We approach it from two different scales and vantage points. In a way, the most important thing is to cultivate a culture based on a certain level of fluency around climate issues and how the built environment fits into the bigger puzzle. It’s really complicated and daunting, but super urgent. It highlights the importance of many decisions we make as architects and designers. Even if the tangible impacts of individual choices may seem small, we have to operate from the belief that reducing harm is imperative. You need to train your brain to think about the climate impact of every design decision you make on behalf of our clients. It has to become second nature to how you operate – baked into every decision making process by default.

At the same time, we need an office full of architects and designers equipped with the technical knowledge and expertise to execute design strategies that result in fewer emissions compared to if we did not have this tactical know-how and awareness around what levers can impact the outcome in terms of environmental impacts. For that, we focus on relatively high-return, low-friction interventions first – sharing knowledge internally and implementing the low-hanging-fruit as the baseline standard across our projects. For the type of projects we typically work on, that comes down to a few simple basic elements from the operational carbon perspective – electrification, on-site energy generation and storage, and efficient enclosure design. 

Given we mostly work in California, the state’s regulatory standard already sets a pretty good starting point to pursue additional incremental improvements. Things like optimization through modeling and better/best MEP design, rainwater/greywater reuse, etc. – are fun and well within our wheelhouse, especially when we’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with some of the top consultants in the field. For the majority of our projects, the most impactful thing we can do is to design buildings that consume less energy and are able to produce and store some of their own.

From the embodied carbon perspective, we start by building awareness around how carbon-heavy or light our design is in the structural package – while also being aware of other values some carbon intensive building materials can bring. In a recent project, for example, we decided to incorporate a series of cast-in-place concrete walls into the design after initially rejecting the notion for environmental reasons. They were light-weight single-story buildings that did not warrant concrete walls for structural or thermal reasons but we learned that the low-carbon cement technology the client had been working on for over a decade was looking for a pilot project. The concrete walls, even with the use of low-carbon cement mix, increased the total embodied carbon of the design by a fair amount, but we saw other ways in which it added values. Beyond being the first pilot project for the low-carbon cement product, it added to the aesthetics, the durability, the wild fire hardening, and the thermal mass (the walls were designed in triple-wythe construction with an insulation layer in the middle). Similarly, sourcing materially locally, particularly for interiors projects, can be environmentally preferable and also bring the intangible values through the connections and the stories behind each product/producer.

At the end of the day, less is always better from an embodied carbon perspective so being thoughtful not to design bigger than necessary and choosing to remodel over tear-down/ground-up whenever that path is available are fundamental to how we approach design.

Of course, there are moments where we intentionally make tradeoffs – like in the concrete example – but overall the goal is still to reduce our reliance on carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel whenever possible. Some of these design decisions come with upfront green premiums of varying magnitudes, but not always. Some can even save money and the return on investment often pencils out for the vast majority of decisions we strongly advocate for. Given the increasing urgency around climate change, resiliency is more relevant than ever. This urgency has been crucial in shifting client mindsets, making it easier to justify the extra spend. Ultimately, many of the design choices that are environmentally preferable also lead to superior user experiences – not dissimilar to driving a car with electric motors compared to one with an internal combustion engine. While some hesitations and skepticisms are not uncommon initially, our clients are consistently happy for having made the right decisions in the end.