making and implementation process that prepares communities for the climate crisis as we simultaneously work to reverse it? Our research collaboration envisions a process for community-centered climate planning that values the knowledge and experiences that residents hold and then uses that information to shape planning strategies.12 This approach builds on the use of public participation in environmental planning, where resident involvement has been found to improve outcomes.13 In addition, increased participation of frontline communities — communities experiencing the climate crisis firsthand — in the planning and design of climate solutions will increase equity and contribute to better results.14 When our UT Austin team reached out to the City of Austin and GAVA to ask if they would join a proposal for a National Science Foundation Smart & Connected Communities grant targeted at combining social and technological solutions for disaster preparedness and response, they mentioned how the community’s need for an online portal meshed with the City’s wish for local knowledge to inform climate adaptation planning. We saw an opportunity to work with residents and community partners to design a data portal that leverages lived experience and better climate disaster preparedness. And although coordinating the equitable codesign of a data portal stretched the bounds of our interdisciplinary knowledge and research approaches, we jumped at the chance to join Dove Springs residents, GAVA, and the City of Austin on this project.

To date, we’ve worked with our community partners to facilitate a group of neighborhood residents who are paid to help codesign the portal and to help later train other residents to use the portal to both share information useful for the City’s climate adaptation strategies and help their own households prepare for future floods and other socionatural disasters. This pilot program, dubbed the Climate Navigators, builds upon the robust community connections that exist in Dove Springs, in part because

FIG 2 Flooding in Dove Springs, Austin, Texas. Photo credit: City of Austin.

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FIG 3 Neighborhood children create a community garden while their parents learn more about the Climate Navigator program.

Photo credit: Go Austin! Vamos Austin!

1 M elissa Taboada, “Austin School Board Takes on Persistent Segregation Problem,” Austin-American Statesman, October 21, 2016, https://www.statesman.com/news/20161021/austin-schoolboard-takes-on-persistent-segregation-problem/1.

2 E ric Tang & Bisola Falola, Those Who Left: Austin’s Declining African American Population, (Austin: Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, 2016), https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/iupra/_files/pdf/those-who-leftaustin.pdf.

3 D isplacement, gentrification, and infrastructure inequality in Austin have been documented by School of Architecture faculty in research such as Heather Way, Elizabeth Mueller, and Jake Wegman, “Uprooted: Residential displacement in Austin’s gentrifying neighborhoods and what can be done about it,” The University of Texas at Austin – Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic – School of Law 3 (2018);

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Junfeng Jiao, “Measuring Vulnerable Population’s Healthy and Unhealthy Food Access in Austin, Texas,” AIMS public health 3, no. 4 (2016): 722.

4 Koch & Fowler, “A City Plan for Austin, Texas,” (1928).

5 City of Austin, “ City of Austin Sidewalk Plan Absent Sidewalk Scoring Results November 2017,” https://austintexas.gov/sites/ default/files/files/Public_Works/Street_%26_Bridge/Absent_ Sidewalks_22x34_111517.pdf (2017); Karen Banks, “Central Texas Foodshed Assessment.” Sustainable Food Center (2011).

6 Katherine Lieberknecht, Deidre Zoll, Junfeng Jiao, and Katherine Castles, “Hurricane Harvey: Equal Opportunity Storm or Disparate Disaster?,” Local Environment 26, no. 2 (2021): 216–238.

7 Alejandra Maldonado, Timothy W. Collins, Sara E. Grineski, and Jayajit Chakraborty, “Exposure to Flood Hazards in Miami and Houston: Are Hispanic Immigrants at Greater Risk than Other Social Groups?,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13, no. 8 (2016): 775–795. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph13080775; Bev Wilson and Arnab Chakraborty, “Mapping Vulnerability to Extreme Heat Events: Lessons from Metropolitan Chicago,” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 62, no. 6 (2019): 1065–1088. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2018.1462475.

8 Climate mitigation focuses on reducing, preventing, and stabilizing emissions of greenhouse gases, whereas climate adaptation refers to preparing for the impacts of the climate crisis already occurring, such as increased flooding and wildfire; Katherine Lieberknecht, Deidre Zoll, Junfeng Jiao, and Katherine Castles, “Hurricane Harvey: Equal Opportunity Storm or Disparate Disaster?” Local Environment 26, no. 2 (2021): 216-238.

residents are accustomed to supporting each other when public infrastructure and services fail Fig 3. As residents help us improve and mature the Climate Navigator program, we hope to expand similar programs to other neighborhoods in Austin, since the need for this local knowledge and disaster preparedness extends past Dove Springs. As the Climate Navigator program has launched, we’ve worked to combine our team’s social science, planning, communications, engineering, and computer science skill sets as we’ve conducted interviews with residents, designed the back end of the portal, and begun work on the data systems needed to keep information safe. COVID-19 has slowed us down, but it has also given us space to work on some of the behind-the-scenes and trust-building portions of the project, which will strengthen eventual outcomes.

Our hope is that this local knowledge will be useful for residents and city departments and contribute to the large-scale modeling and strategy development being undertaken by the UT Austin Planet Texas 2050 research program.

Planet Texas 2050 is a decade-long program focused on working with communities across Texas to discover knowledge and codesign strategies to prepare for climate risk while building a thriving, equitable future.15 Dozens of School of Architecture faculty, students, and staff are involved in Planet Texas 2050-related research projects, and the Dove Springs portal project may contribute data that helps improve outcomes in other projects. For example, I am integrating interview data from the Dove Springs project into a new research initiative led by Community and Regional Planning

9 M anabendra Saharia, Pierre-Emmanuel Kirstetter, Humberto Vergara, Jonathan J. Gourley, Yang Hong, and Marine Giroud, “Mapping Flash Flood Severity in the United States,” Journal of Hydrometeorology 18, no. 2 (2017): 397-411.

12 Katherine Lieberknecht, Deidre Zoll, Junfeng Jiao, and Katherine Castles, “Hurricane Harvey: Equal Opportunity Storm or Disparate Disaster?,” Local Environment 26, no. 2 (2021): 216–238.

10 K atharine Hayhoe, Climate Change Projections for the City of Austin Draft Report, (Lubbock: ATMOS Research and Consulting, 2014), https://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/ Sustainability/atmos_research.pdf.

13 Samuel D. Brody, David R. Godschalk, and Raymond J. Burby, “Mandating Citizen Participation in Plan Making: Six Strategic Planning Choices,” Journal of the American Planning Association 69, no. 3 (2003): 245–264; Samuel D. Brody, Sammy Zahran, Arnold Vedlitz, and Himanshu Grover, “Examining the Relationship Between Physical Vulnerability and Public Perceptions of Global Climate Change in the United States,” Environment and Behavior 40, no. 1 (2008): 72–95; Ellen Bassett and Vivek Shandas, “Innovation and Climate Action Planning: Perspectives from Municipal Plans,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 4 (2010): 435–450, do i:10.1080/01944363.2010.509703; Jamie A.R. Haverkamp, “Politics, Values, and Reflexivity: The Case of Adaptation to

11 P ierre Clavel, The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969–1984 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Judith E. Innes, “Information in Communicative Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 64, no. 1 (1998): 52–63; Philip R. Berke and Mark R. Stevens, “Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 36, no. 3 (September 2016): 283–289.

(CRP) professor Dr. Michael Oden and joined

by CRP faculty Dr. Miriam Solis and myself.

In this new project, we’re helping the City of Austin define equitable, well-paying, green sector jobs in order to increase sustainable economic development. By incorporating information from the Climate Navigators, we’re asking how green-job creation can reflect the lived experience and codesign skills held by residents in frontline communities, which adds significant value to effective climate planning.

Could climate-related local knowledge and community-codesign become a new piece of Austin’s knowledge economy?

On my way to a meeting earlier this week, I crisscrossed my old school-bus transect that provided my first glimpse of Austin’s stark segregation. This transect now runs through a hotter Austin landscape, with flashier floods and more tenacious droughts. Seeing it reminded me of how much work remains before we’ve fully addressed infrastructure disparity, which is made even more critical by the climate crisis. Our allied disciplines have a once-in-a generation chance to work with communities to plan, design, and implement these equitable urban infrastructure systems. It will require hard work, new knowledge, expanded coalitions, political will, and good fortune, but the outcomes will be significant: resolving historic and ongoing inequity while preparing for new climate futures.

Climate Change in Hampton Roads, Virginia,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 11 (2017): 2673–2692, doi:10.1177/0308518X17707525.

14 L inda Shi, “From Progressive Cities to Resilient Cities: Lessons from History for New Debates in Equitable Adaptation to Climate Change,” Urban Affairs Review, March 2, 2020, https:// urbanaffairsreview.com/2020/03/03/from-progressive-citiesto-resilient-cities-lessons-from-history-for-new-debates-inequitable-adaptation-to-climate-change/.

15 P lanet Texas 2050: Annual Report 2020, Austin: The University of Texas at Austin, 2021, https://www.flipsnack.com/ BridgingBarriers/planet-texas-2050-fy20-annual-report.html.

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what queer ecology and queer people can teach us about doing better design and planning work

the end of binary

KATIE

In planning and design, we often imperfectly use imperfect tools to further our thinking about the complex systems where we live and work.

Dichotomies are useful tools if we’re using them to find space in between, but, all too often, we forget to progress from acknowledging that dichotomies exist to using them to find harmony somewhere in the middle. This is partially due to the inability for many to sit with the discomfort in the middle. While the far ends of a dichotomy are not productive in creating a more just society, they are clear, simple, and comfortable.

This acknowledgment of the discomfort associated with challenging dichotomies is why I firmly believe the work of designers and planners must be paired with radically empathetic practice — practice that encourages the mindful consideration of another person’s point of view as a way of cultivating deeper connection, even when we may firmly disagree.

I prefer the use of the term “binary” over “dichotomy,” though I see the two words as essentially interchangeable. The concept of non-binary means finding space in the world, manifesting in many different ways, and becoming more and more accessible to larger groups of people. It can apply to the processes behind our work and the systems in our cities, but also to people and gender. My goal of eliminating binary thinking, and doing so with radical empathy, is directly related to how I work toward creating more sustainable and resilient places. It is also a core value of mine because of my own lived experience as a queer practitioner.

IDENTITY When I came out, my family worried that my queerness would hamper my ability to live a life full of joy. While I have always known it, I only recently began to articulate clearly how my queerness is my greatest superpower in the work I do. Being queer is the quality about me that has most influenced the way that I think and work.

COYNE

There has been so little public representation of what it means to be queer thus far, especially when I was growing in the ‘90s Fig 1. If we narrow the idea of representation down to the visibility of queer, butch women, like me, there were, and are, even fewer examples. The act of being in the world exactly how I am is a constant practice of activism, revolution, invention, and reinvention. It has forced me to see the world and the status quo of society differently. So many things exist within a binary: male / female, black / white, Republican / Democrat, gay / straight, city / nature, etc. It’s a gross oversimplification that helps us mentally cope with complicated and nuanced systems. It is simply easier for everything to fit neatly into a box. But, as a queer butch woman, I don’t fit neatly into these traditional binaries, and I more readily see how much of our world doesn’t fit into them either. If the structure does not make room for my own and others’ existence, why can’t we reinvent it? Is it not our moral imperative to do so? There is an essential radicalism in oppressed people that is necessary in order to exist, which makes the process of reinvention that comes with it mandatory, not brave. And if we as a larger society never challenge ourselves to get out of our binary comfort zones, we will constantly be at odds with one another and sometimes with ourselves.

Even in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, activists generally split into a binary. There are two ends of the spectrum of thought: 1) individualism/ non-conformism: we create our own culture and accept that there is no need to conform our culture to the norm; and 2) assimilation: we assimilate more into established norms and are accepted as part of mainstream society because of that assimilation. We have plenty of examples of this narrative carried out in other marginalized groups, oftentimes with far more violence and force toward assimilation. One of the most traumatic examples can be found here in North America in the nineteenth and

FIG 1 Author, age 12. Image credit: Katie Coyne.

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Even in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, activists generally split into a binary.

twentieth centuries with the forced removal of Native American children from their homes.

They were sent to boarding schools, abused, and were stripped of their culture in an attempt to forcefully assimilate them into white Christian society.1 As far as where I fall in the assimilation / non-conformist binary, I’m content somewhere in the middle — acknowledging that so many things about me and my culture are outside of the bounds of straight norms. I believe in my version of a “marriage,” but it certainly doesn’t look like the partnership of some of my straight counterparts. There was no pressure for me to get married, have kids, etc. because my identity does not carry with it those expectations, though more and more of these expectations are being applied. Without those expectations, my decision to get married was far freer than that of my straight friends. In that way, I’m privileged to have a life generally free of societal expectations while also maintaining the privilege that comes with being white, not femme, and of a certain socioeconomic class, which largely allows me to avoid the discrimination so many women and LGBTQ+ folks continue to face on a daily basis. Firmly floating in the middle, I have both the freedom and agency to see and call out what needs to change and actually have people listen.

Being queer also mandates learning how to be more empathetic across the board. I certainly cannot understand the discrimination that other groups face. But, as a queer person who has seen what the empathy of others has accomplished along my path, I understand how important radical empathy is in our work.

I refuse to be the “white moderate” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to most worry about in his work toward a more just society.

I will not shy away from hard conversations to save the peace in the room. There are many that may be considered “white moderates” even

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within the LGBTQ+ community. Case in point: many statewide equality organizations disbanded for lack of funding and/or interest after marriage equality was granted at the federal level. Privileged, cis, white gays, who felt they had assimilated enough, felt safe to disconnect from the larger movement and lacked the will to empathize with parts of our community still facing employment, housing, adoption, and other types of discrimination.

This had disparate negative implications across the country for BIPOC LGBTQ+ communities, especially transgender communities.

ROOTED IN THEORY Two academic theories are foundational in my evolution and commitment to non-binary thinking and radical empathy. Ecofeminism is a way of thinking that posits that the destruction of the environment and the oppression of people based on gender, race, sexuality, etc. are inextricably tied to one another and to the larger patriarchal, destructive society we generally live in.2 Each component of the patriarchal society is situated as an object or resource to be used at the will of white men in power. Queer ecology, which on its face may seem more narrowly contrived, has more recently been introduced to me as a more expansive and potentially more pertinent way of thinking today, especially as it relates to work focused on reimagining and creating more resilient and sustainable cities.3 Queer ecology looks to debunk the dualisms that exist in our society between nature and culture. It is a way of thinking that pulls from the sciences, ecofeminism, environmental justice, and queer geography, and recognizes binaries as destructive frameworks that are both socially and colonially constructed. Queer ecology directly critiques the binaries of culture versus nature, self versus other, human versus non-human, male versus female, heterosexual

FIG 2 Scoring rubric for Austin’s proposed Functional Green Regulatory Framework. Image credit: City of Austin.

versus homosexual, etc. While not specifically calling out queer ecology, Adam Miller — the 2019–21 Race and Gender in the Built Environment Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture — talked specifically in an interview about how queer thinking informs his work: To think queerly might be to consider a conceptual space beyond binary thinking.

Queer thinking resists duality, allows for a decentering of a single aesthetic paradigm, and makes space for aesthetic difference: this is a queer space within architecture. This recognition of the difference in taste and its potential design implications is what I think of as a solidarity of tastes. Solidarity is a unity that also maintains and recognizes difference — a discordant whole. This unity in recognizing difference has real implications for us and material consequences in our world.4 FINDING A NON-BINARY PRACTICE Beyond architectural aesthetics, non-binary thinking is a necessary step in advancing the fields of sustainability and resilience. Binary thinking is the single most common barrier to

doing effective and just work in these spaces.

The most common binary I interact with is “city versus nature.” There are multiple iterations of this example, but each situates people and or development as opposite to nature, environment, or sustainability. This framing leads us to a desire to control and oppress the world around us because it uses fear-based tactics — affirming a narrative that states that if nature, environment, and sustainability goals are the inherent opposite of quality of life, culture, and economic growth, then humans must give something up or suffer in order to work toward these goals.

For years, we have attempted to control nature to maximize the development potential of even very vulnerable places. In my home state of Florida in the early 1900s, people intent on making undevelopable places developable began distributing Melaleuca (Melaleuca quinquenervia) seeds across the Everglades, thinking that these water hoarding trees would help dry up “useless swamp land.”

This campaign resulted in almost 20% of the green space south of Lake Okeechobee becoming overrun by these trees. Onehundred years later, we are still fighting to

manage and eradicate this invasive species.5 In New Orleans, we have created a completely fabricated hydrology with drainage-pump stations and levees that attempt to keep water out of neighborhoods. At the same time, these actions have exacerbated the rapid subsidence of land in the city and region, with an estimated loss of six to twenty inches over the last twenty years.6 In the suburban American front yard, we have cultivated an ideal that favors a manicured monoculture lawn — a feature that does very little in terms of ecosystem services and also requires massive amounts of water to maintain.

In Austin, like in other American cities, many have cried for the preservation of single-family neighborhoods and have been dismayed by the idea of a sterile, dense urban development, with the resulting urban sprawl destroying green spaces on the fringe.

There is still hope for a new way of doing things. At Asakura Robinson—a nationally recognized design and planning firm where I lead our Urban Ecology Studio—we have been working on many projects that directly challenge the city versus nature binary. And, whether it is conscious or not, many others are beginning to use queer ecological principles to

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FIG 3A & 3B Early phase concept design is for Jones Park in Galveston, TX — key proof-of-concept project demonstrating Green Galveston’s guiding principles. Image credit: Vision Galveston, Asakura Robinson.

FIG 3B Early phase concept design is for Shield Park in Galveston, TX — key proof-of-concept project demonstrating Green Galveston’s guiding principles. Image credit: Vision Galveston, Asakura Robinson.

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FIG 3C Distanced Green Galveston engagement event at Shield Park — late 2020. Image credit: Vision Galveston.

drive new and innovative work that challenges these persistent binaries with tangible impacts on the ground in our cities and our most vulnerable ecological and human communities.

FUNCTIONAL GREEN7 While the Austin Land Development Code is facing an unclear path to adoption for political, social, and procedural reasons, one specific component aims to challenge the city versus nature binary in our city’s most urban contexts. Led by the City of Austin with the support of consultants including The Nature Conservancy, “Functional Green” aims to rethink the ways we embed nature within highdensity developments in our urban core Fig 2 .

Ecosystem services are used as a basis for this regulatory framework. The team did a deep academic dive into the peer-reviewed literature on the types and scales of ecosystem services that can be garnered with certain green design techniques. This included everything from tree preservation, rain gardens, and green roofs to biodiverse plantings, rainwater harvesting systems, and other stacked green features. Each of these features was then assigned a score based on how it contributes to the provision of ecosystem services such as urban heat mitigation, better water quality, habitat, and mental and physical well being, among others. With this knowledge, the team created a flexible menu of greening options for

developers who are exercising entitlements that allow for some of the most densely urban and highly impervious development in Austin.

The regulation imposes a minimum target score for developers to reach using those greening options that will result in substantive human health and ecological benefits.

Additionally, the team ensured the feasibility of reaching the minimum score within the current market without substantial economic impact to developers by reviewing multiple case studies of existing development in the City of Austin. Other cities are looking to these types of metrics as well as other methods to better embed nature and ecosystem functions into urban places. While Houston is still only using incentive programs to drive different types of green development, Dallas is taking an initial look at creating a regulation for some land-use types based on Austin’s stalled Functional Green program and may even beat us to the punch.

GREEN GALVESTON8 Our firm has spent years working with Vision Galveston, a 501(c)3 working to implement a comprehensive, island-wide community resilience strategy that covers everything from entrepreneurship and the local economy to affordable housing, parks, and climate resilience. Galveston is a place where 89% of

the island population lives within the urban core, but a majority of residents and visitors perceive “nature” as something “out there” — as in, out at the state park, etc. Green Galveston aims to embed more nature into the urban fabric of the island with a foundation of seven guiding principles: 1. RIGHT TO GREEN: All Galvestonians have a right to the recreational, restorative, and social opportunities of high-quality parks and natural areas.

2. GREEN THAT PROMOTES HEALTH: Galveston’s parks and open space should support the physical and mental health of the island’s residents.

3. GREEN THAT SUPPORTS THE LOCAL ECOLOGY: Galveston’s parks and open space should respond to and support the local ecological and environmental conditions of the island.

4. GREEN THAT SUPPORTS THE LOCAL ECONOMY: Galveston’s parks and open space should support local economic growth and development across the island.

5. GREEN THAT IS CONNECTED: Galveston’s parks and open space should be accessible for cyclists, pedestrians, residents utilizing public transportation, and through waterways.

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6. GREEN THAT IS ACTIVATED & AUTHENTIC: Galveston’s parks and open space should include programming and placemaking that reflect the cultures and histories of the island.

7. GREEN THAT IS EDUCATIONAL & PROMOTES STEWARDSHIP: Galveston’s parks and open space should provide immersive educational opportunities for residents that also support stewardship.

Each of these principles will be applied to proof-of-concept designs for two very different urban parks in Galveston — Jones and Shield Parks — with schematic design currently underway Figs 3A-3C. These guiding principles directly respond to finding space in the middle of the binary. They look at the overlap of nature and people — in ways that have historically been framed as at odds with one another — by utilizing Galveston’s local ecosystems, climate resilience challenges, historic and current disparities, culture, history, and other contextual information to create multifunctional and deeply place-based design in very urban parks.

As climate change exacerbates so many of our urban problems such as flooding and heat, parks are some of the lowest-hanging fruit to help mitigate impacts and improve overall community resilience. Beyond Galveston, many cities are working to embed more multifunctional goals in their parks development, which is quickly becoming the new best practice in parks planning and design.

HOUSTON CONSERVATION MOONSHOT 2030 Green Galveston’s framing is similar to much of the work The Nature Conservancy, the Houston Parks Board, and other leaders in Houston are attempting to push forward as a new way of thinking about biodiversity conservation. Their work on the Houston Conservation Moonshot 2030 aims to embed health, environmental justice, climate action, and other concepts into a biodiversity conservation framework and long-term vision for the region.

Biodiversity is foundational to functioning ecosystems, including urban ones. We are in a global biodiversity crisis whereby inaction will lead to the collapse of ecosystems and devastating impacts on people, especially our most vulnerable, as well as widespread impacts on global economic systems.9 To turn things around, we can no longer focus only on saving 18

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wildlands outside of urban regions. Biodiversity must be embedded into our cities. The benefits of doing so thoughtfully can also have tangible impacts on urban communities. Reaching urban biodiversity goals can help remedy other urban problems like urban heat-island effects; chronic and disparate health outcomes; access to parks and open space; unsightly, unwelcoming, or unsafe public realms; urban flooding; and poor water quality. But in order to do so, the conservation community needs to challenge the city versus nature binary or, perhaps more accurately, the rural versus urban binary.

One of the key tools I have found for unsticking folks from binary thinking is the transect. The transect is foundational to our work as planners and designers with some of my favorite historic examples coming from Patrick Geddes and Ian McHarg. It is also a direct physical representation of non-binary thinking involving both ends of the spectrum and all the spaces in between. As a part of our work on the Houston Conservation Moonshot, we created a rural to urban transect to help explain how we conceptualize greening opportunities in all contexts of the Houston region Fig 4 . This graphic helps us break down false binaries between rural conservation and urban green infrastructure systems and creates a more expansive vision for the future.

AUSTIN CLIMATE EQUITY PLAN10 In 2015, the City of Austin completed its first Community Climate Action Plan, the first of its kind in the state, and an effort to truly be proud of. However, what was missing both from this plan and the larger discourse around climate was the actual integration of community into the process and meaningful integration of equity and justice into the proposed actions.

We have come a long way since then, including in national and international discourse. For example, the Green New Deal directly links just economic transitions to our nation’s climate goals and continues to gain traction.11 Here in Austin, in 2019, our climate plan was due for an update according to our five-year, Councilimposed cycle. In the four years since the previous plan’s adoption, the City has created an Equity Office and has begun its journey on a long road to reckoning with historic and current policies rooted in systemic racism. Initial meetings between City staff and community leaders reinforced a goal of creating a more

community-engaged and equity-driven plan.

To help guide the climate plan update, City staff put together a steering committee made up of diverse and knowledgeable community leaders who value equity and justice as guiding principles in climate-action work. This group was complemented by five topical advisory groups made up of both City staff and community leaders. Many community members committed time, energy, and emotional vulnerability to the process after years of relationships with the City rooted in distrust. During the plan process, the dynamic required both radical empathy and clear accountability to overcome some of the distrust that had built up. Others, perhaps more embedded in traditional climate-action work, could see how important equity was in guiding the plan. Across the board, there was full acknowledgment about the concept of a just transition, meaning that the communities most vulnerable to climate impacts and those most historically harmed by legacies of racism, disenfranchisement, and disinvestment should be those who also benefit most from transition strategies. But, often, those most embedded in traditional climate-action work had the most consistent trouble letting go of binary thinking. A consistent issue that came up from the beginning of the process was a fear of trade-offs, specifically: “What if we have to compromise on our emission-reductions goals in order to integrate equity and justice in the way you’re asking for?” White culture, traditional siloed schooling, and efficiencymindsets have taught many of us that even if we can see the rationale behind changing the way we frame our work toward climate justice, there is so much fear associated with that transition that our minds constantly push us back to the binary. The fear is rooted in two key factors: 1) a scarcity mindset: “There is only so much pie, so if we include another factor, that must mean that I have to give something up;” and 2) discomfort with lack of simplicity or clarity.

While BIPOC leaders in the group were coping with distrust rooted in years of trauma, privileged white leaders passionate about climate action were struggling with reframing their thinking. It took a handful of BIPOC leaders willing to shoulder the burden of additional emotional labor and white allies willing to empathetically approach those who were

e l

FIG 4 Houston Conservation Moonshot’s regional transect, outlining conservation and urban greening opportunities in various contexts across an urban to rural gradient. Image credit: Asakura Robinson.

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CLIMATE CHANGE ELIMINATE THE USE OF FOSSIL FUELS

HEALTH ACCESSIBILITY JUST TRANSITION

Renewable energy Less dependable on cars Electric vehicles More trees and nature Healthier consumer choices

CULTURAL PRESERVATION COMMUNITY CAPACITY ACCOUNTABILITY

RACIAL EQUITY ELIMINATE DISPARITIES THAT CAN BE PREDICTED

BY RACE Safety for all at all times No disproportionate economic outcomes Fair access to services for all Inclusive participation in our city Positive health outcomes for all

FIG 5A Venn diagram used during the Austin Climate Equity Plan process to help express the overlapping nature of climate change and racial equity. Image credit: City of Austin.

struggling in order to bring them along. It took a climate justice workshop at the beginning of the process and the facilitator, Dr. Tane Ward, asking the entire group to imagine a utopia, free of the roadblocks we’ve met in the past that have reinforced a fear of conflict between goals. It took many one-on-one conversations where we talked about accountability in all directions often needing to say, “Let’s not manifest a conflict where one doesn’t exist.

Instead, let’s all commit to transparent and vulnerable communication so that we may work together to find the middle.” It took me, as a co-chair of the steering committee, saying that I will be an advocate for justice even if I do not fully understand the positioning of my advocacy, because I fully and radically support my BIPOC neighbors and friends. It took constant checkins to make sure our BIPOC leaders were not taking on too much emotional labor in a process

that necessitates more from them than from any of the white participants. It took paying community ambassadors, who already had trusted relationships with their communities, to act as conduits to the City that lacked the trust they had. The result is a plan that does not situate equity and justice as a mutual benefit or subtractive component of climate action but as an integral part and a core driver. The eventual lack of a boundary between climate action and equity strategies is the essential goal of nonbinary thinking in process and end result.

1 E rin Blakemore, “A Century of Trauma at U.S. Boarding Schools for Native American Children.” History. July 9, 2021. https://www. nationalgeographic.com/history/article/a-century-of-trauma-atboarding-schools-for-native-american-children-in-the-unitedstates.

5 T ame Melaleuca, “The Green Menace from down Under.”

Accessed July 9, 2021. https://pesticide.ifas.ufl.edu/courses/pdfs/ melaleuca/Melaleuca.pdf.

2 K aren J. Warren, “Feminist Environmental Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu. 2014. https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/feminism-environmental/.

3 C atriona Sandilands, “Queer Ecology | Keywords for Environmental Studies.” Nyupress.org, 2012. https://keywords. nyupress.org/environmental-studies/essay/queer-ecology/.

4 A dam Miller, Q&A with Adam Miller, 2019-2021 Race and Gender in the Built Environment Fellow Interview by University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Accessed July 9, 2021. https:// soa.utexas.edu/headlines/qa-adam-miller-2019-2021-race-andgender-built-environment-fellow.

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Figs 5A–5C

more resilient and just communities. For folks whose identity does not rely on constant invention and reinvention in a system not made for them, this requires consistent mindfulness and action — mindfulness that allows for breaking through the binary and accepting inherent discomfort. Our acknowledgment of that discomfort and the trauma of others who have been trying to change oppressive systems mandates that we do this work with radical empathy. As for me, if reincarnation is real, I hope that in every life I live, I come back queer. I am a better person and a better practitioner because of it.

WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS MEAN FOR THE FUTURE? We have a lot more work to do and we need more people who are willing to get uncomfortable in challenging the systems that never have and never will work to create

6 City of New Orleans, “Subsidence—NOLA Ready.” Nola.gov. 2016. https://ready.nola.gov/hazard-mitigation/hazards/subsidence/.

7 CodeNEXT, Review of Austin Land Development Code. City of Austin, 2018. http://www.designingthesustainablesite. com/uploads/1/0/3/8/10386536/austinldc_ functionalgreen_2018.02.08_final.pdf.

8 Vision Galveston, “Home.” VISION GALVESTON, Accessed July 9, 2021. https://www.visiongalveston.com/.

9 National Geographic, “Global Biodiversity Is in Crisis, but There Is Hope for Recovery.” National Geographic Society Newsroom, September 23, 2019. https://blog.nationalgeographic. org/2019/09/23/global-biodiversity-is-in-crisis-but-there-ishope-for-recovery/.

10 City of Austin, “Austin Community Climate Plan | AustinTexas. gov.” Austintexas.gov. Accessed July 9, 2021. https://austintexas. gov/page/austin-communityclimate-plan.

11 Lisa Friedman, “What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained.” New York Times, February 21, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/climate/green-new-dealquestions-answers.html.

1 2 3 4 5 7

What is the history? Where are the inequalities? Maps, data, stories, etc. Research racial injustice to understand the root causes.

What does the data tell us? Disaggregate data by race, income and location. Research and collect data on racial disparities

What is the proposed goal? Does it include a climate and equity component?

Develop strategies. How can history and disaggregated data help achieve this goal?

Identify strategy owners, participants, costs and benefits.

Analyze strategies with the equity tool. Does the strategy meet our values?

Answer Equity Tool questions and analyze the results.

6

Review and revise proposed strategies with an iterative process.

Implementation. How do we ensure accountability? How do we communicate results?

FIG 5B Group photo of the Austin Climate Equity Plan Community Climate Ambassadors. Image Credit: City of Austin.

FIG 5C Process tool used to embed equity within the goals and strategies of the Austin Climate Equity Plan. Image credit: City of Austin.

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to advance anti-racist green building, education, and practice

A research-practice Partnership

miriam solis abby randall will davies CENTERING YOUTH OF COLOR IN OUR GREENING IMPERATIVE The construction and operation of residential and commercial buildings account for 38% of total global energy-related CO2 emissions.

Architects, planners, and designers across the United States are grappling with how to shape the built environment in ways that mitigate the consequences of climate change. The U.S. Green Building Council has formalized the uptake of green building principles through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification and credential program, which encourage green building practices like rainwater harvesting, the use of recycled materials, and thermal and solar energy. Some local jurisdictions have begun to incentivize the use of these green building approaches.

Combined, these strategies, codifications, and policy changes reflect some urgently needed headway.

Environmental justice scholarship and advocacy has illuminated equity implications of the greening of the built environment.

Communities of color have less access to environmental amenities that contribute to wellness, such as parks and public space.

Yet urban plans that allegedly seek to improve the neighborhood can be a double-edged sword, as both public and private urban greening efforts can precipitate “climate gentrification” and eventual residential displacement. 2 Greening the built environment in ways that don’t uproot long-time residents presents a significant challenge to communities, planners, and designers.

Another example is the field’s labor stratification. The green building field is growing rapidly and can offer an attractive career pathway for young people of color.

Schools, unions, and community organizations recognize the value of green jobs associated with skilled trades because of their high pay

and stability.3 But, currently, many of the jobs classified as green are held by people with advanced degrees and credentials, such as licensed architects and certified planners.

These more professionalized fields are also largely held by white people.4 At present, this racialized non-professional/professional divide is reproducing inequities in educational and career advancement. It also signifies that the field is missing the critical contributions that people of color can make.

These equity implications require that the planning and design fields attend to who is greening the built environment — a question of diversity — but also to how the environment is being greened. One way to address the former is through educational outreach in these fields through access to quality green curriculum.5 Green building training and expertise has historically been the domain of industry professionals, but scholars and educators are beginning to investigate how formal and informal STEM educational spaces can expand green building education through “green building literacies” in the K–12 school context.6 The designing, building, and operation of green schools can themselves be instructive processes, by providing students with hands-on opportunities to learn about how sustainability can feature in their learning environments.7 AN ECORISE/UTSOA RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIP To diversify the field and identify conceptual interventions for how to green the built environment in anti-racist ways, University of Texas faculty, researchers, and students teamed up with EcoRise, an environmental education organization that implements school-based programs to provide youth with knowledge and skills in the areas of sustainability, design, and green building.

The organization has worked with Austin

Dining Commons at Blazier Intermediate School, Austin ISD. Architect: BLGY Architecture, Photography: Andrea Calo.

Construction tours for Akins HS students organized by BLGY.

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Environmental justice scholarship and advocacy has illuminated equity implications of the greening of the built environment.

FIG 1 Akins High School student participants tour Austin’s Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC).

They also developed their own green school models at an MAA workshop. Image courtesy of EcoRise.

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Independent School District (AISD) since 2009, when former UT student Gina LaMotte founded it. The organization has greatly increased its reach, now serving more than 5,500 PreK–12 teachers at nearly 2,200 schools annually.

In 2019, EcoRise launched its Green Building Lessons for a Sustainable Future (GBSF) program at an AISD high school. The school is a federally designated Title I school, which means that a high portion of its students are from low-income households. The school enrolls approximately 2,750 students, 86% of whom are students of color. Six twelfth-grade students in the school’s STEM Academy’s capstone Engineering Design and Development course, a career and technical education class, participated in the program. GBSF also provided professional development for teachers, which included a visit to the Mexican American Cultural Center Fig 1, a three-day training session before the start of the school year, and forty-two lessons of green building curriculum with hands-on activities and group projects like identifying their schools’ energy inefficiencies and making recommendations on how to improve them. In addition, BLGY, an Austin-based architecture firm that specializes in green and LEED-certified schools, provided hands-on learning by facilitating workshops and site-visits to AISD’s Blazier Elementary School Fig 2 . UTSOA Assistant Professor Miriam Solis, community and regional planning student Oriana Lopez, and College of Education student Will Davies also joined the initiative to design and offer workshops and evaluate the program.

In 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Environmental Literacy Program (NOAA ELP) awarded EcoRise and the School of Architecture a $450,000 grant to grow the program in Texas.

The Building a Green Texas: Activating a New Generation of Sustainability Leaders Program supports projects that both inspire and educate people to use Earth-system science to increase ecosystem stewardship and resilience to extreme weather, climate change, and other environmental hazards. EcoRise’s deputy director Abby Randall is overseeing program implementation. The program will now include paid summer internships in addition to those already offered during the school year and will reach 400 students from fifteen schools in Central Texas and the Gulf Coast by 2023.

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FIG 2A View inside the new Blazier Elementary School designed by BLGY Architecture, which Akins High School students toured. Photo by Andrea Calo courtesy of BLGY.

UT’s role has also expanded. Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Charlton Lewis, Assistant Professor Katherine Lieberknecht, and landscape architecture graduate students are offering college readiness and design workshops in Central Texas, while UT’s Marine Science Institute will be doing the same for students in the Houston area and along the Gulf Coast. Associate Professor Carmen Valdez of the UT School of Social Work is a project advisor.

The pandemic temporarily affected the program’s momentum. In the ‘20-‘21 school year, it was at times difficult to coordinate with already overburdened teachers and students. As program coordinators, we took the time to learn from the challenges facing the school communities we were working with. We also hosted several virtual workshops that generated engagement, including a presentation by the School of Architecture’s Materials Lab Director, Jen Wong. This past summer was especially exciting, with Austinarea high school students interning at various offices throughout the city — including the City of Austin Office of Sustainability, Go Austin / Vamos Austin, and AISD’s facilities and STEM departments — all key organizations rethinking the intersection of equity, climate change, and the built environment. The high school students represented several campuses, including Eastside Memorial Early College High

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School, Northeast Early College High School, and Del Valle High School.

Throughout the grant period and beyond, we will iteratively evaluate if the project is achieving its overarching aim: to build environmental literacy among high school students and help communities become more resilient to extreme weather and other environmental hazards in the short- and long-term. We will do this via an in-depth study and on-the-ground application of green building principles. Our program evaluation efforts involve using a participatory action research approach (PAR) to identify and synthesize what we are learning from young people’s experience. PAR is a philosophy and a research approach implemented with communities and is designed to address diverse program and organizational needs across a broad range of local and cultural contexts.8 Insights generated through PAR enable collective deliberation and action to improve existing efforts. Thus, any insights generated from youth or the organizations we work with are collectively discussed and acted upon.

CONCEPTUALIZING CLIMATE JUSTICE PEDAGOGIES In addition to working toward diversifying the field, our research-practice partnership is enabling us to identify conceptual interventions that can contribute to anti-racist green building practices. We seek to disrupt traditional

“banking” pedagogical models of technical green building education, where a teacher unidirectionally “deposits” learning upon students.9 Our model engages high-school students’ knowledge about the connection between their daily lives and how green building plans — or their absence — affect their communities. By illuminating the potential role of youth in green building practice, we aim to advance green building methods that reflect historically marginalized communities’ concerns, priorities, and visions for the future.

Two insights about green building education have already emerged from this collaborative work.10 First, while green building curricula present valuable opportunities for students to help design and participate in decarbonization efforts in their communities, program designers and participants must consider the way that students’ and their communities’ perspectives and experiences are valued and incorporated.

When green building promises a healthier future, the ethical implications of what and whom green buildings might replace emerge.

Greening the built environment can precipitate “climate gentrification” or fail to adequately examine the historical and structural factors that produced high amounts of carbonization in the first place. Students visiting the Blazier school green building site made observations about the changing face of the neighborhood.

Rapid residential growth, with hundreds of

8 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (MB Ramos, Trans.), (New York: Continuum, 2007).

9 Miriam Solis, Will Davies, and Abby Randall, “Climate Justice Pedagogies in Greem Building Curriculum,” 2021. Manuscript submitted for publication.

3 N ational Council of Architectural Registration Boards, National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), & Coalition of Community College Architecture Programs (CCCAP), Examining the State of Diversity—AIA (2016). https://www. aia.org/resources/12416-examining-the-state-of-diversity.

4 L aura Biranna Cole, “Green Building Literacy: A Framework for Advancing Green Building Education.” International Journal of STEM Education 6, 1: 18.

7 C hristopher M. Bacon, Saneta deVuono-Powell, Mary Louise Frampton, Tony LoPresti, and Camille Pannu. "Introduction to empowered partnerships: Community-based participatory action research for environmental justice," Environmental Justice 6, no. 1 (2013): 1–8.

12 M olly Vollman Makris “Separate, Different, but Not Isolated: How Youth in Public Housing Relate to Their Gentrified Community, Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City (New York: Springer, 2015), 171–189; Odis Johnson, Jr. “Toward a theory of place,” Research on Schools, Neighborhoods and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility, ed. William Tate (PA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012) 29–46.

11 M egan Bang, Lawrence Curley, Adam Kessel, Ananda Marin, Eli Suzukovich III, and George Strack. “Muskrat Theories, Tobacco in the Streets, and Living Chicago as Indigenous Land,” Environmental Education Research 20, 1 (2014): 37–55.

6 U SGBC, LEED 2009 for Schools New Construction and Major Renovations, 2008. http://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=5547.Accessed 1 March 2021.

2 E llen Scully-Russ, “The Dual Promise of Green Jobs: Sustainability and Economic Equity,” The Palgrave Handbook of Sustainability: Case Studies and Practical Solutions, eds. Robert Brinkman and Sandra Garren (New York: Springer, 2018), 503–521.

10 A ndrew M. Busch, “Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and Gentrification in Austin, Texas,” Southern Spaces, 2015; Eliot Tretter, Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016).

5 I bid.; Laura Brianna Cole and Elke Altenburger, “Framing the Teaching Green Building: Environmental Education Through Multiple Channels in the School Environment," Environmental Education Research 25, 11: 1654-1673.”

immobility, and surveillance, while simultaneously presenting their possibilities of schools as sites for community health and inclusion. They called for sufficient sidewalks, high-quality food, and space for exercise. Youth prioritized cultural knowledge and diverse community values in their green building designs, offering climate justice imaginaries that drew clear connections between their lived experiences of social and spatial injustice and their school.

When considering approaches to climate justice, green curriculum’s primary focus on the application of LEED certifications and associated green building principles can flatten conceptualizations of communities’ contributions to planning and design. Centering only discrete, technical modifications to buildings that promote incremental decarbonization interventions is not enough to disrupt the normative relations between those designing and those using the built environment and can reproduce and reinforce racialized and classed disparities. What good is a “greener” building where students cannot walk safely to and from the buildings, where resources are unequally allocated, and where community and family are systematically excluded from participation in the school and its educational opportunities? Designing a greener, socially just built environment demands that students are active participants; pedagogical and curricular approaches must encourage the same. Our UTSOA-EcoRise partnership will continue to generate applied and theoretical insights on how to make progress in achieving these essential goals.

1 I sabelle Anguelovski, “From Toxic Sites to Parks as (Green) LULUs? New Challenges of Inequity, Privilege, Gentrification, and Exclusion for Urban Environmental Justice,” Journal of Planning Literature 31, 1 (2016): 23–36.

brand-new condominiums, was a driving force behind the need for a newer, larger (and greener) school building. Because Austin’s brand of “sustainability” has pushed the costs of urban development onto low-income, non-white residents by relegating them to racially and economically segregated parts of the city, exploring the relationship between the social and built environment starts with recognizing, not erasing, the complexity and political dynamics of decarbonization initiatives.11 Education frameworks that center the past and present contexts of land and settler colonialism can offer a way to do just that. This involves recognizing how non-Indigenous people’s claim to land and citizenship is contingent on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people; in this way, Austin is a settler-colonial city. When working with Austin youth, avoiding Indigenous erasure requires an understanding that land and land education do not exist separately and apart from cities.12 Another emergent conceptual intervention in our research-practice partnership is acknowledging that youth hold critical insights on planning and design practice that ought to be reflected in green-building curriculum and pedagogy. Green building curricula, however, don’t generally engage youth as potential contributers to the design process, yet youth can develop critical analysis and ideas to changes to their built and social environment, including gentrification and displacement.13 To collect their insights, we designed and offered a series of workshops that prompted students to share their ideas on climate justice.

Through drawings and models, students offered critiques of schools as sites of control,

FIG 2B Image courtesy of EcoRise.

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Phyto-Performance and Building Regulations

Plants v. Code:

ALEKSANDRA

JAESCHKE

Note: This text is an excerpt from a book forthcoming with Princeton Architectural Press in 2022.

In an overview of regulatory practices used to govern construction, housing policy expert William Baer pointed out (referring to scientist and economist Herbert Simon) that “rules are merely human devices to translate between desired ends and possible means.” Like other devices, rules — especially when formalized as professional standards or governmentenacted regulations — function according to internal protocols. As Bear put it, they “have an internal organization or grammar and metarules for its organization.” 1 While some rules are prohibitive (in other words, proscriptive) 2 and concentrate on avoiding negative effects, most of them tend to be formulated as positive prescriptions, even if in practice they still simply prohibit what is not permitted.3 They promote positive outcomes either by imposing a method tested to be beneficial, or at least safe, or they do it by indicating a desired performance without defining specific means.

The former approach reduces the risk but does not necessarily promote optimal solutions or encourage innovation. The latter, performancebased approach attempts to maximize the benefits by accepting an elevated level of risk.

The specificity of regulations can also vary; they can impose exact standards, or, whenever such degree of absolute precision is impossible, more relative criteria requiring specialized knowledge and professional judgment Fig 1.

At the latter, softer end of the spectrum, performance-based, process-oriented criteria only signal desired results and vaguely suggest means. Below is an example: FIG 1 Forms of regulations. Drawn after Baer 2011.

Provide clean indoor air [performance] by venting air to the outside [process] to carry out harmful pollutants [relative criterion].

In such a prescription, neither the means nor the effects are clearly defined; designers, plan-checkers, and users are all entrusted

Botanical air filtration system (schematic view). Redrawn from Carver et al., 2010, 3-2.

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with a significant amount of responsibility.

Not surprisingly, it is difficult to find suitable examples of rules like this in the current building code. What is more common is what one finds at the other end of the spectrum: prescriptive, product-oriented standards that impose precise outcomes, leave little freedom to designers, plan-checkers, and users, and shift responsibility onto manufacturers and installers. The following regulation contained in the California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen) serves as an example: “A4.506.2 Construction filter. (…) Provide [prescription] filters on return air openings rated at MERV 8 [exact quantitative standard] or higher during construction.”4 This level of precision is preferred by code makers as it reduces the need for specialized knowledge and minimizes legal liability. As will soon hopefully become evident, the way in which we express standards and regulations determines how we practice sustainability as a society. The freedoms and responsibilities assigned to each of us — manufacturers and certifiers, users, plan-checkers, architects, and nowadays also simulation software — are embedded in these meta-rules; they define our relationship with the environment.

VEGETATIVE SHADE: THE SIMULATION ENGINE AND ITS AGENCY Historically, US building codes have been either prohibitive or, when expressed in a positive way, prescriptive — granting little freedom to designers and trust to users. While over the last decades, performance-based rules have occasionally been woven into the existing prescriptions,5 the California-written Energy Code appears very progressive as it explicitly offers two options: a prescriptive compliance path and a performance-oriented approach.6 Yet, while in part the choice reflects the increasing acceptance of digital simulation as a way to assess untested solutions and

encourage technological innovation, there is a twofold caveat: 1) performance must be computed by compliance software certified for this use by the Commission, and 2) the software only accepts a limited range of “compliance options” (or inputs), all itemized in additional reference manuals.7 Rather than granting complete freedom, the software engine assesses the effects of combinations that, while finite and quite limited, exceed the capacities of a human brain. A quick look at how shading is defined in the Residential ACM Reference Manual, specifically section 3.5.8.4 “Fixed Permanent Shading Devices,” illustrates how those options are defined: Overhangs or sidefins that are attached to the building or shading from the building itself are compliance options for which credit is offered through the performance approach. However, no credit is offered for shading from trees, adjacent buildings, or terrain [my emphasis].

Further in the same section one reads: Shading is more challenging on the east and west sides of the house. (…) Vertical fins can be effective, but they degrade the quality of the view from the window and limit the natural light that can enter. In cooling-dominated climates, the best approach is to minimize windows that face east and west. Landscaping features can be considered to increase comfort but cannot be used for compliance credit [my emphasis].8 Landscaping features (i.e., shrubs and trees) do “increase comfort” but cannot be “inputted” into the compliance software. Since the shade that they provide (or shadow they cast) is variable, it cannot be easily quantified to be expressed numerically as in Table 3-4 “Exterior Shades and Solar Heat Gain Coefficients” where an array of devices (e.g., bug screens,

The freedoms and responsibilities assigned to each of us — define our relationship with the environment.

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FIG 2 Botanical air filtration system (schematic view). Redrawn from Carver et al., 2010, 3-2.

sunscreens, awnings, blinds, and slats) is ranked according to the percentage of transmitted sunlight.9 Even though unlike vertical fins and bug screens, trees do not “degrade the quality of the view,” they are not on the list.

In the meantime, “All operable windows and skylights are assumed to have an insect screen, and this is the default condition against which other window/exterior shading device combinations are compared.” 10 The insect screen is considered to be the default shading option. I permanently removed it on the day I moved into a Los Angeles house, one under Title 24 jurisdiction.

VEGETATIVE INSULATION: MANUFACTURERS, INSTALLERS, AND RATINGS While the above-mentioned CALGreen Code does suggest vegetative shade as a possible, although voluntary, nonresidential measure (specifying that it may be used if documented to reach coverage within five years), it never

mentions vegetative insulation.11 It may be because it would not satisfy the provisions that regulate insulation materials in the Energy Code, where the expression “documented” acquires a more absolute meaning: the insulation product must be rated by the manufacturer. Section 110.8 “Mandatory Requirements for Insulation, Roofing Products, and Radiant Barriers” explicitly states that insulation materials must be certified by the Department of Consumer Affairs.12 Reliance on manufacturer rating is confirmed in the same Residential ACM Reference Manual which allows for non-listed assemblies (e.g., insulation) to be used as long as their properties (e.g., R-value) have been rated by the manufacturer.13 Last but not least, exceptions are permitted, but exceptional quality has also been normalized. It is a clearly standardized procedure described in Section 2.2.5. “Quality Insulation Installation (QII)” and it must be field verified, certified, and reported by a licensed installer following HERS procedures.14 As of today, no manufacturer can rate, and no licensed expert can verify, the quality of vegetative insulation. Unrated and unverified, vegetation cannot be considered a viable option when following the performance compliance path offered by the Energy Code.

PHYTO-AIR PURIFICATION: THE AGENCY OF THE USER The Residential Code, specifically section R303.1 “Habitable Rooms,” prescribes openable windows to guarantee natural ventilation.

At the same time, the Mechanical Code, in the previously mentioned section 402.2 “Natural Ventilation” makes ASHRAE 62.2 requirements mandatory, and imposes mechanical ventilation in addition to openable windows. The reason for this level of protectiveness can be found in one of the Energy Code reference manuals, which states: “Energy Commission-sponsored research has revealed that concentration of pollutants such as formaldehyde are higher than expected, and that many occupants do not open windows regularly for ventilation.” 15 This explains why the code emphasizes that although mandatory “window operations are not a permissible method for providing whole-house ventilation.” 16 However, while it is obviously clearly stated that users cannot be trusted to regularly open windows, what is not made equally clear is that outdoor air can no longer be trusted to purify indoor air

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either. Although the code implicitly recognizes that outdoor air is polluted — inlets must be located ten feet away from outdoor air contaminants — nothing prohibits outdoor air intakes from being placed within 1,000 feet of a freeway where cars incessantly emit hazardous pollutants.17 What is then necessary is not only a forced supply of air, but also a filter. In fact, a filter in domestic whole-fan systems and local exhausts is required by the Energy Code, section 150.0 (m) 12. “Air Filtration.” 18 Yet, while the same code encourages compliance through performance approach, the way this and other prescriptions related to air purification are formulated does not leave space for “phyto-innovation.” A NASA-developed phytopurification system is not a valid compliance option Fig 2 .19 Since vegetation cannot be rated by a manufacturer, an experimental phyto-filter cannot comply with the section that imposes MERV labeling, and cannot obtain a HERS certificate Fig 3.20 A phyto-purification system developed for the “airless” outer space is also not an acceptable option, although it requires neither supply nor filtering of outdoor air. When mentioned in the code by their names, plants are simply considered a hazard or a nuisance. While performative enough for the outer space, they are not a valid compliance option here in downto-earth residential construction. The code treats humans with well-founded skepticism and it mistrusts organic life in general — its nature is too unstable.

1 W illiam C. Baer, “Customs, Norms, Rules, Regulations and Standards in Design Practice,” in Companion to Urban Design, eds. Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (New York: Routledge, 2011), 277–78.

2 F or example: “405.3 Miscellaneous Fixtures. (…) No dry or chemical closet (toilet) shall be installed in a building used for human habitation, unless first approved by the Health Officer.” The following section provides an example of another prohibitive, although more flexible proscription: “411.2 Water consumption. The effective flush volume of all water closets shall not exceed 1.28 gallons (4.8 L) per flush (…).” California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) and International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO), 2019 California Plumbing Code, California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 5 (Ontario, CA: International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials, 2019), 58, 62.

3 F or example: “411.2.3 Performance [HCD 1 & HCD 2]. Water closets installed in residential occupancies shall meet or exceed the minimum performance criteria developed for certification of high-efficiency toilets under the WaterSense program (…).”

CBSC and IAPMO, Plumbing Code, 62. While this prescriptive regulation is expressed in positive terms its ultimate meaning is similar to the one cited in the above note. The latter prescribes a standard, the former prohibits performance below a precise numeric value.

4 C BSC, 2019 California Green Building Standards Code, California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 11 (Washington D.C.: International Code Council, 2019), 111.

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PHYTO-WASTEWATER PURIFICATION: THE LIABILITY OF THE PLAN-CHECKER One instance where plants are welcomed by rule-makers in the Los Angeles area is in the Stormwater Low Impact Development (LID) Ordinance. 21 Meant to mitigate the impact of urban runoff, the ordinance imposes such methods as bioretention and phyto-purification as mandatory prescriptions. While this federally imposed ordinance embraces the performative capacity of plants (retention and purification), and sets some objectives in exact terms (i.e., the amount of the runoff to be retained on site), it also accepts that other aspects of phytoperformance will remain less well-defined (i.e., the degree to which stormwater runoff is purified). The attitude toward plants is slightly different in the state-imposed, conservation-

FIG 3 HVAC Furnace MERV 8 Filter. Photo by author.

driven Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (MWELO) and in the related building code regulations. Here, vegetation becomes a passive object, if not a culprit, in part responsible for water scarcity. It is referred to as “the receiving landscape,” 22 and gets ranked according to water consumption using a numerical system, and must meet precise requirements. Among prescriptions included in the MWELO one reads:

For residential areas, install climate adapted plants that require occasional, little or no summer water (average WUCOLS plant factor 0.3) for 75% of the plant area excluding edibles and areas using recycled water...23

5 A certain degree of freedom is inscribed into section R316.4 of the Residential Code: “Thermal Barrier.” While it refers to a specific standard of performance, the expression “or a material that is tested in accordance with and meets the acceptance criteria of” leaves some space for innovation and allows for use of new materials. California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) and International Code Council (ICC), 2019 California Residential Code, California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 2.5 (Washington D.C.: International Code Council, 2019), 3.

6 CBSC, 2019 California Energy Code, California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 11 (Washington D.C.: International Code Council, 2019), 153. Performance-oriented approach is defined in Section 150.1 “Performance and Prescriptive Compliance Approaches for Low-Rise Residential Building,” under b) “Performance Standards” one reads: “A building complies with the performance standards if the energy consumption calculated for the proposed design building is no greater than the energy budget calculated for the standard design building using Commission-certified compliance software as specified by the Alternative Calculation Methods Approval Manual.”

7 California Energy Commission (CEC), 2019 Residential Alternative Calculation (ACM) Method Reference Manual, for the 2019 Building Energy Efficiency Standards Title 24, Part 6, and Associated Administrative Regulations in Part 1 (May 2019), 1, https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/2019_ Res_ACM_Ref_ada.pdf. The Energy Code relies on a number of additional manuals. The Residential ACM Reference Manual: “establishes the rules for creating a building model, describing

how the proposed design (energy use) is defined, how the standard design (energy budget) is established, and ending with what is reported on the Certificate of Compliance (CF1R).”

Other sources include the reference appendices for the 2019 Building Energy Efficiency Standards, the 2019 Residential Compliance Manual, and the California Building Energy Code Compliance (CBECC) User Manual, which provides guidelines for software users.

8 CEC, 2019 Residential Compliance Manual, for the 2019 Building Energy Efficiency Standards Title 24, Part 6, and Associated Administrative Regulations in Part 1 (December 2018), 3–25, https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/publications/displayOneReport_cms. php?pubNum=CEC-400-2018-023-CMF. 9 Ibid., 3–22. The rest of the building code either does not mention vegetation or does it to prevent damage from it. In the Residential Code, Section R337 “Materials and Construction Methods for Exterior Wildfire Exposure” (128) protects from “vegetation fire”; in sections R408.5 “Removal of debris” (185) plants are referred to as litter.

10 Ibid., 3–23.

11 CBSC, Green Building Standards Code, 131. Vegetation as a shading device is mentioned as a voluntary nonresidential measure in section A5.106.7 “Exterior wall shading.” It suggests that in the future vegetation might become a shading option. It simply needs to be standardized first.

12 CBSC, Energy Code, 47.

The attitude toward vegetation is even more distrustful when it comes to wastewater treatment. While the local authorities can authorize a private sewage disposal system (i.e., septic tanks), such freedom is granted only in low-density (and low-risk) rural areas. 24 In these areas, they can also approve aerobic systems as an alternative to septic tanks:

H101.11 Alternate Systems. (…) Approved aerobic systems shall be permitted to be substituted for conventional septic tanks provided the Authority Having Jurisdiction is satisfied that such systems will produce results not less than equivalent to septic tanks, whether their aeration systems are operating or not.25 Due to the way these rules are expressed, aerobic treatment units (ATU) are still rare, although standardized models are available on the market, and often constitute the only alternative to a conventional septic tank.26 Yet, since they require continuous maintenance, they are considered even riskier than risky septic tanks. More experimental, ecologically engineered systems, in which not only aerobic bacteria but also plants are used to treat water, are even less common. John Todd’s pioneering Eco-Machines mostly serve research or educational institutions.27 In urban areas the code imposes connection to the public sewer, and few municipal treatment plants rely on

13 C EC, Residential ACM Reference Manual, 21.

14 I bid., 14.

15 C EC, Residential Compliance Manual, 4–74.

16 C BSC and ICC, 2019 Residential Code, 83.

17 C EC, Residential Compliance Manual, 4–110. See section 4.6.8.9 “Air Inlets.”

18 CBSC, Energy Code, 145.

19 S ee Robert M. Carver, Jianshun (Jensen) S. Zhang, and Zhiqiang Wang, Air Cleaning Technologies for Indoor Air Quality (ACTIAQ): Growing Fresh and Clean Air, Report 11-10 (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, 2010). This NASAdeveloped system uses Golden Pothos and root microbes, in an irrigated bed of activated carbon, and shale pebbles, and is fitted with an induction fan.

20 C BSC, Energy Code, 146. See section 150.0 (m) 12E “Air filter product labeling.”

21 C ity of Los Angeles, Planning and Land Development Handbook for Low Impact Development (LID), 5th ed. (May 9, 2016), https:// www.lacitysan.org/cs/groups/sg_sw/documents/document/ y250/mde3/~edisp/cnt017152.pdf.

22 C BSC and IAPMO, Plumbing Code, 41.

natural systems such as constructed wetlands for treatment.28 The potential liability is so high that without a dedicated insurance system, local authorities will continue testing and praising natural systems, but insist on sending the treated water back to a conventional treatment facility to avoid responsibility.29 The early Victorian engineers embraced the convenience of waterborne waste removal, perhaps because they, as observed by Eran Ben-Joseph, “believed in the purifying nature of water.” 30 Although we no longer share this belief, we continue to mistrust plants’ capacity to purify wastewater and our own capacity to take care of them.

THE PLANT-MINDED DESIGN Organic systems, nonstandard technologies, and passive spatial solutions are penalized by the prescriptive code, which favors manufacturerrated products over custom-designed spatial configurations, and mistrusts users and “rebellious” vegetation.31 Not only is use of plants not prescribed by the building code, but it is also not an acceptable option when satisfying the quasi performance-driven regulations found in the California Energy Code. As one might expect, the only section of the building code meant to protect vegetation can be found in the CALGreen Code. And yet, in the current edition of the green part of the building regulations, its adoption depends on the goodwill of the client and the architect. Restoring native vegetation species

23 California Code of Regulations, title 23, division 2, chapter 2 (23 CCR § 490–495), Appendix D “Prescriptive Compliance Option,” accessed June 30, 2021, https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/ Browse/Home/California/.

24 CBSC and IAPMO, Plumbing Code, Appendix H “Private Sewage Disposal Systems,” 427.

25 Ibid., 429–30.

26 “Aerobic Treatment Units: An Alternative to Septic Systems,” West Virginia University National Environmental Services Center website, Pipeline 16 (3), 2005, https://www.nesc. wvu.edu/files/d/2a62a149-f578-4509-ad97-fdf32d2c0101/ pl_summer05.pdf. The article reports that two-thirds of all the land area in the U.S. is not suitable for septic systems due to the lot size, soil conditions, high water table, or proximity to a body of water.

27 For example, in the Omega Center Eco-Machine (NY), “treatment is accomplished through a combination of septic and equalization tanks and anoxic tanks, aerated aquatic cells, outdoor wetland and a recirculating sand filter.” For details, see the John Todd Ecological Design website, accessed June 30, 2021, https://www.toddecological.com/projects.

28 The Arcata Wastewater Treatment Plant and Wildlife Sanctuary located in Northern California combines conventional wastewater treatment with the natural processes of constructed wetlands and serves a city of approx. 18,000 inhabitants.

and patterns after construction remains a voluntary measure.32 As of today, the plantminded design can only be practiced as an “uncredited” expression of a genuine passion for the environment (or a form of unrewarded biophilia, to use E.O. Wilson’s term). It is a dangerous extravagance, considering the multitude of mandatory prescriptions that one must satisfy before engaging with the otherness of plants.

In his parable of the acrobat on the wire, Gregory Bateson wrote: For obvious reasons, it is difficult to control by law those basic ethical and abstract principles upon which the social system depends. (…)

On the other hand, it is rather easy to write laws which shall fix the more episodic and superficial details of human behavior. In other words, as laws proliferate, our acrobat is progressively limited in his arm movement but is given free permission to fall off the wire.33 Unfortunately, the acrobatics of sustainability are so accurately regulated by laws, that we, the acrobat-architects, risk not only falling off, but might lose interest and simply step off the wire to once again apply our skill to a less standardized facet of the art of building.

29 E ran Ben-Joseph, The Code of the City, Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 96–97. This was the case with a project built in South Burlington (VT) in 1995. The system was funded and tested by the EPA, but although the results met the federal standards, the agency and the municipal authorities insisted to send the cleaned water back to the local treatment facility to avoid liability.

30 Ibid., 91.

31 While vegetation is still not standardized enough in terms of building performance, it is highly controlled in other fields—turf grasses and most agricultural products have been engineered for decades. Possibly, organic systems will be accepted by the building industry only when it becomes possible to represent them as CAD blocks and therefore integrate them into the BIM system. They will be integral to the project once the process of their scientific management is complete all the way through to representation.

32 CBSC, Green Building Standards Code, 99.

33 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972); Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 506. Page reference is to the 2000 edition.

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building relationship

coleman

Teaching architecture offers an extraordinary opportunity to understand relationships between individuals and others, and between people and their homes, places they work, communities in which they live, and how they treat their environments. Having this occasion not only to consider but to help shape these relationships is a gift and a responsibility not found in many other university programs.

Yet, teaching design presents us with a set of unique complications, for architecture isn’t quite about offering systematic solutions, as, say, in the field of law with its prescribed rules of societal norms, or in medicine with its prescribed techniques that enable healing.

And architecture isn’t quite art, as might be undertaken by a painter, poet, or musician.

Instead, it falls in a middle-ground between prescribed skill and open-ended exploration, which makes it tough to nail down exactly what it is we do as design educators. Is our role to pass on prescribed methodologies that a student then adopts and develops, yet never should stray too far from? Or, like a finger pointing at the moon, should we try to teach students to be “artful,” which, in truth, they can only find within? A combination of both — employing the prescribed, and the freedom to create — is the balance I imagine we aim for.

Within this boundary, architecture, for me, is a social art, and I try to teach it as such. I define “social” as communal or, more specifically, as a loose collective of individuals acting for the common good. And I define “art” here as artifice or artful skill.

Instead of designing buildings, landscapes, and communities, the social artist makes what Professor Michael Benedikt lucidly calls relationship.1 Approaching architecture as spaces for which to form relationship rather than formally shape objects — what we call buildings — best provides a site where

relationship between an individual and time unfolds, where vision, light and shadow, touch and memory, place and love, embodiment and spirit can find a home. The social artist shapes relationship between one and another, edifice and society, community and ecosystem.

Once made, a site becomes the active middle ground, always there in the background of our lives. Seeing design this way can provide fertile territory for architecture students, offering them vivid places to explore and seductive locations to discover relationship, for others and for themselves. I’ve found this kind of exploration to be strongest when working outside the walls of academia in public places. There, students can effectively hone their design skills, discover opportunities for versatile interaction and adaptable interrelationship potential, and generate reciprocal relationships with others.

Testing their design ideas by building what they’ve designed, students construct a screened porch and fire circle for Houston Audubon at their High Island, TX Coastal Operations Center. The finished project will be used by environmental educators and other volunteers who stay on the island for several weeks each year. Image courtesy of Coleman Coker.

coker

During a backyard potluck dinner, GCDL students brainstorm early design ideas with their neighborhood stakeholders. This will be the first test for what is to become a new environmental education pavilion designed and built by the students. Image courtesy of Ava Kikusaki.

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The Texas coast is a microcosm of what’s happening worldwide ­— an ideal laboratory to explore the larger concerns our students will inevitably face.

Students get a firsthand look at petro-chemical plants along the Houston Ship Channel from the deck of the MV Sam Houston. Field research like this forms an integral part of their investigation into environmental justice issues in nearby fenceline communities. Image courtesy of Luther Yamamoto.

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Learning this way requires a level of commitment and trust — which are invaluable teaching tools themselves — between student and stakeholder and offers design challenges not found in the safety of the classroom.

In this context, learning through doing transforms ideas into something tangible.

Learning this way is about risk taking, teasing out the middle ground between theoria and praxis, so that learning how to become a better architect happens within the messiness of the real-world, where you can’t fake it. Working with a real-world stakeholder is thus a twopronged investigation: the first ambition is to satisfy the desires and needs of that client.

Working with a stakeholder provides students opportunities to demonstrate responsibility and commitment; it shows how working toward someone else’s benefit — instead of an isolated student ego — is what being an architect is really all about. The second part of the investigation is about learning how to cope with — and use as an asset — the reality of concrete limitations: gravity, rain, heat, cold, material, temporal and fiscal restraints, and the constraints of building codes and social expectation. By meeting stakeholders’ needs and acknowledging limitations, students learn firsthand how to economically make beauty, all together practical, equitable, and meaningful. Yes, it can be untidy, but — as more than one student has told me — it can change their understanding of what architecture is and can be.

Teaching by doing — as has long been done at other institutions — led me to establish the Gulf Coast DesignLab here at the UT School of Architecture. Though I don’t call what we do “public interest design” (PID) (general labels like that can be misleading and even sound conceited), the term is sometimes used to describe one of the ways in which the DesignLab engages. PIDers rightfully point out that “architecture” serves only a small percentage (3-5%) of the public. To overcome this limit, academia and the profession need to cast a wider net, to seek and serve a “public” that has little idea what an architect is, could never afford one in the first place, and who, in the opinion of some elite designers — only whispered in dark hallways — are the nonaficionados who never read Dwell, nor have worshipped at the altar of architectural masterworks. In other words, we must serve

the masses who wouldn’t appreciate what we designers do. For many academics and “highdesigners,” PID isn’t really about design at all.

Much of what has been fashioned under PID’s banner has been poor design, rarely inspiring and delighting. For those critics, the pursuit of the beautiful is incidental, and for PIDers, that lack of direct ambition toward beauty is to be forgiven, since their ambition rests more on the laurels of its “higher” community-saving goals. For the architecture profession, working under the pressures of our capitalist economy, there is no money in PID work. Funding for communities in need or non-profits working for the public good to engage with architects is minimal, if it exists at all, and doesn’t even cover a junior designer’s time. Some firms of course do pro bono work as a way to bridge this gap, and more progressive AIA chapters have programs to address the shortfall, but their effects are minimal, barely reaching that other 95% who never benefit from what good design can offer.

The Gulf Coast DesignLab tries to bridge this gap with one foot in the public realm — working with those who would otherwise never encounter an architect — and the other foot planted firmly in design that aspires to be beautiful and fitting. Whether we accomplish this or not is for others to decide, but the pursuit of good design meant to serve the public good is instilled in the students. It is the ethical foundation from which they are asked to work, learning about an architect’s responsibilities and what that can mean to a client, to the neighborhood, community, and environment of which they are a part. Making something aesthetically appealing that will be used for decades becomes a point of pride for many students, instilling in them what being a citizen architect is all about, and what it means to make the world just a little bit better for others.

But, why teach design and community engagement on the Gulf Coast? After all, a coast is no more than a thin strip of land, specific to its own particularities, bound to ocean. Yet, it is dynamic and constantly shifting, both literally and figuratively, unpredictable and uncanny.

With more intensity than many landbound places, our Texas coast openly displays the uneasy bargain that’s been struck between people and “nature.” The Texas coast is a microcosm of what’s happening worldwide, and because of that, it provides an ideal laboratory

to explore the larger concerns our students will inevitably face, regardless of where they settle. These concerns are unfolding around the globe in the form of ever-increasing climate disasters, the sixth extinction, forced migration, failing crops, water shortages, and climate refugees. These global-sized concerns, all observed on the Texas coast, are embodied in ever-increasing industrial growth — much of it petrochemical — that affects unique coastal flora and fauna. It affects the livelihood of shrimpers, oyster farmers, commercial fishers, and ranchers. It impacts home- and land owners, sports anglers and beach goers. It causes illness and jeopardizes personal health, especially for low-income neighborhoods.

Finding healthy places to live and work is getting harder and harder. Add increased hurricane intensity and ever-more intense, more frequent rain events. It is both fascinating and confounding to see how all these factors intermingle and coalesce in tenuous day-today relationship. The question I ask myself is: Are we preparing our students for this? As future practitioners, wherever they end up, our students will face these “hyper-object” events, and will be put to the test. 2 My hope is that DesignLab’s efforts offer a response in some small way.

Our work has taken us from Port Isabel to Port Arthur; these past several years have been in the Galveston Bay/Houston area. This is a rapidly growing megalopolis sometimes referred to as “Anthropocene City.” 3 It has earned that moniker by being home to about 42% of our nation’s petrochemical production.

What is produced there helps feed global warming, making Houston hotter and more vulnerable to hurricanes and rain deluge. Our nation’s rapidly growing fourth-largest city gobbles up more surrounding land daily, littering about unsustainable, auto-dependent subdivisions, which require more expressways and more petroleum products, resulting in more pollution, more unhealthy places to live… on and on, creating an ouroboric relationship, a city constantly feeding on itself. For designers and planners, Houston is a complex laboratory in which to plumb the depths of unchecked urban sprawl, unsustainable transportation, social inequity, unhealthy environmental conditions, and ecological devastation. In the early ‘80s, Dr. Robert Bullard — who calls Houston home and is widely hailed as the father

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Middle-school students from the Houston area gather in an outdoor classroom built by GCDL students in the spring of 2018. They’re discussing what they just experienced on a kayak trip in Galveston’s West Bay, hosted by Artist Boat, a Galveston area non-profit that works with Houston area public schools to promote stewardship through increased ecological literacy. Image courtesy of Mary Warwick.

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of the environmental justice movement— and his students from Texas Southern University mapped the relationship between the city’s garbage dumps and minority neighborhoods on behalf of a class-action lawsuit, Bean V. Southwestern Waste Management Corp.4 In their landmark study, they clearly documented that Houston planners had systematically placed waste landfills in or close to communities of color. Once made public, Houston changed its practices, but other health-harming practices continue.

Environmental racism and ecological devastation are ongoing. Just visit the mostly Latinx fence-line neighborhoods of Manchester and Galena Park that back up to the Houston Ship Channel. Once meandering along Buffalo Bayou, now dredged and widened, the channel welcomes ocean-going ships that dock next to

its petro-chemical plants. Toxic-waste air- and water releases and chemical fires — which are illegal in most states — happen there often.

Cancer rates, particularly for childhood cancer and leukemia, in those neighborhoods are staggeringly above national average.

Governmental failure, both local and national, and corporate callousness are to blame, putting the health and well-being of many Houstonians in harm’s way. And there seems to be no stopping it. Houston is fertile ground for exploring complex design issues, especially for students who will face many of these problems.

Because government and corporations have yet to address these quality-of-life concerns, anxious individuals have pulled together to form outspoken neighborhood groups and determined non-profits. Though their missions vary, each strives to make their city a healthier

4 B ean v. Southwest Waste Management Corp., Civ. A. No. H-79-2215 (US District Court, SD Texas 1979).

3 R oy Scranton wrote a chapter in his 2018 book We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, Inc.) titled “Anthropocene City,” (pp: 30-49) where he describes the complexities of

2 H yperobjects are objects (or events) so massive in scale and duration that they become hard for us to conceive in our understanding of spacetime: things like global warming, world monetary systems, plate tectonics, plastics, all are hyperobjects. We can name them but have difficulty in grasping them in any meaningful way. Object-oriented

Houston, TX and the disproportionate role it plays in contributing to planetary climate change. Scranton describes meeting Timothy Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, for a boat tour of the Houston Ship Channel where they discuss the ironies and paradoxes of the city. ontology philosopher Graham Harman was an early user of the term, but it was later popularized by Timothy Morton, first in his 2012 book, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press), and more extensively explored in his 2013 book Hyperobject: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press).

A third relationship the Gulf Coast DesignLab gives our students is a deeper understanding of the place in which they are working. This understanding goes far beyond what students typically learn about “place” when looking out their classroom window. Immersion in the landscape happens in two ways: first, through boots-on-the-ground intelligence, in the form of walks and kayak trips, guided by those with firsthand knowledge of the coastal environment. Whether in town or coastal prairie, experts in their field give talks and demonstrations about where the students are and what they’re seeing. It’s no longer “just grass” or “just wetland,” but newly-realized interdependent ecologies with ebbs and flows — productive, sustaining, and beautiful.

This method helps students to understand how what they make can fit comfortably into the local ecology, and how what they are doing is not just a formal object-making exercise or another design problem to be solved — but is providing active work, fully embedded and dependent upon the place in which it plays a part. This type of immersion occurs second through a service-learning project meant to repair and nourish damaged landscape. These projects have included planting native prairie grasses in over-ranched areas; removing trash from wildlife refuges; sinking bagged oyster shells in bay waters to reestablish oyster habitat and help cleanse the water and reduce erosion; planting live oak saplings in areas cut down for generations-long farming. These projects provide the opportunity for students to build relationships with the places in which they’ll work.

This is engaged activism, students working with their hearts and hands — and their best design ideas — while practicing ethical responsibility toward others. I’ve found that most architecture students want to make a better world for others. They recognize architecture’s failures when it only serves the few and they want to do something about it.

Their idealism drives them to commitments to make change. I am optimistic they will do just that. My hope for these budding architects — these social artists — is that they take what they’ve learned and shape their own understanding of how to build relationship around it, for their future endeavors and for the future of others.

1 M ichael Benedikt, Architecture Beyond Experience (San Francisco: Applied Research and Design, 2020).

and more sustainable place to live. For the Gulf Coast DesignLab, these David-versus-Goliath organizations are the conduits that allow us to cut across traditional academic boundaries and build relationships between students and the public. As engaged designers, this takes the form of students working with a community client much in the same way an architect would in real-world practice. In our case, however, the design process goes one step further; the students build what they design. Developing years-long relationships with non-profit partners, we have been drawn to those focused on public schools in the Houston/Galveston area. Our stakeholders typically offer middleand high-school kids the chance to get out of the classroom and into the landscape — hiking, kayaking, collecting specimens, sketching, and water-coloring. They learn what coastal ecology looks, feels, sounds, smells, and tastes like, increasing their ecological literacy and gaining a sense of stewardship. All this helps them better understand who they are and how they fit into their greater surroundings. Our DesignLab students contribute to this outreach by doing what architects do best, designing meaningful buildings that inspire.

None of our architecture students are seasoned builders and teaching them building skills is by no means the goal here. Making them better designers is the goal. Constructing what they have designed shows them how to work within specific time frames and unbending budgets, how to respect the needs and desires of their stakeholder over their own ambition, and how to better understand composition and proportion. They must test their abilities to make something beautiful while considering appropriate and durable material choices or, as Vitruvius described, to make firmness, commodity, and delight. DesignLab students have designed and built outdoor classrooms, observation areas, kayak storage facilities, and gathering places for middle and high school students to learn from marine biologists, ecologists, scientists, master naturalists, nature interpreters, and artists. The structures our DesignLab students have fashioned over our program’s nine years are places to catch welcoming breezes; retreats from the sun; and places to sketch, observe, rest, imagine, and contemplate. The general public also benefits, since it also has access to most of these places.

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and energy consumption in texas

climate change, population growth,

Juliana

Many cities in Texas are facing dramatic population growth alongside extreme temperatures due to climate change. The stress these factors place on the electrical grid is a threat to human life. Buildings contribute 30-40% of global greenhouse gas emissions.1 Texas architects, planners, and engineers have considerable leverage to affect the future health of their cities; how we organize ourselves as a society has a direct impact on our per-capita energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Looking at multiple neighborhoods in Austin, as well as metropolitan areas throughout Texas, we forecasted possible outcomes from various intervention strategies—from improving building envelopes to promoting denser urban morphologies. 2 The implications on energy consumption, overheating risks, and total carbon emissions are varied and complex as the following four projects will show.

First, looking to retrofit buildings in the West Campus neighborhood of Austin, we described the energy simulation of 650 buildings for multiple building refurbishment cases from the present to the year 2100, superimposing a climate scenario for the 21st century as projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).3 We evaluated both urban energy demand and building overheating.

In order to evaluate the performance of the building stock across many time periods and refurbishment scenarios, we combined data from the PostgreSQL database with the simulation capability of CitySim, a large-scale urban energy simulation tool. We created a database of 120,000 buildings using data from the Travis County Appraisal district and the US Department of Energy, including the height, type, and material used based on typical building codes for that year.4 We refurbished wall, roof, and window material to the LEED Gold standards. GHCitySim, an extension for Rhino3D’s Grasshopper, was used to transfer various facets and geometries from the

felkner

database, Honeybee, and Ladybug Tools5 to CitySim.6 For the climate scenarios, we utilized the IPCC’s B1 scenario, which supposes rapid technological and economic development worldwide,7 assuming, for argument’s sake, that the entire building stock would be retrofitted by 2040. For the reference year, we used climate data from a typical meteorological year (TMY3) representing an average of decades of data.

For climate data on future SRES climate change cases, data was obtained from Meteonorm, which uses stochastic modeling. We assumed regular building HVAC operation, with scenarios assuming 1) improved glazing, 2) improved wall material, and 3) full refurbishment. Only full refurbishment was found to be enough to keep energy savings into 2100 Fig 1.

While full refurbishment helped buildings use less energy even into the increased temperatures of 2100, in the case of a blackout, these buildings retained considerably more heat than the reference case Fig 2 .

The results of this study suggested that retrofits alone are not sufficient to meet future performance goals. On the other hand, the relatively high performance of the multifamily residential buildings showed that the typological characteristics of those buildings yielded a general improvement over most others. Multi-family homes use not only less energy per capita, but also overheat less in case of a blackout.

These findings led us to the second project, which tested the potential of urban density to mitigate the effects of climate change using the same neighborhood. We investigated different urban growth and densification scenarios and their energy performance under climate change conditions using urban energy simulation and an abstract urban growth model, which supposed a continuation of the current pattern of single-family houses being redeveloped into various types of multi-family housing. The area was made up of seventy plots that have

Cooling savings (-MWh) for Dallas under A1b (Blue: Base Case, Red: Scenario 3, Yellow: Scenario 2, Green: Scenario 1).

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Overall, we see multiple strategies are available to make to make Texas cities and neighborhoods more energy efficient.

area equivalents to single-family house lots.

Our framework allowed for each scenario to be accounted for in a parametric growth model for which each ten-year step from 2030 to 2100 could be modeled and simulated. We used predictions of population growth by a market research group, which estimated Austin’s population at 3.86 million by 2046.8 To allow for population growth in the neighborhood, we assumed redevelopment with building typologies that allowed for densification Fig 3.

Fig 3 and Fig 4 show the types and patterning of single family (grey), low-rise (orange), medium-rise (pink) and tower (purple). From Fig 5 we see that if West Campus continues to allow single-family homes (grey) to remain with low-rise housing (orange), the area can only absorb population until 2030 and can then no longer grow. However, allowing all types, the neighborhood could absorb population into 2100. If we allow only mid-rise or tower housing to be the redevelopment strategy (pink and violet), something interesting happens.

More single-family lots could be available into 2070 in the mid-rise only scenario, and in the tower only scenario, single-family homes could still fit into the seventy-plot area into 2100, proving that a few towers mixed into residential neighborhoods can preserve more single-family homes longer into the future, while still allowing the population of the area to increase.

Looking at energy consumption in terms of “ground area” consumption yields lower energy savings than if we were to look at per-capita consumption. But this is a standard approach, so we started with that here. We assumed climate change based on the IPCC’s A1b scenario.9 All cases would have increased energy loads (mainly due to cooling) however the tower-only scenario would yield higher savings than a midrise only redevelopment scenario Fig 6. Clearly,

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the per capita energy would yield different results than looking at per area (as more people will live in a tower than a smaller building).

Therefore, our next project looked at per building and per capita values (which requires a closer approximation of occupancies).

In the third project, we extended our framework to consider larger areas in Austin as part of the Energy Institute’s initiative: Fueling a Sustainable Energy Transition (FSET) and in collaboration with the Cockrell School of Engineering and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. We examined multiple neighborhoods in Austin, and went into detail about Montopolis.

We streamlined our computational framework using Envision Tomorrow, a scenario modeling tool, and by linking building archetypes with EnergyPlus through Rhino and Grasshopper, and through DIVA for population calculating based on floor area and schedule builder and American Time Use Survey Fig 7.

We assumed two possible scenarios for Montopolis, high density and low density.

From 2030 to 2050, and finally to 2100, total energy use per total building in the high density development was considerably lower than in lower density, “worst case” development Fig 8 . We observed a higher change of average energy use before 2050 compared to after 2050. We speculate that this is the result of the changed interplay between the transformation of the building stock and the impact of climate change. Since there are only three data points (2030, 2050, and 2100), more research is needed to investigate further. This framework innovates by developing a methodology that links spatial planning (zoning policy) with parcel scale resolution for the energy demand under climate change, as well as a model for forecasting transformation of these parcels, e.g., from single to multi-family homes over

FIGS 1A & 1B Only refurbishment of the entire building stock by 2040 reduced energy use into 2100.

FIG 2 Juxtaposition of building types in West Campus and occupancy types, and overheating chart, hottest 90 days.

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# OCCUPANTS (whole lot)

3 (12)

91 (182)

776

91 (182)

HEIGHT (m) (# floors)

4.5 (1)

12.4 (3)

26.7 (8)

80.1 (24)

FAR

0.107

1.186

5.060

15.181

FIG 3 Four residential typologies and metrics. Illustrated by Julien Brown.

FIG 4 Abstract model showing tiles being “redeveloped.”

FIG 5 Potential to absorb a growing population and save energy in West Campus.

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FIG 6 Operational energy savings compared to “all types” case.

FIG 7 Modeling impact of climate, building type, construction, and occupancy on energy usage.

FIG 8 Per capita building floor area for “best” high and “worst” low density scenarios.

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FIG 9 Average energy usage/building, high vs. low density with Alb climate scenario.

FIG 10 Urban energy simulation workflow.

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the course of decades until 2100 including retrofit scenarios Fig 9. This will allow for future study and implementation in terms of how individual buildings on these parcels, i.e., their inhabitants, make decisions to adopt certain energy systems. It further reveals the great extent to which denser urban development reduces building energy consumption at the neighborhood scale.

Moving on to the larger scale, we analyzed multiple larger cities in Texas—in this example, over 100,000 buildings in Dallas. Obtaining accurate information about geometry and occupancy proved computationally intense.

We analyzed different neighborhoods in Texas under a new methodology that allows for large-scale implementation. This methodology uses PostgreSQL, QGIS, LiDar, Grasshopper and CitySim to generate, analyze and compare energy models under various climate change scenarios Fig 10. This study found metropolitan areas performed similarly under various refurbishment scenarios — the more aggressive scenarios showed greater improvements for the same given amount of time Fig 11. The results of these experiments showed consistency between this expanded method and the original, yet this method must make concessions in terms of detail. While it is possible to achieve a more accurate estimate by taking into account variables such as enclosure composition,

building systems, and shading surfaces, it becomes difficult for larger simulation, making LiDar an effective alternative.

To evaluate the effectiveness of refurbishment, three scenarios were selected.

In Scenario 1, refurbishment occurred rapidly, with 50% refurbishment by 2050 and 100% by 2100. In Scenario 2, refurbishment occurred at a medium pace, with 25% refurbishment at 2050, 50% at 2070, and 100% at 2100. Finally, in Scenario 3, refurbishment occurred slowly, with 25% refurbishment by 2050 and 50% refurbishment by 2100.

In Fig 12 , we see that Dallas showed significant improvement in terms of heating and cooling. There was a clear change between full refurbishment and no refurbishment.

The large-scale test of the Dallas area demonstrated this new methodology’s ability to handle large sets of data. The section of the Dallas metropolitan that was analyzed contains over 100,000 buildings. The simulations focused on the IPCC A1b climate scenario and the efficacy of the various refurbishment policies. Refurbishment proved effective both in terms of heating and cooling demands, with more aggressive efforts resulting in sizable reductions in cooling demands. All scenarios showed improvement by 2050, with median cooling values in Dallas dropping from the base-case value of 265 MWh to 242 MWh in Scenarios 3 and 2, a 9% decrease. Similarly, Dallas saw a drop from 265 MWh to 146 MWh, a 45% decrease. Our results showed that the methodology is able to generate reasonable predictions. It demonstrated a significant decrease in computation allowing for more complex models to be examined. Looking at the results of the simulation itself, Scenario 1 showed the highest performance in terms of mitigation, while Scenario 3 showed the lowest.

This is consistent with the previous scenarios, as Scenario 1 was the most aggressive approach to refurbishment while Scenario 3 demonstrated a slower approach.

Overall, we see multiple strategies are available to make Texas cities and neighborhoods more energy efficient while facing population growth and climate change.

However, building practices and behaviors need to change drastically in order to reduce our energy demand into the future. It is our hope that these tools can help architects, planners, policy makers and engineers evaluate different possible future outcomes for Texas cities in a computationally efficient and easy-tovisualize manner.

FIG 11A & 11B (Refurbishment schedule scenarios applied to a given neighborhood.

FIG 12 Cooling savings (-MWh) for Dallas under A1b (Blue: Base Case, Red: Scenario 3, Yellow: Scenario 2, Green: Scenario 1).

1 L uis Pérez-Lombard, José Ortiz, and Christine Pout, “A Review on Buildings Energy Consumption Information,” Energy and Buildings 40, no. 3 (January 1, 2008): 394–98, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2007.03.007.

3 IPCC, ed., Emissions Scenarios: Summary for Policymakers;a Special Report of IPCC Working Group III - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Special Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2000).

2 J uliana Felkner et al., “The Impact of Climate Change and Envelope Retrofit on Urban Energy Consumption, Comfort, and Overheating in Austin, Texas” (paper presented at the Building Simulation Conference, Rome, Italy, September 2019); Juliana Felkner et al., “Urban Densification and Housing Typology for Climate Change Mitigation,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1343 (November 2019): 012020, https://doi. org/10.1088/1742-6596/1343/1/012020; Juliana Felkner et al., “Linking Urban Scenarios with Energy Simulations for Dense Urban Planning Under Climate Change.” Carbon Neutral Cities — Energy Efficiency & Renewables in the Digital Era, CISBAT 2021, Lausanne; Juliana Felkner et al., “Energy analysis of Texas Metropolitan Areas for climate change mitigation using LiDar Carbon Neutral Cities — Energy Efficiency & Renewables in the Digital Era, CISBAT 2021, Lausanne.

4 Shawn Martin, “Trends in Energy Codes.” (PowerPoint presentation, International Code Council HVAC and Plumbing Workshop, Mar 25 2010).

5 M ostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari and Michelle Pak, “LADYBUG: A Parametric Environmental Plugin for Grasshopper to Help Designers Create an Environmentally-Conscious Design” (13th Conference of International Building Performance Simulation Association, Chambéry, France, 2013), https://www.aivc. org/resource/ladybug-parametric-environmental-plugingrasshopper-help-designers-create-environmentally.

7 IPCC. 8 I HS Markit, “U.S. Metro Economies: Past and Future Employment Levels,” in United States Conference of Mayors, 2017; Juliana Felkner et al., “Urban Densification and Housing Typology for Climate Change Mitigation,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1343 (November 2019): 012020, https://doi. org/10.1088/1742-6596/1343/1/012020; Juliana Felkner et al., “The Impact of Climate Change and Envelope Retrofit on Urban Energy Consumption, Comfort, and Overheating in Austin, Texas” (paper presented at the Building Simulation Conference, Rome, Italy, September 2019).

9 IPCC.

6 Giuseppe Peronato et al., “Integrating Urban Energy Simulation in a Parametric Environment: A Grasshopper Interface for CitySim,” in Proceedings from PLEA 2017: Passive Low Energy Architecture Conference, 2017.

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Sustainable Design Between Global and Local Systems

The City of Austin Office of Sustainability and The UT Austin School of Architecture

matt fajkus daniel garcia The City of Austin Office of Sustainability has a vision to ensure Austin is a thriving, equitable, and ecologically resilient community.1 There are multiple strategies to achieve these ideals, including aiming for a balance of climateadaptivity and a consideration of human factors and demographics. The Office of Sustainability partnered with the UT Austin School of Architecture design studio courses taught by Matt Fajkus over two semesters to brainstorm and develop design ideas, which produced provocations that made it all the way to the Austin City Council docket for discussion about implementation.2 A “middle ground” is the place between two extremes — not a compromise but a synthesis.

When considering where it exists, one must first acknowledge the spectrum we are a part of, from the perspective of an individual in a community to a global citizen. We must also be humble and acknowledge that our recent history of the past one hundred, or even 1,000, years represents a small fraction of time, albeit a pivotal one, in the existence of human civilization. In this time, civilizations have risen and fallen, yet humans have endured.

Throughout this history, a constant has existed: the fundamental threats driven by climate change, ranging from fire to flood, famine, and drought. These realities call for questioning how we reconcile our relationship to nature, our notions of comfort and convenience, and our ability to tolerate risk.

Resiliency is the capacity to respond and adapt to changing conditions, and at its essence, design is about response. Sustainable design not only strives for functional efficiency and experiential factors but also aims to maintain or regain functionality in or after a given stress or disturbance. Resilience is both response and action; it involves articulating or blurring boundaries between nature, city, landscape, and building design, all while accommodating the human scale. Contemporary global crises — including racial and social justice, a pandemic, political divisiveness, and climate change and its impacts — are colliding at multiple scales.

PAST/PRECEDENT Both within academia and practice, great effort is now being increasingly placed on the proactive pursuit to analyze, understand, and control environmental threats, which go beyond just those that are naturally occurring, in order to be able to “sustain” ourselves perpetually.

Yet, with such emphasis on discovering both novel and innovative solutions, it is easy to forget our longer history as a species and look upon the sophisticated human responses by past civilizations who have overcome similar threats utilizing parallel “modern” modes of living. This acknowledgment of time, evolution, and iteration has many lessons to teach, and perhaps the most significant is that there is no final solution to such threats. Additionally, to suppose that any technology and/or tool was sufficient, and did not bring its own set of consequences, is important to note. While technology and tools extend our capabilities and offer convenience, it is our selves, as active manipulators of space, adapting to where and how we inhabit the earth, that have sustained civilizations until now. This understanding offers a framework for the agency that we have in our

Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin. Credit: UTSOA Students Jessica Felicelli and Fernando Olmedo Rivera; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 1 Wildfire research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal. Credit: UTSOA Students – Alexis Carreon, David Juan Garcia, Katharine Glasheen; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

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ability to design solutions to the fundamental threats before us, and simultaneously exposes the limits upon our current modes of living.

FIG 2 Drought research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal.

Credit: UTSOA Students – Amaya Lucas, Aaron McMurry, Casey Rowden; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 3 Heat research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal.

Credit: UTSOA Students – Tzu-Lin Lin, Thomas Palmer, Michelle Powell; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 4 Flood research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal.

Credit: UTSOA Students – Diego Zubizarreta Otero, Meg Bunke, Ken Dineen; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

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TEMPORALITY VS. PERMANENCE Upon examining our relationship to nature, there are two common approaches: one that frames the relationship as amiable — living with nature, and one that frames it as combative — living against nature. Architectural historian Mark Jarzombek’s book, A Global History of Architecture, offers the example of pre-colonial, Native American tribes who placed great emphasis on maintaining agility to relocate and migrate on a seasonal basis according to changing weather patterns.3 Their architectural architype, the tepee, was the sophisticated means by which they would literally transplant their communities in response to threats. This image is in stark contrast with Marc-Antoine Laugier’s 1753 concept of “The Primitive Hut,” which hypothesized on the origins of architecture and the anthropological relationship between humans and the environment. Laugier argues that ”man” desires shelter “so that neither the sun nor rain can penetrate therein.” 4 This presupposes a more critical relationship described by Jarzombek that dates back further to the first civilizations where shelter, in the modern sense, as a permanent structure, was not necessary, due to milder climates and more agile societies. It was not until humans began to settle in extreme climatic regions that real threats of climate became elements to combat. This notion presents a shift in the anthropological values from nomadic civilization to colonial civilization, which placed greater emphasis on establishing permanence. This shift inevitably led to occupation around the globe in climates that are more-or-less desirable while the evolution of society introduced new priorities, power structures, and threats specific to both time and place due to this new relationship between humans and nature.

COMFORT/CONVENIENCE/RISK There is a great contradiction in how we understand comfort and convenience when defining success in the built environment today. With the advancements in building technology, attitudes toward climate and place have become inverted. Fast-forward to the twentieth century from the pre-colonial Native American tribes, and one finds a very different

There is a great contradiction in how we understand comfort and convenience when defining success in the built environment today.

FIG 5 Resilience hub proposal responding to heat stressor, North-Central Austin.

Credit: UTSOA Student Matthias Tippe; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

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FIG 6 Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin.

Credit: UTSOA Student Cameron Osborn; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 7 Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin.

Credit: UTSOA Student Aaron McMurry; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

way of occupying the same land. The ability to remain in place is currently emphasized in our society, and our response to climate has developed into a reliance on technology.

Climate is something we literally control with advancements such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, which allows one to maintain a temperature range from sixty to seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit year-round. The reality is

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that this comfort is an illusion of convenience.

In fact, it places us in constant conflict with nature, one in which we ultimately always lose.

Mechanical equipment breaks, façades wear and lose integrity, expansion and contraction compromises structures, and infrastructure becomes inadequate to meet demand. The cost of comfort takes on more than just the energy cost associated with operating buildings, but

also the time, money, and waste involved in keeping buildings operating. Ultimately, our desire to occupy a specific place in a particular climate — because of its beauty, resources, or our own emotional ties to it — can mask undesirable realities, providing a false sense of permanence that is actually a gamble against nature. We become tied up in probabilities, finding excuses to believe that threats such as fire, famine, flood, or drought won’t happen and are too rare to trade our temporary comfort and convenience to make a real effort to prepare, adapt, and evolve to get to the root of these threats. Furthermore, insurance, our current betting system against these threats, cannot provide possible answers to the risk our cities, communities, and families face. The tangible nature of these threats becomes more evident as their very real consequences begin to expose the fragility of our current modes of living. Cities below sea level are flooding and /or sinking; communities established in forests are subject to fires; families are losing their livelihoods with longer periods of drought. Examples such as these open the conversation to speculate on the built environment’s response to the consequences and constraints associated across different scales.

RESEARCH AND DESIGN RESPONSE AT THE UT AUSTIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE Research and design offer the opportunity to experiment with strategies to interact with the uncertainty of the future. Mitigating the potential risks of the future can aid in the creation of shock-resistant, healthy, adaptable, and regenerative communities — creating resilient design through diversity, foresight, and experimentation. This method was directly applied at the UTSOA through a series of design studios taught by Matt Fajkus, in collaboration with Marc Coudert of the City of Austin Office of Sustainability. Student projects took on the relationship between urban resiliency, communities, and structures by investigating social, environmental, and economic stressors that face each context, proposing design ideas to help mitigate the disparity. The studio work investigated ways that a space can serve the needs of the community for both chronic and acute stressors, creating a flexible structure ready to adapt to changing needs, reintroducing a sense of agility from lessons of past civilizations.

The City of Austin Office of Sustainability has

1 City of Austin Office of Sustainability: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/sustainability.

FIG 8 Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin. Credit: UTSOA Students Jessica Felicelli and Fernando Olmedo Rivera; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

CONCLUSION Polarization can lead to paralysis and insufficient action, or even inaction; all the while, time is always moving. Thus, finding opportunities for middle ground is of great importance in order to be able to evolve and adapt, for the inability to act will only

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4 Marc-Antione Laugier, Essay on Architecture, 1753.

3 Mark Jarzombek, Franics Ching, Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2010).

intensify the very real threats around us in the built environment. While history has much to teach us, we must acknowledge the different circumstances we face, and the fact that solutions from past civilizations are likely not applicable today. However, the lessons are clear, and there is value in acknowledging the parallels between past sustainability responses to advance our own responses. Our fixated lifestyle defined by cities and infrastructure requires rigorous speculation on evolving our relationship to place, comfort, and risk to address the constant threats of climate. As a globally connected civilization intrinsically tied through history and future, design offers us a lens through which to imagine and test that imminent future. The aforementioned UTSOA studio work addresses such issues as building performance and response to environmental conditions. The proposed resilience-hubs explore ways in which architecture and design can operate in middle grounds between the global and local, urban and natural conditions, as well as between infrastructural and cultural situations.

2 https://www.austintexas.gov/department/city-council/2021/20210325-reg.htm#064.

identified four major local stressors — wildfire, flood, heat, and drought — that threaten vulnerable communities and are expected to be exacerbated by climate change.

The studio prompted graduate architecture students to research each local stressor as a global phenomenon and then design a singular prototypical shelter, or a take on a “primitive hut,” to respond to each respective stressor Figs 1–4 . The work then progressed to grounding the exploration within the local context of greater Austin. In conjunction with the four environmental stressors, the City’s Office of Sustainability identified social stressors, including mental-health issues, lack of adequate transportation, age, certain types of poverty, physical / mental disabilities, chronic disease, and race/ethnicity. These factors led to pinpointing particularly vulnerable areas of Austin, including Colony Park / Hornsby Bend (wildfire), East-Central Austin (flood), Southeast Austin (drought), and NorthCentral Austin (heat). The program prompt was to design resilience-hubs to be directly proposed in each respective part of the city, with both reactive and proactive program components. Resilience-hub design proposals were expected to be symbolic and functional nodes in their given neighborhood and meant to respond directly to the most relevant stressor. Each hub’s reactive program included housing, residency, and shelter for temporary emergency times; and a proactive program including research, education, and a community asset or public amenity for daily use Figs 5–8.

Through the design and relationship of each program component, the hubs not only addressed a specific stressor but also anticipated and mitigated the risks of a future shock. The hub designs proposed synergistic and integrated relationships to their sites, in addition to considering the immediate contexts and demographics. The UTSOA-student work has since resulted in a resolution to create resilience-hubs in Austin, and was addressed as an agenda item at the City Council meeting in March of 2021.

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about (Mass) Timber in the City

Dispelling Misconceptions

ulRICH

My passion for wood began when I was studying architecture in my hometown of Stuttgart in the 1990s. Through my German and Austrian heritage, it didn’t take me long to discover the westernmost Austrian province of Vorarlberg and its unique building culture — one that is heavily rooted in its timber construction tradition. After several years in practice in London, I moved to Texas to begin my academic career. Ever since arriving at UT Austin in 2005, my teaching and scholarship have revolved around designing and building with timber.

The opportunity to undertake in-depth research allowed me to explore the phenomenon of Vorarlberg, and the results were ultimately summarized in my book, Sustainable Architecture in Vorarlberg, which was published in 2010 Fig 1. While this study was specific to a particular region, the small province and its pioneering architects were instrumental in the rebirth of wood architecture in Europe, initially in the 1960s, and later in the 1980s and 1990s. Vorarlberg’s sophisticated yet sustainable building style culminated in a model for architecture worldwide, but — given the region’s unique circumstances — one that might be challenging to replicate in other parts of the world. As I concluded this work, newly developed engineered wood products — most importantly cross-laminated timber — began to enjoy increasing popularity in the construction sector Fig 2 . Along with the advent of these innovative products came the promise of a host of environmental and performance benefits.

These included renewability, the ability to sequester carbon, a high strength-to-weight ratio, and the potential to replace more energyintensive materials in mid-and high-rise building applications with bio-based products. The prospect of these new developments prompted me to expand my studies. As a result, I began to look at timber construction on a global scale.

My objective was to investigate wood through the entire supply chain — from growth and harvest to processing, to fabrication, all the way to the installation of the finished product

on-site. This involved engaging with individuals across multiple disciplines, drawing upon existing relationships, and establishing new ones. I consulted and worked with foresters, researchers, building product manufacturers, fabricators, architects, engineers, government bodies, interest groups, and non-profit organizations. Understanding the motivations and responsibilities of each individual or entity was critical to recognizing their impact on the successes and failures of building products, strategies and initiatives, and the industry at large.

My research highlighted one of the most significant dichotomies in discourse of contemporary architecture today: timber in the city, or the reintroduction of wood as the primary structural material for multistory building applications in dense urban environments. Even though wood was the most prevalent building material up to the nineteenth century, it lost its dominance in the construction sector for several reasons.

Not only was it flammable (remember the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 Fig 3), but it also did not possess the structural capacities that were necessary to realize the enormous construction undertakings that came along with nineteenthcentury industrialization efforts: factories, warehouses, train stations, exhibition halls, and numerous other large-scale infrastructure projects and building types. Instead, iron, steel, and concrete, which were quickly optimized and perfected through focused scientific research, stepped into its place and became the materials of choice. Wood, with its seemingly unpredictable chemical and physical properties, became relegated to secondary construction tasks such as roof framing and non-structural applications. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, innovations in manufacturing techniques yielded entirely new engineering solutions. The resulting mass timber products possessed unique properties and they promised the return of wood to the city as a building material. However, the introduction of

dangel

FIG 1 Sustainable Architecture in Vorarlberg: Energy Concepts and Construction Systems, Birkhäuser, 2010. Image courtesy of Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel.

Cross-laminated timber production. Image courtesy of Stora Enso.

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FIG 2 (above) Cross-laminated Timber (CLT). Image courtesy of Stora Enso.

FIG 3 (right) The Great Chicago Fire, Chicago in Flames– The Rush for Lives Over Randolph Street Bridge, artist’s rendering by John R. Chapin, 1871. Public domain.

these novel technologies also raised many questions and concerns, leading to the emergence of numerous misunderstandings and misconceptions around increasing the use of wood in construction. My curiosity to find answers for myself and others led me to examine the circumstances more carefully. In the process, I was able to formulate explanations, clarify apparent contradictions, and debunk long-standing myths. I will elaborate on three of these misconceptions here.

THE INCREASING DEMAND FOR WOOD WILL CAUSE INCREASED DEFORESTATION Forests are the most predominant and biologically diverse ecosystems on land, providing habitat for more than 80% of the terrestrial species of animals, plants, and insects.1 In addition, billions of people rely on forest products to satisfy their basic needs for food, energy, and shelter.2 Forests also play a critical role in the hydrological cycle by preventing soil erosion, landslides, floods, droughts, desertification, and salinization.3 Most significant is their ability to absorb and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making them essential carbon sinks.4 There is no doubt that harvesting trees reduces the ability of forests to provide these vital services, so concerns for increased deforestation are warranted. Defined as the permanent conversion of forest land to non-forest land, deforestation causes vary widely from one

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region to another. While trees might be cut down to be used as timber for construction, some of the most severe deforestation occurs, in fact, when land is cleared for agricultural use, in particular for the cultivation of commodity crops and the creation of pastureland for livestock.

This is of primary concern in the tropics and sub-tropics, and much work remains to be done to curb the detrimental environmental effects while simultaneously supporting sustainable economic development. In contrast, countries such as the United States and Canada are at extremely low risk of deforestation. Historical data confirms that global regions with the highest levels of industrial timber harvest and forest product output are also regions with the lowest deforestation rates. An economically vibrant forest industry is key to policies, incentives, and management practices that support sustainable timber supply and healthy demand for forest products Fig 4.5 SOURCING OF MASS TIMBER PRODUCTS REQUIRES THE HARVESTING OF OLD-GROWTH TREES One of the significant advantages of engineered wood production is the ability to prefabricate sizeable components used in long-span applications. Cross-laminated timber (CLT), for instance, can be manufactured in panel sizes up to ten-feet wide, sixty-feet long, and up to twenty-inches thick. Rather than relying on valued, large-diameter trees that are likely

only found in old-growth forest stands, these products utilize readily available dimensional lumber. Instead, 2x4 and 2x6 boards are typically sourced from fast-growing, small-diameter trees and are laminated together to form largeformat structural components. Through these methods, modern engineering and production technologies increase the value of forests as a resource by turning low-value raw materials into high-value commodities Fig 5.

Additionally, wood is a truly renewable material as long as it is sourced sustainably.

Forest certification systems, such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), support stewardship efforts and sustainable forest management objectives by ensuring that wood products come from well-managed, legally harvested forests. Wood is, in fact, the only structural building material with third-party certification programs in place to verify that products originate from a responsibly managed resource. About 19% of total US timberland is currently certified, which is well above the global average of 11%.

Even though forests in federal ownership are not certified, it does not mean that they are not sustainably managed. National forests meet many of the certification requirements regarding forest planning, protection of threatened and endangered species, and others.6

MASS TIMBER BUILDINGS ARE NOT AS SAFE SINCE THEY ARE MORE SUSCEPTIBLE TO FIRE THAN STEEL OR CONCRETE BUILDINGS Fire safety is one of the biggest concerns when building with timber. Still, there are significant differences in fire performance between conventional light-frame construction and the new mass timber systems. The structural members in light framing are relatively small in size, making them susceptible to ignition and early collapse in fires. This means they need to be protected with fire-resistant membrane barriers such as gypsum board, creating an arrangement of concealed combustible spaces. In contrast, construction with mass timber typically does not yield combustible voids, greatly reducing the risk of a concealed fire. Due to their solid nature, mass timber members also possess the inherent ability to resist fire without additional protection. Their mass allows for a char layer to form on the surface, which insulates the remaining wood from heat penetration and ignition. While the charred portion no longer fulfills any structural functions, the non-charred section retains its structural capacity over an extended period of fire exposure Fig 6. This unique characteristic makes mass timber more predictable in a fire than steel, which can deform and collapse

quickly when exposed to high temperatures.

Structural steel still needs to be protected with additional fireproofing, even though it is considered a non-combustible material.

Besides employing the charring method as a means for fire protection, mass timber members can also be encapsulated with fire-rated boards or other non-combustible materials to satisfy building code regulations.7 Recently approved provisions allowing the construction of tall mass timber buildings up to eighteen stories — with varying degrees of fire protection of timber surfaces — will be included in the 2021 edition of the International Building Code (IBC).8 These three instances merely offer brief insight into questions that might arise when designing and building with mass timber. In my research, I gathered numerous compelling arguments for the increased use of sustainably sourced wood products as viable alternatives to non-renewable, more fossil fuel-based building materials. Efforts to share my findings culminated in the publication of Turning Point in Timber Construction in 2017 Fig 7. Envisioned as a compact reader and inspiring resource, the book’s goal was to demonstrate the potential positive effects on the global environment, local

FIG 4 Group selection harvest in British Columbia, Canada. Image by Moresby Creative, courtesy of naturallywood.com.

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FIG 5 Cross-laminated timber production. Image courtesy of Stora Enso.

FIG 6 CLT panel after fire testing with clearly visible char layer.

Photo courtesy of FPInnovations— web.fpinnovations.ca.

FIG 7 Turning Point in Timber Construction: A New Economy, Birkhäuser, 2017. Image courtesy of Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel.

FIG 8 Time for Timber exhibit, Mebane Gallery, 2018. Image courtesy of Piston Design.

FIG 9 Centerline 14: Time for Timber, Center for American Architecture and Design, 2019. Image courtesy of the Center for American Architecture and Design.

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FIG 10 “City Stoop” by Aaron McMurry and Joshua Melton, spring semester 2019.

Courtesy of Aaron McMurry + Joshua Melton.

FIG 11 Structural system for “City Stoop” by Aaron McMurry and Joshua Melton, spring semester 2019. Courtesy of Aaron McMurry + Joshua Melton.

FIG 12 Structural connection details for “City Stoop” by Aaron McMurry and Joshua Melton, spring semester 2019. Courtesy of Aaron McMurry + Joshua Melton.

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FIG 13 “Sustainable Community of the Future” by Hailey Brown and Prarthan Shah, spring semester 2019. Courtesy of Hailey Brown + Prarthan Shah.

rural economic development, and our building culture at large. The target audience was design professionals, engineers, anyone involved with forestry and timber-product manufacturing, and especially architecture students and the general public. The 2016–2018 Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellowship at the Center for American Architecture and Design allowed me to highlight my research interests at the School of Architecture. The Time for Timber exhibit in the Mebane Gallery showcased six innovative mass-timber projects from Europe and North America that represent significant contributions to sustainable building. Each case study was carefully selected based on its efforts to pioneer particular aspects of contemporary timber construction in urban contexts Fig 8.

The accompanying one-day symposium brought together four invited panelists from various professional backgrounds to present their work from research or practice and engage in a dialogue about designing and building with timber. Along with a documentation of the exhibit, their thoughts, observations, and opinions were captured in the publication Centerline 14: Time for Timber Fig 9.

Designing with timber continues to play an integral role in both my elective seminars and design studio courses. The Timber in the City Urban Habitat Student Design Competition, organized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) in collaboration with the Softwood Lumber Board, has served as an excellent vehicle to introduce students to mass timber construction in the classroom.

Now in its fourth edition, the program intends to ...engage students (…) to imagine the transformation of our existing cities through sustainable buildings from renewable resources, offering expedient affordable construction, innovating with new and traditional wooden materials, and designing healthy living and working environments.9 The competition brief most recently served as the framework for my spring 2019 integrative studio.

The students were challenged to reimagine a vacant waterfront site in Queens, New York through the design of a midrise, mixed-use complex that included affordable housing and several community amenities. The format of this prompt required studio projects to emphasize the tectonic expression of architecture. The challenge therefore placed a strong focus on the design implications of technical issues,

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9 “ 2022 Timber Competition,” Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, accessed July 2, 2021, https://www.acsa-arch.org/competitions/2022-timbercompetition/.

3 F ood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Forests and Water: International Momentum and Action (Rome, 2013), 1–2.

2 F ood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, State of the World’s Forests 2014 (Rome 2014), xiii.

6 V . Alaric Sample, Will Price, Jacob S. Donnay, and Catherine M. Mater, National Forest Certification Study: An Evaluation of the Applicability of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI) Standards on Five National Forests (Washington, DC: Pinchot Institute for Conservation, 2007), https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/ documnts/pdf2010/fpl2010ince001.pdf.

8 M ass Timber Code Coalition, Understanding the Mass Timber Code Proposals: A Guide for Building Officials, https://awc.org/pdf/tmt/MTCC-Guide-Web-20180919.pdf.

7 U lrich Dangel, Turning Point in Timber Construction: A New Economy (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017), 167.

As this type of construction becomes more widely established and accepted, dedicated coursework on the topic will be necessary.

To this end, I have been working as the faculty lead with the ACSA and the Softwood Lumber Board to develop the call for submission for their inaugural Timber Education Prize.

This award program seeks to recognize effective, innovative courses and curricula that create a stimulating and evidence-based environment for learning about timber as a material that achieves multiple design, construction, and performance objectives.

Mass timber construction continues to gain momentum and offers enormous potential to address some of our society’s most pressing issues. I am hopeful that the efforts and initiatives of myself and others equally passionate about finding sustainable and resilient building solutions will set the stage for the return of wood to our cities.

4 “ Forests Absorb Twice as Much Carbon as They Emit Each Year,” World Resources Institute, accessed June 30, 2021, https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorbtwice-much-carbon-they-emit-each-year.

5 Peter Ince, “Global Sustainable Timber Supply and Demand,” in Sustainable Development in the Forest Products Industry, eds. Roger M. Rowell, Fernando Caldeira, Judith K. Rowell (Porto: Ediçoes Universidade Fernando Pessoa, 2010), 29–41.

particularly their potential for design generation and as a repository of meaning. The course’s objective was to develop a project from its initial concept to the construction detail while simultaneously ensuring that design decisions reinforce architectural ambition and intent at all scales. The resulting quality and conviction of the final projects indicated the timeliness and relevance of mass timber building systems for multi-story applications in urban areas.

In addition, students were able to gain an understanding of how their use can offer viable low-energy alternatives to other, more conventional construction methods, while satisfying society’s building needs for the foreseeable future Figs 10-14. The continued advancements in engineered wood products and the emergence of new building systems highlight the need to further integrate lowcarbon mass timber construction methodologies into the architectural curriculum.

1 U nited Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF), Vital Forest Graphics (2009), 38.

FIG 14 “Sustainable Community of the Future” by Hailey Brown and Prarthan Shah, spring semester 2019.

Courtesy of Hailey Brown + Prarthan Shah.

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material manifesto

jen

Architectural education is overdue for an overhaul; our students and instructors alike lack the material- and carbon literacy required to meet the climate crisis. Today, we occupy over two-and a-half trillion square feet of building area worldwide, but by 2050, we will add two trillion more in new construction and major renovations1 in order to meet the needs of our growing population. 2 At its core, global expansion at this scale will require massive amounts of material and energy. 2050 is also critical for another reason that clashes headon with our current practices: it marks our deadline from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for halting all anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG).3 The magnitude of this collision requires a complete rethinking of what and how we build. Though much progress has been made in recent years regarding renewable energy and operational efficiency, we must equally and immediately address our material consumption.4 Resource extraction and production across all industries accounts for half of all GHG emissions and — just as critically — for 90% of biodiversity loss.5 Given the imperative that we meet the infrastructure and housing needs of the billions more people to come, we must aggressively pursue new material strategies including not only a transition to new material palettes, but also a paradigmatic shift towards dematerialization, the minimization of material quantity. These urgent changes first require a significant leap in our collective material literacy, followed by the articulation of material commitments at the individual and institutional level that are acted upon with dedication and resolve.

LITERACY Material literacy is fundamental in the pedagogy and practice of built-environment design and planning. In the most straightforward

way, architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, planning, and preservation are disciplines that move and consume massive amounts of material. The materials used in the construction and maintenance of buildings alone account for one tenth of all emissions.6 As such, it is critical that our students, educators, and practitioners develop a deep understanding of the qualities, contexts, and implications of material use. And yet, material curriculum in design education and practice is woefully under-developed. We remain distracted by the aesthetic and formal concerns of a care-free past, which dominate studio projects and dialogue to the detriment of our graduates and disciplinary relevance.

Too easily, we have lost track of the critical context of our raw and processed materials, the literal building blocks of our disciplines. We lack material knowledge essential to ecological and human health, from the quantity of embodied carbon in our most common products to the chemical ingredients of concern in our most intimate interiors. We must expand our scope far beyond the first stage of the building lifecycle, tackling the reality that construction and demolition waste account for more than a quarter of all landfill in the U.S.7 Not least, we must stay ahead of leading-edge material developments that would benefit from our advocacy and participation.

Since 2001, the Materials Lab has fostered material literacy at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture through two parallel efforts. From the beginning, it has provided students and faculty with direct access to material products through a curated collection that is unparalleled among peer institutions. Critical to the success of the collection are efforts that serve to interpret its holdings through direct course support as well as extracurricular programming and education. Recent emphasis has been placed on

Visitors to the Materials Lab have direct access to over 29,000 materials, which provide tactile information that can only be experienced in-person. Courtesy of the Materials Lab.

wong

These BioMason pavers are fabricated with the help of microorganisms that excrete calcium carbonate crystals, binding together fine aggregate with “biocement” to form masonry units. Courtesy of the Materials Lab.

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ABOVE A growing subset of the Materials Lab collection includes products designed for circularity, including this “mono-carpet” from Niaga available in all polyester, returnable to the manufacturer for recycling.

Courtesy of the Materials Lab. RIGHT Incorporating 100% Blue Planet aggregate in one cubic yard of concrete would amount to over 1300 lbs of sequestered carbon dioxide, more than twice the carbon footprint of conventional concrete. Courtesy of the Materials Lab.

the support of experiential learning in the form of workshops that provide hands-on access to sustainable and innovative materials and assemblies. Examples include the cultivation of rapidly renewable, plastic-free foam from mycelium; the formation of hempcrete blocks following the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill that lifted restrictions on industrial hemp production; and the casting of low-carbon concrete using Blue Planet’s synthetic limestone made of sequestered carbon.

“Appropriate Materials for the 21st Century” — the course first taught as an advanced theory seminar in the summer semester of 2019 and since adapted for a non-major undergraduate audience in the spring of 2021—goes a step further. My main objective in teaching these courses is to lay the foundations of lifelong material literacy that students may build upon over time. We start the course with a survey of the evolution of matter itself, including the formation of our planet and all of the resources we utilize today. We follow this with another survey of the 3.3-million-year trajectory of human material use. These lessons provide the necessary context for grasping the complexities of the material present, in which we examine our greatest material challenges and possible trajectories. We explore both the most prevalent materials of today and those on the

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horizon, and ask ourselves by which criteria |can we determine those that are most appropriate — and when, and for whom. Among these are four key criteria that widen the singular lens of sustainability — addressing not only environmental and health factors, or “welfare,” but also “accessibility,” “performance,” and “value.”

MANIFESTO The culminating project of “Appropriate Materials” is a material manifesto that captures each student’s outlook on material appropriateness, developed and challenged over the course of the seminar. As has commonly been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, periods of insecurity lead to upheaval and acceleration that may not have otherwise occurred. The climate crisis, though less visible or directly disruptive for most of us thus far, is more existentially pressing by orders of magnitude. What better time to reassess our practice, our priorities, our raison d’être through the exercise of articulation?

Manifestos take many forms, spanning the spectrums of irony to sincerity, reality to idealism, and criticism to agenda. At their core, they are public declarations that provide critique and often programs for change. First employed to explore the dynamics of power and

politics, manifestos have since become available in all flavors. Among these is the sustainability manifesto, whose authors range from science-fiction thinkers (see Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Manifesto, 2000) to scientists (see E.O. Wilson’s A Biologist’s Manifesto for Preserving Life on Earth, 2017), environmental groups, and corporate brands (see the Imagine Mission from Gap Inc., 2020).

The exercise of formulating a manifesto focused specifically on materials counteracts the bias towards aesthetic and formal concerns that dominates much of design curriculum. It redirects our attention to the physical realities of building and the far-reaching implications of our actions. Our students have taken on the task of generating their material manifestos with a commitment and enthusiasm that is inspiring.

Each student is asked to define “material,” to map a trajectory of material use, to identify the material challenges they find most pressing, to establish criteria for determining appropriateness, to test these criteria via case studies, and to generate a concise declaration of appropriate material use. The semesterspanning exercise moves many of the students from an initial sense of despair, stemming from the enormity of our material challenges, to an outlook infused by motivation and resolve. Their declarations include strong commitments to

global equality, renewability and regeneration, circularity, efficiency, and dematerialization.

Though their material outlooks will likely shift over time, as both the exterior world and their interior selves continue to evolve, the act of articulation following literacy is a powerful exercise that can nudge them towards eventual action.

CHALLENGES Increasingly, rhetoric addressing the manifesto has proliferated in the form of mission statements, vision documents, and other pledges, indicating movement in the right direction. In 2019, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) passed a resolution on climate action for the first time. This resulted in a change to the AIA Code of Ethics, making it mandatory for architects to consider the environmental impact of their buildings and to inform clients of these results. It is now “officially” unethical for architects to ignore sustainability. Following the resolution, projects considered for Design Excellence awards are now assessed by ten measures originally outlined by the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE). Other positive indicators

include the emergence of climate advocacy and working groups such as Architecture 2030, Architects Declare, Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), and the Carbon Leadership Forum. Further still is the adoption of sustainability certifications for projects and material products, which have expanded beyond LEED to include WELL, SITES, LBC, C2C, and more.

As our most committed colleagues push forward, challenges remain in architectural education. There is a growing gap between the scale and immediacy of the climate crisis and the ability of our instructors to meet it.

Having obtained my MArch nearly a decade ago, I can attest that a shift towards topics of sustainability and equity is indeed underway.

However, this progress is outpaced by a greater leap in the justifiable demands of our student population, whose desire for immediately applicable information and tools remain unmet.

In 2020, ACAN launched a Climate Curriculum Campaign calling for increased carbon literacy in architectural education, warning students, “Your education is failing you!” Speaking for myself, with the assumption that my experience might well apply to others, my own training

has proven inadequate in meeting today’s climate emergency, and there is a real need for the continued education of our educators.

This challenge, which upends the traditional instructor-student dynamic, can be tough to admit. However, it is a reality rooted in the exponential rate of change today, and the fact that much of what we need to know is still in nascent stages.

Another challenge in architectural education is the long-standing tension between technical and theoretical study. Architectural education is a lifelong pursuit, and we can’t teach it all.

However, it’s critical that we dissolve the biases that actively stand in the way of the change that is needed. Though our students need not be LEED-certified upon graduation (though some are), they should be equipped with basic understandings — not only spatial and canonic but also material and architectonic — that will serve as firm foundations moving forward.

Every dialogue should hold the possibility of a turn supported by a deep material (and thus, carbon) literacy, not only in those seminars with a sustainability focus, but in every core course, advanced theory seminar, and especially in studio. Though we’ve treated them as

A view of the winter gardens and balconies that make up the self-supporting second skin of the reinvigorated Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, originally built in the 1960s. Renovation by Frédéric Druot and Lacaton & Vassal, 2011, Paris. Courtesy of Igor Siddiqui.

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There is a growing gap between the scale and immediacy of the climate crisis and the ability of our instructors to meet it.

Students attend a Materials Lab workshop on mycelium materials, led by guest instructor and founder of Myco Alliance, Daniel Reyes. Photo by Katie Hill. Courtesy of the School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection.

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such, materials and carbon have never been specialist subjects, and the significant role of buildings in the climate crisis serves as glaring evidence. We must acknowledge — today — that we are in an emergency situation. Whatever lofty ideas we might hold about the higher art of building are thrown out the window once we realize that our house is on fire.

ACTION One powerful example of a material-adjacent manifesto in action can be found in the thirtyyear careers of 2021 Pritzker Prize laureates Anne Lacaton and Jean-Phillipe Vassal.

Working from an oft-quoted mantra of “never demolishing, subtracting, or replacing things, but of always adding, transforming, and utilizing them,” their projects demonstrate an impressive consistency that can only come from purposeful intention. Indeed, this mantra is the opening line of their 2004 manifesto, Plus+, a 264-page publication written in collaboration with fellow architect Frédéric Druot.8 Plus+ provides a forceful counterargument to a movement by the French government to demolish and replace post-war social housing blocks it deemed outdated.

In addition to a nine-part exposition on the many merits of saving these buildings, the authors provide a catalog of diagrammatic interventions for individual and communal habitation and several proof-of-concept studies of existing structures.

Plus+ predates the realization of Lacaton & Vassal’s most iconic projects, a series of social housing towers in Bordeaux, Paris, and Saint-Nazare that preserve and improve upon existing structures through the economic addition of a second skin that provides light,

1 Global ABC/IEA/UNEP, “Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction: 2017 Global Report for Buildings and Construction,” 2017. https://www. worldgbc.org/sites/default/ files/ UNEP%20188_GABC_en%20 %28web%29.pdf.

2 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Prospects 2019,” 2019. Projected at 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100.

3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report, 2018.

4 Erin McDade, “Beyond Zero: The Time Value of Carbon,” in The New Carbon Architecture, ed. Bruce King, (New Society, 2017).

Over the next thirty years, the embodied energy of our material use will have an outsized impact over operational energy.

air, and extra space. Although their work is centered on social justice, it is supported by a deep material literacy that is inherently sustainable and incorporates some of the most effective strategies of dematerialization.

In using off-the-shelf components, they not only stretch their budget but also reduce construction waste. In stripping away material layers to the essentials, they further reduce embodied energy. By refusing demolition, they preserve the most carbon-intensive elements of the project: its structure and foundation.

In the case of the Léon Aucoc Plaza, they have gone a step even further by prescribing nonintervention. As the saying goes, “what you build matters, but what you don’t build matters more.”9 Lacaton & Vassal’s robust body of work demonstrates the potential of moving from material literacy to manifesto to action.

The 2030 and 2050 deadlines for net-zero emissions are fast-approaching, and likely inching up. Recently, the International Energy Agency called for an immediate halt to all fossil fuel development.10 In response, Architecture 2030 has revised its eponymous target year for carbon neutrality to 2021. We have no time to waste and must get to work immediately. Key to these efforts is radical change in our material use, which requires boosting our material literacy, articulation of firm resolutions, and swift pursuit with all of the integrity, focus, and skill that we have. And, just as manifestos are powerful exercises at the individual level, they are also indispensable tools at the level of the institution. If we are serious about change, we will find ways — a climate task force of students, faculty, and staff; a climate curriculum committee; a town hall forum — to kick start into action.

5 U N International Resource Panel, “Global Resources Outlook 2019: Natural Resources for the Future We Want,” 2019. https:// www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-resources-outlook.

6 A RUP/WBCSD, “Net-zero buildings: Where do we Stand?” 2021. https://www.wbcsd.org/contentwbc/download/12446/185553/1.

7 M ark Gorgolewski, Resource Salvation: The Architecture of Reuse (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018).

8 Frederic Druot, Anne Lacaton, and Jean Philippe Vassal, Plus+ (Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 2007).

9 L arry Strain, “Rebuild: What You Build Matters, What You Don’t Build Matters More,” in The New Carbon Architecture, ed. Bruce King (New Society, 2017).

10 International Energy Agency, “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector,” 2021. https://www.iea.org/ reports/net-zero-by-2050.

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measuring sustainability

FRANcisco

gomes

FIG 1 Interiors ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

Downslope View ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC. SUSTAINABLE DESIGN: INNOVATION ON MIDDLE GROUND

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FIG 2 Site Plans ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

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FIG 3 Main Level Plans ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

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FIG 4 Lower Level Plans ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

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FIG 5 Transverse Sections ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

FIG 6 Transverse Sections ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

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FIG 7 Entries ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

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FIG 8 Downslope View ©2021, Gomes + Staub PLLC.

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INTRODUCTION The temptation to greenwash our buildings is irresistible, for no rational person denies the broad environmental and societal challenges created by the ever-accelerating material activity of humankind. However, our continually evolving priorities in the making of sustainable architecture also enable this misdirection.

Change creates uncertainty, which in turn undermines confidence in our decisions.

How should we best measure the impacts of our projects?

Two architectural projects by Gomes + Staub, both designed for public clients and both engaging sustainability certification regimes, are presented here in paired images: 1 one built project, a 10,100 square-foot LEED-Gold certified state park visitor center, 2 and an unbuilt small house for an existing community on the Aleutian Islands, which was authored for a competition mounted by the Atka Housing Authority in accordance with the Living Building Challenge guidelines.3 The standards themselves are well documented and publicized, so no comprehensive characterizations of the two certification systems will be attempted.4 While the focus of this essay is the impacts of these systems on design decision-making, their worth as a tool for distilling best practices and their social role in publicly signaling commitments to sustainable practices—of clients, governments, and design professionals—is also valuable.

There is a tremendous amount of thought and care invested in the necessarily imperfect certification systems available, and this essay reflects on their impact on design decision making. Through the lens of these projects, two types of observations follow: doubts about the wisdom of particular decisions influenced by pursuit of the standard, and, perhaps more importantly, thoughts on where the collective gaps may currently exist in certification regimes.

QUESTIONABLE DECISIONS GLAZING AND COMPENSATORY TRADEOFFS: Minimizing exterior glazing is perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit of the low-energy equation, especially in warm climates. LEED-NC and the Living Building Challenge each have different requirements for broad access to exterior light and view from interior spaces, which are readily achievable with relatively low

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quantities of glass. The Atka house, for example, meets the Living Building Challenge guidelines with a glass-to-exterior-wall ratio of only 10.0%.

The park visitor center is not so innocent.

During design, comprehensive operating energy simulations of the planned structure were created, glazing and overhangs were tailored to their exposures, and the building is considerably more operationally efficient than the base LEED standard under which it was certified. But, some of these efficiencies come via the mechanical conditioning technologies and many LEED points were achieved in the myriad of other categories unrelated to energy.

This project was the first LEED-certified project designed by our practice, but has a greater glazing ratio, at 31.8%, than the three prior nonrated and non-energy-modeled commercial projects we completed (averaging 16.9% glazing, including a medical clinic at 12.8%, a rail passenger station at 23.7%, and a multi-tenant office building at 14.3%). Meeting the LEED-Gold certification standards is an endorsement of environmental virtue, but in this case, the energy modeling and innovative low-energy mechanical systems also fostered slippage of established best practices in the office.

We ought to use less glazing in our buildings.

ACTIVE ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR PITFALLS: Innovative, active energy technologies tend to be complex and often have unanticipated effects. The park visitor center has an HVAC system that efficiently exchanged heat with the outside environment through a water-source exchanger: a bank of piping coils submerged in a man-made recreational lake within the park. Because the circulating water used in this loop would enter the park ecosystem if the piping ever leaked, using anticorrosives typically employed in the circulating heat-exchange fluid to protect iron piping was not possible, and instead large amounts of plastic piping had to be substituted. Additionally, the control systems and maintenance regimes required for the more complex system were challenging for the park-maintenance personnel operating the building. When viewed comprehensively, achieving the same low-energy consumption for a project with passive rather than active measures is always the better solution.

To meet the Living Building Challenge standard of producing more energy than is

consumed, some active equipment is necessary.

In the case of our design, this included a wind turbine for electrical power and an array of evacuated solar-thermal tubes linked to an insulated sand-bed thermal mass for heating.

For the competition, the control systems were not determined, but one wonders if their inherent complexities and operational challenges might have diminished their expected performance and lifespan.

CROSS-LAMINATED TIMBER AND EXCESS MATERIAL USE: While both projects use Type V construction, the material agendas of the Living Building Challenge prompted us to pursue atypical choices for the Atka house. The cross-laminated timber structure—insulated on the exterior with a lime-washed, rigid, mineral-wool insulation and waterproofed below grade with bentonite clay—was an effort to make a house with minimal cement and plastic content. The effort to remove entire categories of material, however, led to nonsensical use of disproportionate quantities of lumber. We estimate the same house made with dimensional lumber platform framing would use 74% less wood. It is hard to imagine a situation where a building that is permittable as Type V construction (which includes the vast majority of both residential and commercial building projects) could be made with less embodied energy in another construction type than advanced platform framing with solid-sawn dimensional lumber. Wood also has significant disadvantages as a building material— combustibility, susceptibility to mold and rot, insect infestation—none of which are ameliorated by quadrupling the amount of the material in a structure.

NEGLECTED CONCERNS Many certification systems share an aspiration for comprehensiveness. The point categories of LEED-NC and “petals” of the Living Building Challenge recognize the different dimensions of impact. Just as existing standards continue to evolve over time in response to changing understandings of what defines sustainability, new systems have been developed to address oversights, both perceived and actual, of existing regimes.5 The growing awareness of embodied carbon in construction is an example of an area experiencing significant change in recent years. It seems inevitable that these

5 F or example, the attention to material toxicities beyond carbon emissions in the Living Building Challenge, the requirement for documenting actual post-occupancy operating energy use in the Passive Building and Living Building Challenge standards, and the education and evaluation of social equity in the SEED program or the Design for Freedom framework of Grace Farms.

7 While there are many pressing societal challenges—the climate crisis, inequitable socio-economic opportunity, thresholds in computation—the impending end of global population growth is underattended. For many first-world economies it has already arrived and the implications of population decline are especially profound for economic systems dominated by the exchange of services rather than goods.

4 https://www.usgbc.org/leed, https://living-future.org/lbc/

6 A . Gordon, “Designing for survival: the President introduces his long life/loose fit/low energy study,” Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, 1972, 79(9): 374-376.

3 Atka House credits: Architecture: Francisco Gomes, Dabney Staub, Arman Hadilou

APPROPRIATE DURABILITY: The varied resources expended in the construction and operation of buildings are the core of many efforts to measure sustainable design and construction, but they are only half of the equation. As was recognized in the early days of the contemporary environmental movement in architecture, project lifespan is the divisor for these carefully tracked expenditures.6 That durability is underattended is not surprising. While scientific constructs for understanding durability exist, we don’t have particularly reliable tools for predicting the lifespan of our building projects. However, if one presumes a minimum thirty-year service life, the projects we are designing and building now will certainly outlast the projected peak of the US population, and will likely see the peak of the worldwide population.7 We may not need nearly as many buildings in the future.

CONCLUSION The inevitable friction between project intentions and the criteria of any evaluation system—be it a sustainability certification regime, a set of development ordinances, or even a design award program—provides insight into the current state of knowledge and underlying values of our culture. These multiple lenses of evaluation are valuable because they push design teams to step outside familiar decision-making routines. Engaging all of these imperfect systems, including sustainability certifications, matters. Our world is better for our differences, and specialized experience will always exist in the design professions, but more empathy for the full spectrum of evaluation perspectives benefits our built environment.

2 Cliffs of the Neuse State Park Visitor Center and East District Offices credits: Architecture: Francisco Gomes, Dabney Staub, Dave Hardin, Mayowa Alabi, Sarah Dickerson Structural Engineering: Lysaght & Associates PME Engineering: The Wooten Company Landscape Architecture and Civil Engineering: CLH Design Exhibit Design: Design Dimension Cost Estimator: Capital Building Consultants General Contractor: Blue Ridge Enterprises LEED Manager: Francisco Gomes (design phase), Mayowa Alabi/Schema LLC (construction phase)

THE ENVIRONMENTAL COST OF CONSTRUCTION LABOR: If you were asked to create a mason or framing carpenter from scratch, how much carbon would be emitted by that activity? The sixteen years of food, clothing, housing, and education needed to satisfy the US Fair Labor Standards Act just scratches the surface. Labor dominates the financial and scheduling metrics of construction, and though one suspects it holds an equally large role in the consumption of other resources, it is a factor that is conspicuously missing in existing environmental quantifications of construction.

Perversely, this situation mirrors how we account for the use of waste products of industry, such as fly ash or steel slag. Never mind that providing an end-use for these byproducts of energy-intensive processes economically incentivizes their production; the assumption is that because these are waste outputs from other societal activities, we can use them at scale without accountability for their impact. Why would we account for humans and livelihoods in the same way we account for industrial waste?

How should we think about durability?

We need to make the effort to set explicit intentions about the durability of our buildings and follow up with material-, constructive-, and spatial-planning decisions aligned with these intentions. Shigeru Ban’s work is a good example to follow: buildings intended to be temporary or to have relatively short lifespans are appropriately made with textiles, lumber, or even cardboard tubes. For most buildings, though, long life is an explicit goal and seeking durability with mineral-based materials able to withstand a leak or two without disproportionate damage is a rational approach. Certification systems would gain relevance by incorporating this important aspect of sustainability.

1 The author thanks Thom Palmer for his assistance in preparing the project images.

will soon be adopted by the various regimes we have for measuring impact. What other important issues are not yet on the radar of our sustainability programs?

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ALUMNI

SHIVANI LANGER AIA, LEED AP BD+C. WELL AP; Principal, Senior Project Architect, Regional Sustainability Leader, Stantec; M. Arch Post-Professional, Sustainable Design, 2003

WHY SUSTAINABILITY? WHY SUSTAINABLE DESIGN? WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Communities are facing challenges all around the world due to extreme weather events caused by an increasingly changing climate, due to an overburden on available resources, increasing pollution and waste, and negative health impacts associated with spending extensive time in unhealthy indoor environments. Empirical evidence suggests that the impacts we are seeing due to global warming are not just getting worse but will soon be irreversible. As experienced in recent climate catastrophes, the impacts are widespread, across all regions and communities, and there is urgent need for everyone to question, curb, and rethink the actions that are making the situation worse.

Sustainable design provides guidelines to address these challenges. From resource efficiency and low-carbon development to designing for a resilient and equitable future and incorporating strategies for healthy environments, sustainability provides opportunities for positive change through new technologies and holistic and unified planning.

A sustainable approach — integrating the natural and built environment — is key to transforming the future of our communities.

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TELL US ABOUT YOUR CAREER PATH. I grew up in India, where we moved every two years to different parts of the country for my dad’s work. I remembered and wondered for years how each house and city could be so different from the others. I decided to be an architect to understand what makes buildings and communities unique. After my BArch degree from a renowned school in India, I worked there for three years, two of which were at a firm that was known for sustainable design. This work got me interested in studying sustainable design further, and the MArch in Sustainable Design degree at UT Austin was just the right fit for me.

After working in David Heymann’s architecture firm for four years and getting a great foundation and understanding of construction techniques from a patient and incredible teacher, I joined an education design firm, SHW Group, that later merged with Stantec, a large global consulting firm. I have been at Stantec for fifteen years. Along with being a principal and a senior project architect, I am Stantec’s Regional Sustainability Leader for the US Central region. On one hand, working at a large firm like Stantec has posed challenges when it comes to incorporating and implementing best practices and standards firm-wide, but on the other hand, I have learned

a lot from the varied expertise of our global staff who work in different sectors. It is also hugely rewarding to know that, in a large firm like this, we are raising the bar on all of our projects’ standards, which directly impact the huge volume of buildings and communities this firm designs. Stantec has a research and benchmarking (R+B) program, and I have been lucky to lead the Sustainability R+B group for over eight years. The discipline that we work in faces challenges that keep changing with time, and the solutions we come up with are also based on constantly evolving technologies. It is therefore important for us, through research programs such as these, to take the time to learn and be able to make informed decisions.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN YOUR CAREER OR EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE THAT TRANSFORMED THE WAY YOU VIEW SUSTAINABILITY OR SUSTAINABLE DESIGN? I worked as an architect for two years at a firm in India that was well-known for sustainable design. Apart from working on some school projects, the project that impacted my architectural path forward was writing bylaws for the sustainable development of a solar township in a remote location in India that experiences extreme weather conditions.

Every new generation of students seems to understand the urgency of climate change more than the generation before.

I went to visit and stay in a nearby city for a few days and got to see how innovative people can be in making themselves comfortable with simple, passive strategies. There were not many active, affordable systems available, but people had incorporated ways to utilize solar heat to keep warm.

This project provided both a challenge and an opportunity: we had to provide guidelines for the design of the new community that could cater to the growing population without overburdening available resources, and we had to ensure equitable opportunities for passive living while maintaining healthy environments.

I realized while working on this project that, as architects, we have immense responsibility and obligation towards the people we design for and the environments we design in because our decisions have many long-lasting impacts. We have the power to influence how development responds to and affects the environments in which it is located, and how it impacts the health and lifestyles of the people who live in them. As a sustainable design leader, there was a lot I needed to learn then and a lot I am still learning in the profession in order to inform and steer the people who are making decisions regarding the design of buildings and communities in the right direction.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN ISSUES THAT THE DISCIPLINE, THE RESEARCH, AND THE PRACTICE OF SUSTAINABILITY SHOULD FOCUS ON IN THE NEAR OR MORE DISTANT FUTURE? Climate change impacts—due to increased temperatures and conditions caused by global warming—are catastrophic and are hitting communities all around the world hard.

Climate prediction metrics that we used for our designs in previous years are no longer valid for designing future buildings and communities.

It is important for us to research, analyze, and understand how to make our designs resilient in light of the future ahead of us.

We have also seen that the adverse impacts of a warming climate are not felt equitably among people; some communities disproportionately experience the brunt of these impacts more than the others. This is another challenge that we face in our discipline: How can we ensure that our actions are truly reducing the perils faced by vulnerable communities that are threatened the most by climate change?

With an increase in the amount of time spent indoors, it is becoming more and more critical for us to understand how the built environment effects the health of the occupants we design for.

Beyond just resource efficiency, the dialogue has been shifting towards a balance of both efficient and healthy environments. The materials we use; the amount of air we bring in; how we design for user comfort in terms of lighting, acoustics, thermal environment are all extremely important for our occupants’ physical and mental well-being.

HOW CAN STUDENTS PREPARE FOR THIS FUTURE? Ask questions. Do not let what is considered normal stop you from innovating toward what might be better. Every new generation of students seems to understand the urgency of climate change more than the generation before. The question “Why sustainable design?” is clear from the growing evidence of climate change impacts we see around us. Students can contribute to design’s response. It is critical for students to proactively cultivate the skillsets, certifications, and technical knowledge to analyze design solutions that ensure the environments they create are resilient, efficient, equitable, and healthy. They must spread the message of “why” loud and clear to clients and fellow practitioners while also understanding the evidence and the data behind the “why.” Honing the skills to present the “why” in terms that laypeople understand is very important and something students can learn and improve at.

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ALUMNI

MARC COUDERT Environmental Program Manager, City of Austin, Office of Sustainability, MSSD, 2014

WHY SUSTAINABILITY? WHY SUSTAINABLE DESIGN? WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Because people’s lives depend on it. We live in a different era. The events of the past year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the national spotlight on police brutality, have elevated the discussion of equity and social justice and transformed how policymakers, planners, and designers talk about the future.

Following the trauma of these events, which disproportionately impacted those with the least resources, it is paramount that we learn and build an inclusive and just world for generations to come.

I’ve come to realize that the Earth is all we have, and that most human activities are making things worse. Those with access to power and privilege — including white men like myself — have engendered an economic and political system that creates and feeds off of desperation. Man-made emissions are changing the climate, which threatens those least responsible for it, including communities of color, women, LGBTQIA, youth, elderly, and low-income communities. These communities, burdened with historic inequities, are often “first hit, worst hit” by extreme events, which must be addressed if we want to continue living on this planet.

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It’s not all doom and gloom. Sustainable planning and design are about hope and excitement. I believe that human and environmental health depends on planners and designers coming together to work towards a safer and more affordable future. As designers, we embody a unique skill: the ability to envision and cocreate a positive future. As the liaison between people and policies (or data and emotions), we must find the levers and tools to make positive impacts in communities happen sooner, and we must celebrate those positive changes. This means expanding our understanding and definition of sustainability to include broad concepts of equity, innovation, regeneration, joy, and resilience.

I spend most workdays talking about the worst possible scenarios: negative health outcomes from extreme heat, flooding, wildfires, bad air quality, to, now, winter storms.

Yet, my planning and design education has made me an eternal optimist. I choose to focus on how to make things better. For me, the goal of sustainable practitioners is to create diverse and thriving communities for current and future generations by connecting social equity with environmental health and economic vitality.

I encourage others to create their own definition that resonates with their experience and surroundings.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR CAREER PATH. I’d love to say that I knew exactly what I wanted to do at an early age, but life is a little messier than you expect. I decided to study design and urban planning for my undergraduate degree because I really enjoyed walking and skateboarding around my hometown of Washington D.C., not because I wanted to be a famous designer. For my friends and me, the city meant freedom. For a few bucks, we would hop on the Metro Orange line and be in a totally different world in minutes. At the time, the city had an influx of Eritrean, El Salvadorian, and Lebanese communities that brought with them their food and music. We would exit the metro stop and the sites, smells, and sounds of the local culture would envelop us like a warm hug.

To fulfill my desire to travel, learn about cities, and keep tuition costs low, I attended Arizona State University for my undergraduate degree. I was fortunate to enter a program that had a strong emphasis on sustainable and ecological design. At the time, the planning and landscape program was led by Dr. Frederick (Fritz) Steiner. Dr. Steiner created a program that seamlessly interconnected environmental stewardship, landscape design, regional planning, and urban design. This initial exposure to sustainable-design thinking created an intellectual base for my career.

After earning an undergraduate degree in planning, I moved to San Francisco, got married, looked at housing prices, moved to Upstate New York (Troy), and pursued a career in architecture and urban design. Things were going smoothly until the Great Recession.

Looking for an exit strategy, we moved to Austin at the recommendation of Dr. Steiner.

A recession is the worst time to move to a new city and try to find employment, and because I didn’t have a network of design firms to leverage, I took a job at the City of Austin.

I never saw myself as a bureaucrat, so I assumed my stint at the city would be shortlived. Luckily, the city hired its first Chief Sustainability Officer shortly after I started, and I joined the team at the Office of Sustainability.

This position, which I’ve held since, allows me to draw on my love of cities, my undergraduate education, and my professional experience. I love the work and have been with the office for the ten years since its inception.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN YOUR CAREER OR EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE THAT TRANSFORMED THE WAY YOU VIEW SUSTAINABILITY OR SUSTAINABLE DESIGN? The moments that transformed the way that I view sustainability are too many to count, but none of the moments were as impactful as attending a core sustainability class at the UT School of Architecture, where I pursued a graduate degree in Sustainable Design to expand my understanding of climate and health.

With a few years of professional sustainable design under my belt, I assumed I would cruise through the core sustainable design classes and focus on climate-change planning. I did not expect the sustainable design classes to be so insightful.

Those who were lucky enough to have Dr. Steven Moore — who taught the ARC 386M Society, Nature and Technology class—as a professor will surely agree: he is brilliant.

His lectures were profound and mesmerizing.

I had never considered the multiple ways of viewing and deciphering sustainable practices.

He opened my mind to untold possibilities and pushed me to think more critically. He also instilled in me a sense of wonder, which helped me to acknowledge that education is an ongoing process. I realized that my professional experience had hardened my

view of sustainability, and that I should let go of preconceived notions to accept new ideas.

Before taking that course, I thought that people were the problem and that the environment would be perfect without us.

For everything else, technology was the only solution. Taking that class and talking to community members made me realize that I had it backwards. People and ecology are inseparable. The environment can be a source of great beauty and health but, if not nurtured, can bring harm to those who have the least political power. It is important to stay open to new ideas and to truly listen to those with lived experience. Our education is never complete.

Learn from those with lived wisdom.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN ISSUES THAT THE DISCIPLINE, THE RESEARCH, AND THE PRACTICE OF SUSTAINABILITY SHOULD FOCUS ON IN THE NEAR OR MORE DISTANT FUTURE? Since the dawn of city design, city leaders and designers have made decisions that have provided advantages to some and disadvantages to others. In Austin, this practice stems from the introduction of the first white colonialist to the present day. Through plans, building placement, policies, programs, and police power, we have created inequitable systems and landscapes that negatively impact public and environmental health.

This is unsustainable.

Now, with the advent of climate change, the planning and design professions are in the midst of a realignment. Cities and buildings are built with the belief that the climate is constant, but we can no longer simply use past weather events as a proxy for future events. The recent winter storm Uri highlighted the fact that climate projections are not as simple as adding degrees or inches of rain to our current models.

We must prepare for unknown hazards and, more importantly, unknown cascading impacts.

Believing that the design process is linear is a luxury. We must incorporate multiple voices and impacts into our thinking and communication — both with clients and the greater community.

If we, as planners and designers, do not prioritize the lives of those most impacted by our decisions in the design process, we are certain to make their lives worse. For design professions, this is an existential question.

What is good public design? Are we beholden to

designing for the public good or for gatekeepers who hold power? What biases do we bring to our "good designs" and how do those biases bring unintended consequences? We must strive to include the public’s varied voices in the process and instill democratic values in our design processes and not over-rely on data analysis. Talk to people. Make public design personal. You are accountable.

HOW CAN STUDENTS PREPARE FOR THIS FUTURE? Embrace change. Life is a pendulum that swings between freedom and security. Laying out a meticulous twenty-year plan is great when planning for retirement but difficult, if not futile, when thinking about your career. There are unanticipated events (some good, some less so) that will redirect where you go and shape how you think. If you don’t embrace change, and focus too much on security, you run the risk of feeling “stuck.” If you change too much, you run the risk of not feeling “grounded.”

Focus on balancing this dichotomy. For me, the trick (or challenge) is staying present. Find out what you’re good at. I graduated with my undergraduate degree assuming I would be a famous designer and used glossy magazines to determine my career benchmarks. A year into my first job, I realized my skill-set and personality would not make me a household name, and that glossy magazines were not a good determinant of my success. Figure out what you’re good at and grow those skills.

Create your own meaningful benchmarks and make sure they include a work-life balance.

Volunteer. Every time I’ve considered making a professional move, the connections I've made through volunteering have helped me. I’ve volunteered for professional organizations, friends of parks, art museums, and other tangential groups. If I've needed a letter of recommendation or a local network and reputation, the relationships I've made through volunteering have helped me enormously. In addition, we must strive to do more than our jobs. Helping others is the first step to make the world more sustainable.

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This summer, due to the generous support from real-estate developer Stephen King and his company’s foundation, the Loren Roots Initiative, the School of Architecture's Center for Sustainable Development engaged in two research projects focused on carbon accounting and sequestration.

Assistant Professor Juliana Felkner and her team of graduate research assistants evaluated the current leading carbon accounting practices with the goal of better understanding their effective principles and techniques, particularly when used within service-related industries. Associate Professor Phoebe Lickwar and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Director of Land Resources Matt O'Toole explored the challenges and opportunities present in the Mississippi Delta while researching soil and biomass carbon sequestration strategies. Both research teams were assisted by graduate students from the UTSOA Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture, the Cockrell School’s Program in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering, and the iSchool's Information Studies program.

We caught up with Stephen King — developer of Austin’s latest luxury residence, The Loren at Lady Bird Lake — to discuss the Loren Roots Initiative's mission and its ongoing work with the UTSOA Center for Sustainable Development.

King heads both Sardis Development and C12 Capital Management, which work in conjuction to manage the design, construction, and operation of low-density, luxury hospitality and residential properties.

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SOA: Stephen, can you tell us a little about your background and the development work you’re focused on currently?

SK: My team and I have worked together for almost twenty years, initially in finance. We are very familiar with the imperatives set by investors when it comes to real-estate development. Now, our own firm, C12 Capital, is focused on exceptional real-estate development for living and leisure in some of the world's most beautiful places. The emphasis of the product is for the resident or guest to enjoy the beauty of their surrounding and maximize their experience of the location. Inevitably that leads us to recognize how much the environment is providing our residents, guests, and investors, and how we should ensure we account for and combat our impact on it.

SOA: How did the Loren Roots Initiative come to be? What is its overall mission?

SK: I spent my early years traveling the world, hiking through jungles, scrambling over mountains, and diving in seas. My subsequent career in finance had me somewhat blindly financing projects that were, economically, very credible but seldom gave consideration to the environment. Now, at C12, where we are directly connected to the development of wonderful projects, I want to ensure we are optimizing our chance of preserving the world I so enjoyed as a young man—the same world that our guests are enjoying and that is materially at risk if we continue to blindly abuse it. To that end, the Loren Roots Initiative sets out to consume multiples of the CO2 emissions that the development company produces as a result of its construction and operation and not just offset; the target is 10–20x. This will happen primarily through optimal building design and biodiverse reforestation, and we plan to finance this by having our investors, residents, and guests pay for it. We have detected zero resistance from that community. Furthermore, we hope we can be used as an example that can show others how they may be able to participate in this worldwide endeavor and, ultimately, influence the policymakers who have access to capital and power far in excess of our own.

SOA: Why were you interested in working with The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture? How do you envision the collaboration moving forward in future years?

SK: As a small group, we need leverage. We use that in finance. We need it in an environmental undertaking like combatting global warming and saving our fabulous planet. In this case, we need the capabilities of an institution like UT to help us uncover how and where we can be most effective through targeted research.

The world of climate change and our ability to mitigate and offset our effects on it remains depressingly opaque. I hope that by working with UT and its faculty and students, we are able to steadily work through research topics that lead to results that can be directly implemented by groups like C12. I further hope that it will shed light on practical and economically viable government policies that can be implemented to support the private sector taking a materially better position in combating global warming and preserving our planet.

student tech fund Now more than ever the School of Architecture is committed to leveling the playing field so that all students have equal access to the array of resources and experiences that are essential to learning professional skills. A key part of this is access to digital technology. Like the field itself, architecture education is materialsintensive and requires significant and ongoing investment in technology to stay at the leading edge. Computers and software often fall outside of traditional student financial aid packages of scholarships, grants, and loans that are used to cover tuition, fees, and living expenses.

In 2020, amidst the global pandemic that critically impacted students and families, the School of Architecture reexamined how to be more strategic in achieving student equity.

Led by the school’s Advisory Council and other generous donors from our community of alumni and friends, the School of Architecture launched a new initiative to bridge critical funding gaps and support student equity through the creation of the Student Technology Fund. Gifts will be used specifically to provide new laptops and software to students with financial need in ways that will not offset federal

student aid allowances. Namely, this fund allows the school to purchase computers and software to administer a long-term loan program for students with the greatest financial need. To date, the initiative has exceeded the first-year goal of $50,000.

Thanks to the inspired generosity from the Advisory Council and donors who made gifts during the 40 Hours on the Forty Acres campaign, the school will be able to provide latest-generation laptops and software to a cohort of over ten undergraduates in Fall 2021. This kind of material support will have a significant and lasting impact on these students’ potential throughout their years of study at the school,

To support the Student Technology Fund, please visit giving.utexas.edu/STF or contact Rebecca Dearlove, development specialist, at rebecca.dearlove@austin. utexas.edu for more information.

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said Charlton Lewis, Assistant Dean for Student Affairs.

Given the success of this trial year, we will expand this program in 2022, and I hope we can count on more alumni to participate in this meaningful and effective program that will make a huge difference in student success.

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ENDOWMENTS AND SCHOLARSHIPS 84

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These 155 permanent endowments have an approximate market value of $54.7 million and account for over $2 million in annual, renewable funding that directly supports students, faculty, programs, travel, lectures, exhibitions, prizes, research, and other initiatives in perpetuity. Endowments grow in value over time and provide a reliable funding stream to advance the mission of the School of Architecture.

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE ENDOWMENTS AS OF AUGUST 2021 AIA Austin Charles Moore Endowed Scholarship

George W. Brackenridge Scholarship Fund

Cogburn Family Foundation Architecture and Urbanism Prize

Brooke and Frank Aldridge Endowed Faculty Excellence Fund

Brightman/York Endowed Lecture Series in Interior Design

Peter O. Coltman Book Prize in Architecture and Planning

Blake Alexander Traveling Student Fellowship in Architecture

Brochstein Excellence Fund

Bluford Walter Crain Centennial Endowed Lectureship

Architexas Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Historic Preservation Francisco “Paco” Arumi-Noe Memorial Fellowship in Sustainable Design Yvette Atkinson Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Beattie Family Endowed Architecture Fund Marvin E. and Anne Price Beck Endowed Scholarship Wayne Bell Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation

C. William Brubaker/Perkins + Will Endowed Presidential Scholarship David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Urban Design Conner Bryan Memorial Fund for Sustainability Research John Buck Company and First Chicago Investment Advisors for Fund F Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Build Well Construction Excellence Fund Kent S. Butler Memorial Excellence Fund in Community & Regional Planning

Roberta P. Crenshaw Centennial Professorship in Urban Design and Environmental Planning The Paul Philippe Cret Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Architecture Fred Winfield Day, Jr. Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Isabelle Thomason Decherd Endowment for Preservation Technology Jorge Luis Divino Centennial Scholarship in Architecture Larry Alan Doll Endowment for Architecture Student Travel

Edwin E. Beran Centennial Lectureship in Architecture

Edwin W. and Alyce O. Carroll Centennial Lectureship in Architecture

Carl O. Bergquist Endowed Scholarship

Matt Casey Memorial Scholarship in Architecture

Sinclair Black Endowed Chair in the Architecture of Urban Design

Center for American Architecture and Design Endowed Excellence Fund

Sinclair Black Endowed Excellence Fund for Urban Design

Center for the Study of American Architecture Endowment

William H. Emis, III Traveling Scholarship in Architecture

Myron Geer Blalock Endowed Presidential Scholarship

John S. Chase Endowed Presidential Scholarship

Excellence Fund for Topics in Sustainable Development

Jean and Bill Booziotis Endowed Annual Lecture in Architecture

Dick Clark, III Endowed Chair in Architecture

O’Neil Ford Centennial Chair in Architecture

Jean and Bill Booziotis Excellence Endowment in Honor of the Texas Rangers

Dick Clark Student Travel Fund

Ford, Powell & Carson Endowed Scholarship

Jean and Bill Booziotis Endowed Excellence Fund Jean and Bill Booziotis Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Architectural History

Fred W. and Laura Weir Clarke Endowed Scholarship Presidential Scholarship in Architecture honoring Carl Bergquist

Hal Box Endowed Chair in Urbanism

Fred W. Clarke Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Architecture honoring Alan Y. Taniguchi

Hal Box Endowed Scholarship in Architecture

Bartlett Cocke Regents Professorship in Architecture

Children of John and Christine Boylan Endowed Scholarship in Architecture

Bartlett Cocke Scholarships

Amy Dryden Endowed Scholarship Professor Buford and Ruth Duke Endowed Excellence Fund in Architecture Raquel Elizondo Staff Excellence Fund

Terry Norman Forrester & Nancy Hoppess Forrester Dean’s Excellence Fund Ted Freedman Endowed Scholarship Suzie Friedkin Endowed Scholarship in Interior Design Gensler Exhibitions Endowment The Cass Gilbert Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Architecture

Golemon & Rolfe Centennial Lectureship in Architecture

Leipziger Travel Fellowship Fund

Herbert M. Greene Centennial Lectureship in Architecture

Hugo Leipziger-Pearce Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Planning

Adam Conrad Grote Memorial Scholarship in Architecture

Kevin J. Lorenz Graduate Fellowship in Architecture

Architecture Endowed Excellence Fund — Jesse Hager

LPA Endowed Scholarship for Sustainable Design

Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professorship in Architecture

Lynne Brundrett Maddox Scholarship in Interior Design

HDR Architecture Endowed Scholarship

Harvey V. Marmon, Jr. FAIA / Marmon Mok Scholarship in Architecture

Mike Hogg Professorship in Community and Regional Planning Lily Rush Walker and Coulter Hoppess Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Architecture

McCall Endowed Excellence Fund Sue and Frank McBee Fellowship in Historic Preservation

Humphreys & Partners Endowed Scholarship in Architecture

Eugene and Margaret McDermott Excellence Fund for the Study of American Architecture

Interior Design Endowed Excellence Fund

Eugene McDermott Centennial Visiting Professorship

Janet C. and Wolf E. Jessen Endowed Presidential Scholarship The Wolf and Janet Jessen Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Wolf E. Jessen Endowment Fund Journeyman Construction Faculty Excellence Fund in Architecture Professor Terry Kahn Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Community and Regional Planning Karl Kamrath Lectureship in Architecture Martin S. and Evelyn S. Kermacy Collection Endowment Martin S. Kermacy Centennial Professorship in Architecture Henrietta M. King Endowed Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation

Edward J. Perrault Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Interior Design

Emily Summers Excellence Fund for the History of Interior Design Lance Tatum Endowed Scholarship

Alma Piner Scholarship in Architecture

John Greene Taylor Endowment for Collections Enhancement

John William Potter Endowed Fund for the Encouragement of Risk Taking

John Greene Taylor Family Graduate Fellowship in Architectural History

Boone Powell Family Prize in Urban Design Paul C. Ragsdale Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation The Sid W. Richardson Centennial Professorship in Architecture Debbie Ann Rock Scholarship in Interior Design Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture Roland Gommel Roessner Centennial Professorship in Architecture

Potter Rose Professorship in Urban Planning

Wilmont “Vic” Vickrey Endowed Scholarship

Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellowship in Architecture

Edwin A. Schneider Centennial Lectureship in Architecture

J. M. West Texas Corporation Fellowship in Architecture

Meadows Foundation Centennial Professorship in Architecture

School of Architecture Advisory Council Endowed Excellence Fund

Robert Leon White Memorial Fund

Mike and Maxine K. Mebane Endowed Traveling Scholarship in Architecture

School of Architecture Faculty Fund for Student Domestic Travel

Alice Kleberg Reynolds Meyer Foundation Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Gene Edward Mikeska Endowed Chair for Interior Design The W. L. Moody, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Architecture Jack Morgan Endowed Scholarship Charles M. Nettles Endowed Presidential Scholarship

School of Architecture Scholarship and Fellowship Awards Endowment Joy & Morin Scott / Sally & John Byram Graduate Fellowship Brandon Shaw Memorial Endowed Scholarship

Matthew F. Kreisle, III / Page Southerland Page Graduate Fellowship in Architecture

George M. Page Endowed Graduate Fellowship

Lawrence W. Speck Excellence Fund

Karen and Jerry Lea Family Endowed Excellence Fund

Jane Marie Tacquard Patillo Centennial Lectureship Barbara & Donald Pender Endowed Scholarship Claude M. Pendley, Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund (for Graduate Fellowships)

Roxanne Williamson Endowed Scholarship Trisha Wilson Endowed Professorship Fund Wilsonart Endowed Lecture Series in Interior Design

Sixth River Architects Endowed Fellowship

Louis F. Southerland Endowed Scholarship

Page Southerland Page Fellowship in Architecture

Wilkinson Family Travel Fund for the School of Architecture

Overton Shelmire Scholarship in Architecture

Overland Partners Endowed Presidential Scholarship

Lake/Flato Endowed Scholarship

The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture’s Advisory Council Women’s Endowed Scholarship

Margaret McDermott Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Architecture

Katherine Kligerman Fund for Architecture Student Support

William E. Lake, Jr. Excellence Fund for Architecture

Urban Edge Developers Dean’s Excellence Fund

Potter Rose Graduate Fellowship

Oglesby Prize Endowment

Dr. Nancy Panak Kwallek Endowed Chair in Design & Planning

Jack Rice Turner Endowed Scholarship in Architecture

Wilmont “Vic” Vickrey, FAIA, Endowed Excellence Fund for Architecture of the Americas

Snøhetta Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Established by Craig Dykers and Elaine Molinar

Henrietta Chamberlain King Endowed Scholarship

Texas Chapter American Society of Landscape Architects Endowed Graduate Fellowship

Lawrence W. Speck Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Lawrence W. Speck / Page Southerland Page Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Frederick Steiner Endowed Excellence Fund in Landscape Architecture Ruth Carter Stevenson Regents Chair in the Art of Architecture

ENDOWMENTS ARE FOREVER To create a new endowment or make a gift to support an existing endowment, please contact Luke Dunlap, Executive Director for Development at luked@austin.utexas.edu or 512.471.6114.

giving.utexas.edu/p21

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Friends of architecture We extend our thanks to all of our donors, including those who wish to remain anonymous.

Please consider supporting the School of Architecture: giving.utexas.edu/p21 ENDOWMENTS AND SCHOLARSHIPS Francisco “Paco” Arumi-Noe Memorial Fellowship in Sustainable Design William R. Massingill [BArch ‘84] Peter Pfeiffer [MArch ‘83] Beattie Family Endowed Architecture Fund Evan Beattie [BArch ‘04] Marvin E. and Anne Price Beck Endowed Scholarship Gerald Hyman Children of John and Christine Boylan Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Rebecca L. Birdwell [BA ‘96] Christopher H. Lytle Conner Bryan Memorial Fund for Sustainability Research Anonymous

Build Well Construction Excellence Fund Austin Enve, LLC Laura Burton [BSArchStds ‘89] & David Burton [BBA ’91, MBA ‘00] Morton Feldman Foundation Stanley Freeman Memorial Kent S. Butler Memorial Excellence Fund in Community & Regional Planning Bruce D Butler [BA ’75] Matt Casey Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Kent L. McNeil [BBA ‘98] John S. Chase Endowed Presidential Scholarship Karen E. Pittman [MA ’87, MArch ‘10] Dick Clark, III Endowed Chair in Architecture Dick Clark III Foundation Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund

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Peter O. Coltman Book Prize in Architecture and Planning Felicity A. Coltman Heather J. Coltman [PhD ‘90] Bluford Walter Crain Centennial Endowed Lectureship B. Walter Crain, III [MBA ‘75] Larry Doll Memorial Fund for Student Travel Coleman Coker Sean S. Coney [MArch ‘86] Laura R. Doll [MPAFF ‘78] Luke Dunlap [BA ‘01] David S. Kivel [BArch ‘85] Lloyd Scott Ted Freedman Endowed Scholarship Renee F. Stern Adam Conrad Grote Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Michael R. Boduch [MArch ‘12] James R. Lee Professor Terry Kahn Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Community and Regional Planning David C. Bodenman [BA ’72, MSCRP ‘76] HRI Resources, Inc. Charles and Brandie Killebrew Travel Fund Charles N. Killebrew [BArch ‘95] Katherine Kligerman Fund for Architecture Student Support Lynne Burgin [BBA ‘81] and Lyle Burgin [BArch ‘81] Loren Roots Initiative Fund for Sustainability Research Stephen King C12 Capital Management Kevin J. Lorenz Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Allied/CMS, Inc. Kevin J. Lorenz [MArch ‘84]

LPA Endowed Scholarship for Sustainable Design LPA, Inc. Kate Anne Mraw Donald W. Pender [BFA ‘78, MArch ‘81] Pella Award for Design Excellence in Architecture Pella Windows & Doors of Austin Boone Powell Family Prize in Urban Design Laura Powell [MSCRP ‘95] and John A. Hartman [MSCRP ‘95] Leilah Powell [MSCRP ‘96] Joanne and James Pratt Japan Travel Scholarship Fund Janet Kutner Paul C. Ragsdale Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation The Ragsdale Foundation Rachael Rawlins Memorial Fund Ian D. Becker [MSCRP ‘18] Julie A. Black Luke Dunlap [BA ‘01] Andrea R. Gilles [MSCRP ‘05] Marilyn Lamensdorf Lauren L. McCaul Robert G. Paterson Catherine Schmittling Sarah S. Wu [MSCRP ‘06] Ming Zhang

School of Architecture Advisory Council Endowed Excellence Fund Lexa Acker [BArch ‘63] Richard Archer [BArch ‘79] Charles H. Armstrong [BArch ‘81] Timothy B. Blonkvist [BArch ‘81] David C. Bodenman [BA ’72, MSCRP ‘76] Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Nestor Bottino [MArch ‘83] Laura V. Britt [MArch ‘00] Tamara K. Chambless [BArch ‘79] Gabriel Durand-Hollis [BS ‘14] James Tipton Housewright [BArch ‘80] Michael H. Hsu [BArch ‘93] Impact Outdoor Advertising Company Terry B. Kafka Anne E. Kniffen [BArch ‘79] Laura Britt Design Gilbert Lang Mathews Elaine Molinar [BArch ‘88] Dana Nearburg [BA ’73, MArch ‘76] Overland Partners, Inc. Elizabeth Chu Richter [BArch ‘74] Deedie Potter Rose Emily R. Summers Christine Ten Eyck Ten Eyck Landscape Architects Canan Yetmen [BA ‘91] Brandon Shaw Memorial Endowed Scholarship Kathleen and Brewster H. Shaw, Jr. Edythe & Alan Tonnesen

Emily Summers Fund for Craft & Artisanship in Interior Design Emily R. Summers Texas Chapter American Society of Landscape Architects Endowed Graduate Fellowship American Society of Landscape Architects

PROGRAMS AND CENTERS Architecture Program Kory Bieg Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Bonnie L. Bridges [MArch ‘90] Jacqueline A. Byrd Stella Coble Terry N. Forrester [BArch ‘59] Cisco Gomes Claire Tousey Greene Kathryn Tate Hamilton [March ‘99] Gilbert P. Hickox [BArch ‘80] Lizamma Kappukattil Virginia W. Kelsey [BArch ‘83] Hudson C. Lockett, III [BArch ‘78] Andres Lozano [MArch ‘07] Erick D. Mikiten [BArch ‘87] Catherine Morgan Meeta A. Morrison [MArch ‘07] Linda Peterson Mara L. Pressman Stephen E. Protz [BArch ‘85] Davis Wayne Richardson [MArch ‘19] Greyson McClain Rubin [BArch ‘19] Renee S. Rubin [BBA ‘89] Ya-Ting Shieh Monica Tenorio Andrew M. Torres [MArch ‘07] Heidi P. Tse [BSID ‘91] Benjamin S. Vera-Tudela [BA ’99, MS ’03, MBA ‘08] Brent J. Yost [BArch ‘03] Architectural History Program Ernesto X. Bilbao [PhD ‘20] R. Kelly Mathews [MPA ’91, BBA ‘91] Center for American Architecture and Design Erik A. Josowitz [BArch ‘91] Center for Sustainable Development Marta Salinas-Hovar [BArch ‘87] Community and Regional Planning Program Susan M. Appleyard [MSCRP ‘94] Paula B. Burns [MSCRP ‘95] Benjamin T. Coffey [BS ‘08] Mary S. French [MSCRP ‘90] Andy L. Helms [BA ’64, MSCRP ‘70] Joelle D. Kanter [MArch ‘04] Niloufar Karimipour [MArch ‘17] Jessi Ray Koch [MSCRP ’13, MSUD ‘13] L. Ashley McLain [MSCRP ‘97] Bradley T. Peel [BA ’89, MSCRP ‘92] Judy L. Ramsey [BA ’71, MSCRP ‘76] Ashish S. Shinde Naomi Hadassah Singer [BSArchStds ‘17] David W. Sullivan [MS ’84, PhD 97] Marc A. Toppel [BArch ‘06] Lisabeth C. Townsend [MSCRP ‘88] Yiqing Wang [[MLA ‘17] Floyd T. Watson, Jr. [MSCRP ‘79] Leon A. Whitney [BArch ‘58] Xichang Zhang [PhD ‘94]

Gulf Coast DesignLab Tamara K. Chambless [BArch ‘79] Historic Preservation Program Killis P. Almond, Jr. [BSArchStds ’71, BArch ‘72] John Brown [BSArchStds ‘71] Heidi F. Buchberger [MArch ‘16] Richard L. Cleary Kate Almond Harrison Richard W. Meyer [BArch ’70, JD ‘74] Frank E. Ordia [MSHP ‘16] Brent D. Redus [BArch ‘85] Interior Design Program Melanie F. Entin [BSID ‘90] Gerard A. Griggs [MArch ‘11] Paul J. Nick Leigh Ann P. Ranslem {BS ’92, M.Ed. ‘96] Janet Sisolak [BSID ‘81] Deepika Warrier Kim R. Wilson [BSID ‘80] Landscape Architecture Program Michael W. Averitt [BS ’03, MLA ‘08] R. Kelly Mathews [MPA ’91, BBA ‘91] Catherine Gowan [MLA ‘08] Kevin S. Jeffery [MLA ‘19] Matthew L. Nicolette [MLA ‘11] Michael D. Pecen [MLA ‘07] Gregory B. Pulte [BA ’99, PhD ‘19] Allan W. Shearer Bei Zhang [MLA ‘16] Publications Suzanne Deal Booth Cultural Trust Student Initiatives Miroslava M. Benes Matt Fajkus Architecture Sandra Rosenbloom Student Technology Fund Michelle Addington Killis P. Almond, Jr. [BSArchStds ’71, BArch ‘72] Anand M. Anbalagan Peter J. Boes [MArch ‘93] Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Oza Bouchard [BArch ‘75] William E. Bowerman [BSArchStds ‘84] Blake Allison Brooks [BArch ‘00] Heidi F. Buchberger [MArch ‘16] Jacqueline A. Byrd Tamara K. Chambless [BArch ‘79] Patricia L. Cornelison [MArch ‘84] Lisa C. DeLosso [MA ‘10] Laura R. Doll [MPAFF ‘78] Bibiana B. Dykema [BArch ‘79] Sarah Eilers [BSID ‘80] Guy L. Hagstette [BArch ‘79] Kathryn Tate Hamilton [March ‘99] David Harrison [BArch ‘79] Kate Almond Harrison Julie M. Hooper Leland C. Horstmann [BArch ‘80] Charles C. Huang

Richard W. Jennings Journeyman Construction, Inc. Jodi J. Kautz Sam Kumar [MS ‘92] Emma F. Leonard [MArch ‘12] Robin G. Levatino [BBA ‘88] Charlton N. Lewis [BArch ’95, MArch ‘13] Hudson C. Lockett, III [BArch ‘78] Lucas/Eilers Design Associates, LLP Sandra Lucas [BSID ‘78] Jeffrey T. Mechlem [BArch ‘02] Kathryn P. Meyer [MSIS ’07, MA ’09, PhD ‘18] Elaine Molinar [BArch ‘88] and Craig Dykers [BArch ‘85] Catherine Morgan Dianne R. Nixon [BFA ‘68] & Charles W. Nixon [BArch ’67] Paula R. Pacotti [BSArchStds ‘11] Frederick R. Peterson Amanda Mae Prins [BArch ‘11] Rene D. Quinlan [BArch ‘88] Bharat Rajaram Robert E. Reeder [BArch ‘75] Deedie Potter Rose Glenda D. Rovello [MArch ‘86] Monica Sanga [MArch ‘14] J.C. Schmeil [MArch ‘98] Ya-Ting Shieh Taniguchi Architects Evan K. Taniguchi Arthur R. Tatum [BArch ‘84] Texas Instruments Foundation Billie Jo Thorne [BSArchStds ‘89] Linda M. Tsai [MArch ‘93] Joel A. Villalon [BArch ‘84] Scott S. Watkins [BArch ‘80] David E. Webber [BArch ‘92] Michael I. Wheeler [BBA ‘74] Cissy Winn Patrick Y. Wong [MArch ‘92] Sarah C. Wu [MSCRP ‘06] Canan Yetmen [BA ‘91] Sustainable Design Program Nathan G. Goodman Craig S. Graber Urban Design Program Mengdi Yang

OTHER GIFTS School of Architecture Faculty and Research Support Anthony Chase Houston Endowment, Inc. Microsoft Corporation School of Architecture Dean’s Fund Lexa Acker [BArch ‘63] Jennifer G. Adair [MArch ‘20] Michelle Addington Olubukunola I Akinsanmi Adeola Y Ajayi Richard Archer [BArch ‘79] Charles H. Armstrong [BArch ‘81] Bernie E. Babendure [BArch ‘73] Edward A. Benson [PhD ‘71] Alexander K. Berghausen [MArch ‘01] Hilary K. Bertsch [MArch ‘95] Ariene S. Bihan Timothy B. Blonkvist [BArch ‘81] David C. Bodenman [BA ’72, MSCRP ‘76] Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Gerard Bolsega [MArch ‘95] Farzad Boroumand [BArch ‘87] Nestor Bottino [MArch ‘83] Laura V. Britt [MArch ‘00] Sara C. Bronin [BA ’01, BArch ‘01] R. Brian Burnett [BArch ’08] Bryan R. Cady [BArch ‘99] Robin A. Camp [BS ’80, MArch ‘90] Thomas R. Campbell [BArch ‘59] Bruno Canales [BArch ‘20] Salvador Cardenas [BArch ‘65] Charlotte H. Carter [BS ‘03] Scott Cavaness [BArch ‘80] Elizabeth Chai-Chang Tamara K. Chambless [BArch ‘79] Erlene M. Clark [MSArchStds ‘18] D. Sherman Clarke Andrew H. Coelho [MArch ‘95] David M. Cooperstein [MArch ‘98] O. Neal Corbett [BArch ‘86] Herman L. Coronado [BArch ‘78] Hobson Crow [BA ’76, MArch ‘80] Bang Dai Dang [BArch ‘98] Rebecca S. Dearlove [MA ‘16] Cindy K. DeCosmo [BSID ‘83] Lisa C. DeLosso [MA ‘10] Laura R. Doll [MPAFF ‘78] Clarice A. Droughton [BJ ‘71] Tara A. Dudley [MArchStds. ’03, PhD ‘12] Caleb Duncan [BSArchE ’97, BArch ‘98] Gabriel Durand-Hollis [BS ‘14] Jonathan D. Ellis [BArch ‘90] Linmor B. Feiner [BSArchStds ’64] Terese E. Ferguson [BArch ‘80] Drew M. Finke [BArch ’13, BA ‘13] Susan S. Fisk [BA ‘70] Ron W. Foster [BArch ‘70] Ali Gidfar [MArch ‘85] Jean D. Glass and R. Erle Weekley [BArch ‘73] Ramiro Gonzalez [MSCRP ‘11] Anne L. Gorney [PhD ‘01] and Joseph C. Gorney [MSCRP ‘00] Robyn S. Green [BA ’84, MArch ‘89] Nonya S. Grenader [BArch ‘76] Ranjit Balakrishna Gupta [BArch ‘96]

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Joannes A. Haakman [BS ’83, BArch ‘84] Kathryn Tate Hamilton [March ‘99] Stephen Harris [BArch ’87, MPA ‘16] David Harrison [BArch ‘79] HCA Caring for the Community Ingeborg C. Hendley [MSHP ‘08] Julie K. Hendricks [MArch ‘97] Maggie Shae Hill Larce M. Holder, III [BArch ‘68] Leland C. Horstmann [BArch ‘80] James Tipton Housewright [BArch ‘80] Michael H. Hsu [BArch ‘93] Impact Outdoor Advertising Company Robert T. Jackson [BArch ‘70] Alan C. Janecka [BArch ‘76] Richard W. Jennings Terry B. Kafka Saranya Kanagaraj [BArch ‘16] Susanna Y. Kartye [BA ’96, MArch ‘02] Kristine Kaske-Martin David R.H. King [BArch ‘75] David S. Kivel [Barch ‘85] Anne E. Kniffen [BArch ‘79] Orion Knox [BArch ‘68] Roger H. Kolar [MArch ‘79] Laura Britt Design Emma F. Leonard [MArch ‘12] Mario Lowe Robert L. Marx [MArch ‘82] Gilbert Lang Mathews Kyle S. McAdams [BArch ‘86] Roy J. McCarroll [BArch ‘62] Megan R. McCaskey [MArch ‘01] Michael S. McCauslin [MArch ‘89] William B. McDonald [BArch ‘65] Lenorah E. McKee Dwight B. Micklethwait [BArch ‘72] Jennifer N. Miller [BArch ‘95] Mason A. Miller [BA ’06, BArch ‘06] Elaine Molinar [BArch ‘88] Whitney J. Moore [MArch ‘19] Catherine Morgan Stephanie F. Motal [BArch ‘04] Kate Anne Mraw Dana Nearburg [BA ’73, MArch ‘76] Winifred E. Newman [BArch ‘90] Jim R. Nix [BArch ‘71] Charles W. Nixon [BArch ’67] John V. Nyfeler [BArch ‘58] Justin H. Oscilowski [BArch ’12] Overland Partners, Inc. James H. Overton [BArch ‘75] Paula R. Pacotti [BSArchStds ‘11] Tami L. Pearson [BSID ‘83] Jim T. Phillips [BArch ‘73] Adam A. Pyrek [BArch ‘91] Rene D. Quinlan [BArch ‘88] Natalie Ramirez [MArch ‘14] Stephen B. Ratchye [MArch ‘96] Susan W. Raymond [BArch ‘90] Johanna H. Reed [MArch ‘12] Robert E. Reeder [BArch ‘75] Elmer W. Reichert, III [BArch ‘71] Richard M. Reilly, Jr. [MArch ‘95] Reveal Arc, LLC Sasan Rezaie [BA ‘87] Wendy R. Rhoades [MSCRP ‘95] Elizabeth Chu Richter [BArch ‘74]

88

2021-2022

Daniel R. Robinson [MBA ‘88] Richard W. Robinson [BArch ‘64] Sharyn S. Robinson [BArch ‘82] and Daniel R. Robinson [MBA ‘88] Ronald C. Roeder [BArch ‘76] Deedie Potter Rose Ellen Rosenfeld [BSID ‘81] Alesa Iola Rubendall [MArch ‘03] Chay R. Runnels [BA ’96, MSArchStds ‘00] Gireesh Sadasivan Humberto Saldana [BArch ‘65] Manuel A. Sanchez-Ruiz [MArch ‘84] Mark C. Santa Maria [MArch ‘86] Samantha W. Schwarze [MArch ‘13] Molly H. Sherman [BA ‘86] Lloyd Scott Thomas P. Simister [BA ’01, MA ‘03] Robert S. Simpson [BArch ‘75] Jonathan B. Smith [BArch ‘03] Sandra Bearden Smith [BArch ‘84] Lesley C. Sommer [BFA ‘95] Jerry M. Sparks [BArch ‘67] David R. Stanford [BSArchE ’79, BArch ‘79] Rachel B. Newman Stark [MA ‘18] Julie N. Steele [BArch ‘89] Joel T. Sterling [MArch ‘18] Allan J. Stern [BS ‘91] Kelsey Stine Tracy A. Stone [MArch ‘85] Thomas H. Stovall [BArch ‘62] Robin Studebaker Emily R. Summers Kalpana R. Sutaria [MArch ‘78] Catherine E. Suttle [BSID ‘80] Martha V. Suzuki [BArch ‘92] Arthur R. Tatum [BArch ‘84] Howard L. Templin [BArch ‘72] Christine Ten Eyck Ten Eyck Landscape Architects Billie Jo Thorne [BSArchStds ‘89] Linda M. Tsai [MArch ‘93] Kristine A. Tsao [BBA ‘88] Bruce E. Turner [MArch ‘75] Drexel W. Turner [MSCRP ‘73] Laurie O. Tyler [BSID ‘82] Michael Kosaku Uyeda [BArch ‘84] Jane W. Verma [BArch ‘90] Joel A. Villalon [BArch ‘84] Cynthia Y. Walston [BArch ‘82] John W. Watson [BArch ‘76] Susan M. Weaver [BArch ‘72] David E. Webber [BArch ‘92] Gordon L. White John P. White [BArch ‘57] James E. White [BArch ‘57] Leon A. Whitney [BArch ‘58] Allison Wicks [BArch ‘09] Fred W. Worley [BArch ‘71] Canan Yetmen [BA ‘91] Yilmaz Yetmen Travis G. Young [MArch ‘94] Janet F. Zeitler [BSArchE ’85, BArch ‘85] Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this list. If your name was omitted, misspelled, or incorrectly listed, please accept our apologies and notify Rebecca Dearlove at rebecca.dearlove@austin.utexas.edu, so that we may update our system and correct our error.

Architecture Annual Fund George T. Adams [MSCRP ‘94] Gerard Bolsega [MArch ‘95] Farzad Boroumand [BArch ‘87] Jay M. Brotman [BArch ‘79] Thomas R. Campbell [BArch ‘59] Elizabeth K. Chen [MArch ‘02] and Stephen D. Chen [BBA ‘91] Hilary F. Crady [BSID ‘83] Thomas B. Daly [BArch ‘65] Sarah D. Dunckel [BFA ‘74] and Frank E. Dunckel [BArch ‘78] Winston L. Evans [BArch ‘68] Norman K. Friedman [BS ’85, MArch ‘92] Mitchell G. Gilbert [BArch ‘73] Diana Bravo Gonzalez [BArch ‘81] Craig S. Graber [MArch ‘94] Earl Anthony Grand [BArch ‘82] Tom E. Hinson [BSArchStds ’70, BA ‘70] Leland C. Horstmann [BArch ‘80] Linda M. Jackson [MA ’87, MSCRP ‘87] Kenneth M. Jones [MArch ‘01] Poyy H.Y. Kwan [BArch ‘73] Plus Two Interiors Houston, LLC Phillip G. Mead [MArch ‘91] Tina Mootz Linda R. Moriarty [BArch ’70] Michael Perna Omer Sayeed Jimmy R. Seale [BArch ‘70] James H. Shackelford [BArch ‘80] Molly H. Sherman [BA ‘86] Katharine A. Stowe [MLA ‘20] Ellis L. Swanson [BArch ‘52] Monica Tenorio Bruce E. Turner [MSCRP ‘75] Samuel B. Windham [BArch ‘01] George F. Zapalac [BA ’70, MSCRP ‘74] Degrees from The University of Texas at Austin are indicated.

Founders and Current Members Goldsmith Society Lexa M. Acker W. Randall Ackerman Diana Keller Aldridge and Frank Aldridge Phillip Arnold Lisa and Tim Blonkvist Suzanne Deal Booth Jean* and Bill* Booziotis Diane and Hal Brierley Lynne and Lyle Burgin Diane and Chuck Cheatham Dick Clark, III* Reenie and Kent Collins Curtis and Windham Architects Willard Hanzlik J. David Harrison Nancy and Richard Jennings Journeyman Construction, Inc. Jeanne and Michael Klein Ray Landy Lucas/Eilers Design Associates, LLP Lucifer Lighting Company Sandra and Richard Lucas Ileana Mendez and Kevin J. Lorenz The Eugene McDermott Foundation Dana Edwards Nearburg Cindy and Howard Rachofsky Gay and Shannon Ratliff J. Brett Rhode Deedie and Rusty* Rose Lloyd Scott Shelton-Keller Group Lawrence W. Speck Lenore Sullivan and Barry Henry James Susman John Greene Taylor Helen Thompson Melba and Ted Whatley Kathryn and Mike Wheeler Coke Anne and Jarvis Wilcox

*in memoriam

JOIN THE GOLDSMITH SOCIETY The Goldsmith Society is a special group of principal benefactors who provide flexible, annual support to promote scholarly excellence and advance the school’s high standards of design. Gifts from Goldsmith Society donors have an immediate and direct impact on the School of Architecture, allowing the dean to seize opportunities and invest strategically in important projects that shape the school’s evolving teaching and research agenda.

The Goldsmith Society comprises individuals, families, firms, corporations, and foundations that pledge $25,000 in unrestricted funds over five years ($5,000/year). The school recognizes Goldsmith Society members for their generous support and hosts special events featuring leaders from the architecture and design world.

Interested in joining the Goldsmith Society? Contact Garrett Loontjer, Associate Director for Development, at garrett@austin.utexas.edu or 512.471.8187.

Advisory council

2021–2022

Bibiana Dykema, AIA, Chair Michael Wheeler, Vice Chair

Jeffrey Abel, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP Lexa Acker, AIA Emeritus W. Randall Ackerman Frank Aldridge, III Diana Keller-Aldridge Richard Archer, FAIA Charles Armstrong, FAIA Phillip Arnold, Hon. ASLA, LEED AP Tary Arterburn, FASLA John Avila, Jr. David B. Barrow, Jr., AIA, ASID Ken Bentley, AIA Rebecca Birdwell Myron Blalock, III Timothy Blonkvist, FAIA, LEED AP David Bodenman Melissa Bogusch, AIA, NCARB Bob Borson, FAIA, LEED AP Nestor Bottino, FAIA Laura Britt, ASID, RID, Allied AIA Lyle Burgin, AIA Tamara Chambless, AIA, LEED AP, NCARB

Anthony Chase G. Kent Collins Tommy Cowan, FAIA H. Hobson Crow, III, FAIA Gary Cunningham, FAIA William Curtis, Jr. Gabriel Durand-Hollis, Jr., FAIA Darrell Fitzgerald, FAIA, LEED AP Charles Fulton, AIA John Grable, FAIA Charles Gromatzky, AIA Jesse Cameron Hager, AIA David Harrison, AIA Christopher Hill James Tipton Housewright, FAIA, LEED AP Michael Hsu, AIA, IIDA Ford Hubbard, III Terry Kafka Philip Keil, AIA Anne Kniffen, RID, IIDA Sam Kumar, LEED AP BD+C David Lake, FAIA Kevin Lorenz, AIA Sandra Lucas, ASID, NCIDQ, RID, LEED Green Assc.

Jessica Mangrum Harry Mark, FAIA Gilbert Lang Mathews, Hon. AIA Michael McCall, AIA Elaine Molinar, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP Kate Anne Mraw, LEED AP BD+C Dana Nearburg Judith Pesek, FIIDA, LEED AP Charles Phillips, AIA Boone Powell, FAIA Leilah Powell Howard Rachofsky Elizabeth Chu Richter, FAIA Roland Roessner, Jr. Deedie Potter Rose Samantha Schwarze, AIA Lloyd Scott James Shepherd, AIA, LEED AP Dan Shipley, FAIA Emily Summers, RID James Susman, FAIA Jerry Sutton, AIA Evan Taniguchi Christine Ten Eyck, FASLA Helen Thompson

David Watkins, FAIA Melba Whatley, Hon. AIA Gordon White, M.D. Allison Lee Wicks Canan Yetmen, Hon. AIA Emeritus Members Marvin Beck, AIA Emeritus Susan Benz, AIA Reed Kroloff Graham Luhn, FAIA John Nyfeler, FAIA Gay Ratliff

giving.utexas.edu/p21

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