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[0:00:02] Female Voice: Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!
Taylor Martin: Welcome back to the Triple Bottom Line. I'm so excited to have you back. This week, we get to talk about architecture and sustainability and how those two rows have merged over the decades and where they're headed, which I find incredibly fascinating! I remember when I was a kid, I used to love reading magazines on architecture and picking up books and doing drawing and kind of pretending I was an architect. And I thought at one point in my life, I was destined to be an architect, but when I got into college everything changed. I went into, you know, graphic design and communications was the thing for me, and it's been a great fit. But that hasn't diminished my love and passion for architecture. I even remember going, when I lived in D.C., going to lectures and sustainability architecture tours and seeing new structures built. I do the same thing here in Austin, Texas when I can. And I'm just so incredibly happy to have Rives Taylor as our guest this week. He holds a Bachelor's in Architecture from Rice University and a Master's from MIT. He's a leading sustainability architect that's in the field. He's a professor, a speaker. He's written more than 150 articles for a broad range of publications. Therefore, without further ado, I want to get right into this and introduce you to Rives Taylor. Rives, can you do us a big favor and just tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got into architecture and sustainability and how you've seen sustainability and architecture kind of merge over the years.
Rives Taylor: So, hello, everybody! Good day. It is one of my favorite topics. It's kind of interesting. I came at it kind of midlife crisis, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which, you know, arguably was the smoke capital of the world. And it's a city, that in my growing up, turned itself around, recognizing a couple of important things, including, you know, human wellness and that for a place to be attractive, to use resources in a way that was clever and smart and productive. And, finally just, you know, making an environment that was habitable, was really something that I witnessed firsthand. And soon after coming back to Houston in the nineties, I was lucky enough to go from being an architect designer with a number of firms, to actually being on the client side, running facilities for the University of Texas Health Science Center, which is a Houston-based organization of UT, but it was in the Texas Medical Center. Once again, arguably in that case, the world's largest medical center that's a challenge for resource use and a challenge for kind of human scale, which, you know, over the years, the organizations there have recognized that, and they're making great progress.
But I mentioned that because really this conversation of thinking about sustainable design or we now use the phrase in the arenas I work in, ‘resilience,’ which is doing less bad but also looking long-term and recognizing we have some rethinking of the design process. But the notion of long-term thinking is key to this because, you know, arguably in the beginning of sustainability, you know, the mindset with my students in like 1990 was, “Well, for this to happen either the government's going to have to tell us to do it because it's too expensive” or “It’s not what you would do if, you know, the bottom line drives it.” And that's kind of the basis for the conversation where I really learned it, which is inheriting buildings or interiors or products or things that were built fast and inexpensively to meet, you know, tight budgets on time. And what you inherited was something over the life cycle, which is how our world works, even though we like to throw things away; another topic for perhaps later. But you know, our build environment we build in and we live in for generations, if not longer. I mean, I've been in school buildings, you know, in Boston that were 300 years old or I've been in, you know, a house that’s you know, 1650s. When we build, we build for many generations, and we build because we believe in the future. But we also have to recognize that in building, creating the human spaces with human beings and what we do evolving, there's a basic reality of putting the resources in the right way for long-term viability for healthful economic but also ecologically smart places. So, it's that life cycle thinking that’s the first aha of sustainability because often the time it takes to perhaps not just do what we've always done in design or construction, really is reflected in better operations, better human, you know, life in those buildings, those interiors, etc.
So, on one hand, sustainability is not new. Early civilizations were sustainable because otherwise they wouldn't last. That is, you know, local materials, food grown at a walking distance around the cities that are in the ancient civilizations, you know? That city existed because it was sustainable. It could live with resources close by. We couldn't, you know, ship product from across the world, you know, 2,000 years ago. And how we built was built with built with local materials and built in a way that could be accommodated in addition to, oh yes, growing food, just doing the basic stuff. So, we built and developed and sort of created things that were of the place that, you know, in that time used resources because resources were limited, human capital was valuable in ways that we were, you know, perhaps more aware of, “Let's learn from natural systems. Let's respect the environment and climate. Let's recognize that as we build, let's build for long-term.”
[0:05:29] And so, you know, over the centuries, perhaps we've gotten to the point where one size fits all. We build fast. We build in a way that may not respect local cultures and climates or people. We forget that not everybody's the same. And so, you know, that one size fits all kind of ignores the reality of inclusive design for the different diversity's, disabilities, challenges we face. So, really in the last 20 or 30 years, because there's now more amazing human capital but more challenged natural capital or natural systems, we're trying to find, I think, the balance where we can put our intellectual wherewithal into thinking long-term. Designers think about not just the fast but the term, whether you're looking at a product, the building, or a process. And so, sustainability really, in my mind, is morphing to doing just less bad to now literally undoing some of the bad decisions we made previously, whether it's products or places, or, you know, human processes, thinking differently about how we treat each other as a design process that is very much part of sustainability now.
I will say the other thing that I've kind of learned in the sustainable mindset is recognizing that there's very many different perspectives. As an aging, white guy from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my perspective is one that really has a greater advantage or greater value when it's a collaborative process and that notion of integrated design, bringing different thinkers together, whether you're looking at the traditional architect, mechanical engineer that's now partnered with biologists, human factors thinkers, perhaps even the idea of other resource focusing is really very important when we look at design that's created from a team of diverse thinkers.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. I think that's incredibly on-point because, I mean, I even think in my field, you know, years ago, decades ago, you know, they used to have art directors and designers on one floor, like in Madison Avenue, and then you'd have the copywriters on another floor.
Rives Taylor: And never would they meet, you know? They would see each other over the wall!
Taylor Martin: Exactly!
Rives Taylor: That’s right.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. And then once they did… Well, that was a paradigm shift for them, and everything changed in advertising because then art directors and creative thinkers and copywriters were all in the same room, probably drinking too many drinks and having too many cigarettes, but they would all, you know, have this different perspective and bring their talents and have that creative process with everybody. So, hearing you say that is to me, it's like, “Yes. Hallelujah! Of course.
When you were talking about 20-30 years ago, you know, I think back then people thought sustainability was too expensive. And they thought, “Oh,” you know, like you said, “The government's going to take care of it” or somebody else. “That somebody else's problem. Somebody else is going to take care of it.” And I kind of have to agree with that. I mean, I kind of felt that way back in the day when I was, you know, with my simple view of sustainability. Money- bottom line- always came up first. But now I feel like there's so many options in technology; technology not just electronic technology but physical technologies of building and constructing things and how we perceive those things. I feel like that has kind of really tampered down that notion that it's going to cost more. Plus, you know, long-term thinking like you're talking about. It might actually be a little bit more but, in terms of long-term goals, “How much is it worth? How much does it cost?” And then you brought up the circular, you know, kind of economy.
Rivers Taylor: Yeah. Uh huh.
Taylor Martin: If you start bringing that into focus… Well, then you're buying something that has to be shipped from so far away and the carbon footprint and the value and cost of that is so incredibly high that by the time it's implemented, you didn't have a savings, you know? You actually had a deficit of cost because of that, you know? I think about things like that. Can you speak to some of that in terms of, you know, how that happens in the natural, you know, world of architecture?
Rives Taylor: Well, there's probably… It occurs to me, you know, those within architecture kind of assume the world understands this crazy profession. But let's kind of unpack architecture, whether it be interior architecture, creating, you know, the interior environments that we touch more regularly versus the outside of the building, or products, you know, whether it's a car or your iPhone. You know, the process is a very interesting one, really, whether you're designing a product, whether you're designing even a process, like someone who's thinking of how to rethink landing a plane in partnership with, you know, the design of the plane. You know, there's an interface of humans with something. And so, this design process, as you noted, is one that takes a great deal of collaboration, and it works the best when you actually collaborate with those who use it.
[0:10:00] Now as an architect, arguably, we are the most expensive enterprise there is with perhaps a rare occasion with healthcare where, you know, taking care of someone who's very sick could be millions of dollars. That's very important. Again, I'm not in that business, but let's just put it in perspective, you know? A building… Let’s maybe not a house… Let's make it may be a bit larger, you know, but we are asked to design an office building, let's say it's a million square feet, which is a good-sized building, you know? That project expenditure could be half a billion, two thirds of a billion dollars. We're pulled together. It takes months to work with the various groups- the owner, the owner’s operators, perhaps a broker who's representing the future tenants, our various colleagues from engineers, landscape architects. We hope to also work with a contractor. We spend a lot of time planning and designing on the front end because, you know, $600-$700 million is a lot of money, right? And our fees, you know… We won't get our fees. [Laughing] Our fees don’t add up to a lot but, you know, we're laying the groundwork for the life of that building. And, you know, office buildings downtown last 75, 80, 100 years. But here's the deal. You know, it's a lot of money to build the building but if you look at the cost to operate it, year over year, could be millions of dollars, right? And, finally, the idea too, is it's full of people, and what are the people in an office building? A million square foot could be plus or minus 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people, depending on the kind of use, you know, call center versus fancy lawyers.
The reality is just the people in that building blow away that first cost to build it very quickly. So, the vessel that we create in architecture, which is full of people, we do everything we do because we insist on taking care of people. You know, if it was an empty box, that there was no such thing as human beings, we wouldn't spend energy, wouldn't spend water, wouldn't spend why even build it, you know? We're doing it for the human reality. Unless we keep that in mind through the entire process, architectures for not. I mean, yes, Frank Lloyd Wright and the great architects we point to were wonderful, and they did embrace sustainability and thinking lifecycle and creating very much a statement of their purpose, their aspiration in partnership with our clients. But it was always a human space.
Taylor Martin: I agree. And one of the things that I always find interesting is how I hear this conversation that we're talking about, and it always comes back to productivity. How are we increasing the bottom line for the company that's going to be in that space? Because if you have a space that is conducive to high level of productivity, you're going to get more out of your employees. They're going to be happier. You're going to retain them. You're going to retain the good talent that's going to help your company grow. I mean, there's just so many aspects to the architecture, whether it's interior or exterior or all of it. But it's how all that comes together to create an environment that really inspires them and provokes them and allows them to come together in different means, not just one type of meeting room, but different types of meeting rooms so that they can have that conduit to help them connect. Because it might just be, like, okay. We have, like, you know, three different areas to go have lunch, but there's this one that allows, you know, two people are really come together, you know, or four people. Or you might have an offshoot meeting room area that's only set for four. It's really quaint and subtle. Or it might be everybody's working at a very long one table, and you can hear their conversations, and it's meant to cross pollinate ideas. I mean, what I'm trying to get at is that there's just so many different ways I see offices being built these days, that it's all coming back down to creating these… all these different options for people.
Rives Taylor: In fact, that's a really… You know, the next step to this is: so how do we know what to build? Back to Architecture 101. It behooves us to spend a good bit of time, not ridiculous amounts of time, understanding our client, understanding the needs for the building. We call it design purpose. And in that design purpose is also how far do you want to go toward a sustainable community-focused, resource-smart, human-well focus? And I'll be clear, you know, productivity is kind of the mantra for places where people work, whether it's somebody taking care of somebody in a retail store or someone making sure that, you know, a hotel guest is having a great time. But the flip side, it's also about wellness, you know? A place that is safe. A place that is secure. A place that people feel comfortable, but the wellbeing, which now opens the whole conversation currently of COVID… But no. From the inception, sustainability and wellness were always connected.
In fact, you know, the little bit of history I've got is when I became the client at UT Health Science Center, what even alerted me to “sustainability,” using less resources, smart for the planet, save money long-term, was because in saving that money, we could then plow it back into a series of buildings that weren't very healthful. [Laughs] They were buildings that were sick buildings. And that's a whole another tradition we inherited in the late 20th century where we built fast and cheap and very quickly air quality and mold and mildew and materials and other things weren't supportive of, oh yeah, those human beings, much less long-term viability, durability of the building. It behooves us to understand the client's needs. Is this a building that we will tear down or interiors that we will demo in five years versus, you know, a 100-year target or the Mormon church, the Church of Latter-day Saints, only build for 1,000 years. That's a very different building than one that a, you know, temporary retail space in an exhibit.
[0:15:28] And so, to your point, we fine tune these human spaces, based not only the current needs, but here's another sustainable notion, which is designed for disassembly or designed for the long haul through loose fit, long life, meaning how can you reuse a space when suddenly we have laptops instead of big old clunky computers, or we need to be 10 feet apart from each other for the time being until a vaccine comes along for COVID-19. We need to create those human environments that we don't have to tear up or abandoned to be flexible to accommodate what perhaps is an increasingly challenging climate and healthcare and humanity. I mean, we're not all white, aging guys like me.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. I agree. The key word there, I think, was flexibility. We have to do that in our line of work where we have to build things that are marketing pieces that are very flexible for clients so that they can use them in a lot of different capacities. And when I see drawings of buildings and the interior spaces, I see so much diversity that I look at it and I go, “If his company uses a space for, like, you said five years, and then somebody else comes in. I could see how they could easily flex, you know, move one space to another and change the layout without having to do a lot of heavy lifting and also creating a lot of waste.
Rives Taylor: Yes. Yes.
Taylor Martin: So, I think that's pretty interesting. What about like, you know, when businesses think about… I'm not a business owner that's going to purchase a million square foot building, but for those that do, when they… when they look at sustainability, what are the thoughts that are going through their mind? Do they think that, you know, is this a hard sell for you guys? Or would you say, “You know, listen, we're, we're going to do this. and this is why we're going to do it.” Do you have to teach them or educate them or is it just…
Rives Taylor: So, what I've always taught my students is that an architect is not only someone that thinks about materials and joinery and how things go together and how it's built and made and how it lasts and operates and how it works. But we have to be teachers to coach. Educate sounds like we're the boss, but to coach and partner with those who are spending the money, their money, to create this art piece of architecture, this building. Also, we need to help them work with the people who are their clients to use the building, whether it's a spec office building, whether it's a corporate campus, whether it's a hospital or hotel, or, you know, high rise residential, you know, you, have the next line of consumers who need to trust you, too. And then finally, you know, whether it's code issues or other regulations or just you're in a community, you have to build bridges with your community.
So, there's a lot of communication, education, and so when you take a step back and asking the question of, “So, how do you have the conversation with a ‘client?’” And there's couple of important things to think about this. Back to kind of Architecture 101. There's the woman or man who's got the money to do it, who then often hires someone to help them deliver it, often called project managers. Sometimes those project managers get what the big picture is. Sometimes they don't. It's up to us designers, of various natures, to work not just with the manager who's responsible for the project to be done and that's what she's focusing on, but what's the corporate or the owner mantra relative to long-term thinking. And the sales conversation. It is marketing pitch, but it's a coaching pitch. So, is this a long-term deal? I mean, for instance, corporate campuses, university campuses are very different than the spec world because the spec world, their goal is taking other people's money, investing in, building something, getting it full, and perhaps then selling that building to long-term investors who aren't connected to the building process, but who trust the builder, trust the developer. And remember, there's a constructor in the middle of all of this who's our partner- important partner- through all of this versus, you know, a university says, “We build and 100 years later, we hope it still works. We hope it's still is a productive, healthful environment for the people in it.”
And so, one of the first things to gauge is that lifecycle mindset. Do you care that in 10 years, it's doing well, it's working well, it's saving money, but more importantly, it's a great place to bring people? Part 2, and that kind of tool, it's just like a very large iPhone, right? Your building is there to assist you in delivering your mission. It needs to align with the mission, but also it needs to support the mission through things like… And it's not way down the scale. It's certainly maybe not up there as, “I'm doing important things” or “I'm working with great people,” but it is part of recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest. Because the environment in which we work… Witness what we're going through now: Is the home a great place or not? Our research… the firm with whom I work… is showing that people want to get back to the office because that environment supports the work versus, “Am I home? Am I with my kids?” Or a hotel? Again, you know, a place that people want to come because it's a great place to be. Or a hospital. The environment supports getting better faster through, say, windows that look out over green space are very nice, you know, natural environment versus lots of plastic and metal.
[0:20:23] There's a lot of research about the experience of the space that can support human beings to thrive, as well as by the way, you know, back to the conversation, not only are you saving money in the operations. Your brand is improved. Your investors, you know, like what they see and, frankly, large tech corporations are really into, “We're doing the right thing because that's who we are. It attracts the best people. It attracts the investors. And, basically, it's good for business.” Or as Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet once said, “Doing well by doing good.”
Taylor Martin: I love Ray. The business part you mentioned… How about the resell of the building, you know? If you come in with a platinum lead building, I can only imagine that let's say 10, 15, 20 years later, you will try to sell that building, and people are going to look at it and go, “Hey.”
Rives Taylor: It’s got a third-party certification, which is like a Good Housekeeping seal. And there's a raft of buildings in Houston, where I spend most of my time, spec office buildings that got full fast, even in the past recession, and the building was sold for twice what it was built. Or a great company, the Heinz organization don't often sell their buildings, but they have investors who are very happy with precisely that. It's a building that the tenants love. It's full. You know, the whole notion of spec offices… The mantra is fill it fast and keep it filled. Because if you don't have tenants, our challenge at the moment, no one's paying the rent. There's no one's paying the bills. There's no one's paying the lease or the note.
The idea is creating an amazing place to be with, you know, the quality of the environment, the healthfulness of the environment, its proximity to great amenities. It's a complicated mix, but it's all about the architectural partnership. And sustainability says let's not have that relationship rely on a destructive approach to the community, the resources, etc. because in the long-term that doesn't, to your point, Taylor, doesn't pay for itself. If you think the long-term.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. You know, something you said earlier about how sustainability has evolved or has included wellness and has become this resilience mantra. How is that playing out? I mean, how did that come about? And what's going on in that space to really make people understand ‘why wellness?’
Rives Taylor: Well, you know, what's interesting is I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to kind of be around when the US Green Building Council and LEED were being formed. I, 24 years ago, was part of a group that looked at one of the protocols called LEED Interiors. From the inception, you know, this checklist, this very important tool, not the only tool and many of the third-party Good Housekeeping seal tools said, “Let's not just talk about saving energy” or “Let’s just not talk about making a house.” You know, the sick building and the sick house syndrome was a big thing in the eighties because we started to use lots of plastic in very tightly sealed homes because we were trying to save energy. We got rid of windows because windows were bad for energy but, you know, we were in these terrible boxes.
There was an important conflation, I would say, in the eighties and nineties that said, Hmh hmh,” you know, “Let's not do that. Keep the building cold and wear a sweater and be miserable”. It won't work if human beings aren't happy, and people tend to be happy when they're feeling better. So, in the nineties with the sort of the creation of this generations, kind of, education, coaching checklists, Good Housekeeping seals… a variety of them, you know, LEED being one of them… wellness has been from the base fundamental. I mean, it's not a recent edition. If anything, what we've gone through in 2020 is reminding us what we knew 30-40 years ago when we were seeing the babies in the bubble and all kinds of things that came from being allergic to modern life. So, wellness, which I could describe here in a bit, is really been a fundamental linchpin for all sustainability, really from the beginning,
Taylor Martin: It's always been there. It just… It just wasn't labeled.
Rives Taylor: You know, part of it was, and again, having had the pleasure and challenge of working within a health science center, the medical world, whether it's epidemiologists or public health folks, or etc. etc. said “The built environment is got nineties; that’s not really affecting health.” It's your genealogy. It's your DNA. It’s your bad habits. It may be that you fought in a war and, you know, you were exposed to ABCD. It's really only the last 20 years that the aha moment has come from our public health that the built environment, 90% of our time we're inside. But from the inception, this notion of people do better with certain things- could rattle through those real quick here in a minute- is important. You know, you can't sacrifice saving energy or water or using better materials if you ignore the wellness component. And that's really been baked in, but you're right, it’s kind of gotten subsumed by the carbon climate conversation. In its simplest form, it’s about, you know, to make our electricity for buildings or to heat our buildings with natural gas, we combust. And when we combust fossil fuels, there's all kinds of implications. Then we can argue direct or indirect causality of climate shift, but there's just a lot of burning of fossil fuels over the last 100 some odd years to make the electricity that runs our buildings for the most part. Ignoring, you know, perhaps for healthful buildings, etc. etc., good lighting, etc. But the bigger picture is, you know, making the outside atmosphere much less, perhaps the temperature of the planet, problematic for health. We've now come back around to saying, “Oh. There's a micro health issue.” You know, our products, our materials, our buildings, our processes, our chemistry. And there's a macro health issue with all the impact of yes, you know, progressively challenging climate shift, the issues of too much rain, too little rain, too much heat, you know, other aspects that really challenge the infrastructure in human folks in an increasingly urban population.
[0:25:52] Taylor Martin: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Would you be okay to rattle off some of those lists?
Rives Taylor: Sure!
Taylor Martin: Because I'd be very curious to know what some good wellness things people should be looking out for. Like if I'm a business owner and I want to, you know, have a new office space, what are some things that I should be looking for, you know, from the architects and interior designers?
Rives Taylor: And we think these are the trends that aren't simply, you know, driven by our current important, but current challenge, which is, you know, a cyclical challenge of bacteria and viruses and so forth what we'll have. But fundamentally, there are certain ergonomic, kinesiology things that as human beings we need to be aware of. And these have been, you know, inception of LEED. It's also the focus on a protocol called WELL, another protocol on Fitwell, and there's some fundamental aspects, which is, you know, beyond architecture. There are this things like good nutrition, eexercise, but, in fact, architecture through its design can getting out of your chair and walking up and down stairs, making the staircases a nicer place to be, so active design is one of the things that in, particularly recently, it's rediscovered the notion since we're not smoking as much, you know, sitting is the new smoking and that's for very majority for those.
Taylor Martin: [Laughing]
Rives Taylor: … for those who can’t move. I mean, if someone is in a wheelchair… that’s kind of derogatory… yet we need to move. Sitting in front of computers, you know, even now is even worse. But there's some fundamental issues, like, we are hardwired to be connected to nature. That's why we like potted plants. That's why we take photographs, you know, in a forest. And we then put it up as a poster. Daylight and views. And the views toward natural systems. So, bringing nature in or seeing nature. And there's lots of data through the eighties and nineties where we test better, we get well better, we buy more. We are more productive with daylight and views of natural systems and daylight being our light. We score better on tests as kids when our room is naturally lit versus those rooms in the seventies and eighties where we got rid of windows because they were bad energy. We miss the point.
Indoor air quality, which has particularly been elevated with COVID, that is not only fresh air and what is fresh air? But air that is not blowing down on me, and it's cold. It's looking at the indoor air quality as it relates to the materials we use. The new paint smell is not a good thing for human beings or any creatures. It's a neurotoxin. And so, you know, the paint companies are well on the way at looking at low volatile, organic compounds, and other chemistries. There's a big focus on not just how material is made because of where it's made and those who manufacture it have an impact on their health, but the use in the building. So, there's a whole raft of things called health product declarations, looking at materials that in their full life cycle have less human and, frankly, biological to the larger, you know, natural system impact.
There's also things around wellness about lighting and vibration, you know, not having the right light adds to stress. In fact, you know, most of the headaches come from bad posture and lighting. Vibrations and noise distractions, particularly for children learning, vibrations can be really problematic. So, there's a raft of investigations and research that have been embraced by public health and others saying, you know, “Schools should have better air quality.” We should… Mold and mildew is another element. Most, you know, prominent life form on the planet, or life forms, that are necessary for the cyclical nature of human and natural systems. But having it in the building with our air systems, you know, distributing the mold and mildew, is not a good thing either and that has all kinds of complex factors in our hot, humid climates like Houston.
Some of the other things around wellness are talking, too, about connecting with people, about, you know, socializing, not being isolated or having your own private space. So, there's some programming that says, you know, having the ability to choose where you're doing what you're doing that is, you know, if I'm working in an office… Am I focusing? Can I close the door? But that's the only place I can be. So, it also means choosing what my, you know, daylight is, what my temperature is, you know, controlling my environment, which, you know, we do at home. You know, it's tough in a big office floor plate. And so, we're trying to find in these processes around sustainability is how do we balance now, you know, this personal choice, but not make resource, you know, profligate use. That is energy use, water use, material use, still supporting human beings. It's that integrated design I mentioned that’s really a challenge.
[0:30:11] Now, real quickly, the COVID conversation aligns with a lot of this. I mean, the idea of airflow with the droplets. A lot of discussion about, you know, filtration, ultraviolet, you know, lots of 100 % air exchange. How do we find the long-term balance of not being energy profligate with human health? The materials we choose. Ability to clean it with chemistry that doesn't just say, “Deals with viruses,” but perhaps then creates bad human response. I mean, this balance is complex and that's why it takes a team, a family if you will, of thinkers to really get around that we can't forget the wellbeing of those human and other critters, natural systems, you know, respecting that in our design process, which is, again, what a great time to be a designer. This is really understanding the design balance of all of these forces.
Taylor Martin: Oh, man. That was a lot of information. I almost want to rewind it and play it again.
Rives Taylor: [Mimics rewinding sound]
Taylor Martin: [Laughing] That was, like, a lot to digest. That was great!
Rives Taylor: Well, I haven't even touched on, you know, another important thing is the inclusive design. And we can't design just for aging, white guys like me. And that's a whole another important riff that, frankly, has been… has been forgotten in a lot of, you know, how much can I tackle? The wellness thing. The energy thing. The materials. Water. The stewardship of sites, you know, biodiversity on my site. Don't pave over paradise. There's a lot to tackle. But that's why, you know, a team approach is really how design works best.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. You need so many eyeballs on so many different aspects of it. And everybody has to come together as like one cohesive vision, so you have all the same marching orders Everybody is, you know, realizing that we're going into the same direction.
You know, I think a lot of people know what LEED is for architecture. But when you say WELL and Fitwel are those exactly? I mean, those are accreditations similar to LEED, is that correct?
Rives Taylor: So, there's a lot of discussion about the complexity that I've just described, you know, the idea of materials and where they come from and how they work and their carbon footprint, the wellness focus, the energy focus, etc. So, not the first, in fact, the British have an organization called the British Research Establishment, and they created a tool called BREEAM. But really, you know, since the energy crisis in the seventies, the building industry, the product industry- so it's not just buildings- but it's also the green apparel coalition. And, of course, there's been standards for food since the thirties in the United States and beyond. And so, this idea of creating an agreed upon third-party certification where everybody says, you know, they have no stake in the game except validity of the certification, is that by certifying this third-party group, you know, you have no, in our case greenwash, you're not saying, “Oh. It’s a green building!” And then you show nothing of substance.
So, in some ways, you know, LEED in the United States, leadership and energy and environmental design, which is a component of the U.S. Green Building Council has, by the way, many learning opportunities, coaching opportunities beyond LEED, it then, you know, propagated, “Well, let's focus on sites and let's focus on infrastructure and let's focus on…” And then as we've noted, fairly recently, it's like, “Aha! LEED has always addressed wellness.” But, you know, it's about the life cycle thinking. It's about food, which isn't building. It's about the clothes we wear and how we clean them. It's about active design, kinesiology and how people move. And so, sort of pulling together like LEED pulls the integrated design and construction and operations approach together… WELL, which is a product of an organization called Delos based in New York, looking at with the partnership with a number of health science organizations like the Mayo Clinic have said, you know, “Here's real ways that show, you know, honest to goodness data science reality to improve people's health.” Again, broad swath of a population.
Fitwel, a product of U.K. also, is a group looking at active design. That is how to create in our built environments, through their design and operations, ways to encourage people to be active- walking, climbing stairs, standing up, sit-stand desks. So, they both are kind of merging to the long-term reality of our whole ecosystem of health is about food. It's about movement. It's about how we see how we take care of our own health without being, you know, doctors and nurses. But yet they all have partners with a medical profession, which, you know, US CBC LEED never quite went that far initially. But there's now a lot of, by the way, synergy and symbiotic nature among these organizations. And that's really what's been wonderful, frankly. Sustainable design is about not having, “I've got the only data or proof or knowledge. Let's all share it.” What makes us different is how we share it and who we share it with, so that's kind of an important point to note.
Taylor Martin: That is amazing. That covered a lot. I feel like you guys are looking at every single aspect you possibly can, and you're going to get into the molecular structure of things. [Laughing]
Rives Taylor: Yeah. Well, there's some material folks that are passionate about precisely that with the materials we use in the built environment indeed.
[0:35:02] Taylor Martin: That’s fascinating. That’s absolutely fascinating! What technology is happening right now that's really making you kind of think, “Okay. This is the next big thing” or “This is the next thing coming down the pipe here.” Like. if you were looking at your crystal ball and look at it, what do you see?
Rives Taylor: Well, you know, on one hand, we've got, you know, some very interesting building material technology that we're still trying to learn how to use. And I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because instead I like to say the technology that's really exciting is how we improve our process of design. Making decisions better. So, let me start with the decisions better and then go from there. But when we draft on the drawing table, we've now moved from what's called AutoCAD to a product called Revit, which is a, you know, particular proprietary tool. What it is called building information management; that is our buildings aren't just a bunch of lines as we draw on a piece of paper, they're assemblies of things. And what's interesting is with this three-dimensional Revit tool, or other competitors that are building information modeling, all of those pieces in our design process, we can assign attributes. We can actually say, “I'm making the building out of pieces,” which is, frankly what the contractor does. But now the designer, you know, led by architects like Frank Gary who are creating… had created these amazing shaped buildings… to make those work, he had to understand the assemblies. And so, instead of just drawing lines, we've moved to assembling assemblies that now have properties. Now what makes that interesting, very simply put is, as I'm designing the building, I can have a better sense through simulation and through this kind of information management, how the building will work before I design it, before I build it. I can iteratively say, “by orienting at this or reducing the windows this way or choosing this material over that,” I can, as a designer, have a better sense. And it's computational analytics. It's about data. It scares some of my colleagues, but I can make real-time decisions with a better set of knowledge basis to say, “Hmm. If I do this, it may not be as helpful, productive carbon footprint focused.”
And so rather than building and seeing how it works, we can actually test things before they're finished. So, simulations, you know, modeling, scenario planning, is coming into more and more of the design of architecture, right? Better views. And also that creates a much better partnership with those who build and those who operate because remember, it's a synergistic process through that.
Now in that design process improvement, we now start to say, “Alright.” If there's some unique products, like, say solar photovoltaics… the infamous, you know, generate electricity from the sun. Well, instead of just, you know, festooning a building and plunking a bunch of panels on your roof, can we integrate that? Literally the roof is a PV, or the glass is a PV, or other thoughts of, you know, glazing technology that changes tint to minimize heat gain and glare, or materials that self-clean or materials that literally capture carbon, you know, this is coming out. And new lighting thinking and new systems to control the lighting. More and more is coming out that, you know, just getting your arms around it and understanding the implications, requires that design process toolkit that I've mentioned, the CAD and Revit and so forth. It's empowering the designer to make better decisions without becoming overwhelmed and not making any decision. I mean, that's kind of the really important thing I think we're going is, you know, artificial intelligence is finding its way into design.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. And I also think about people that, you know, when you do a space like this, and you could do something that's very basic or you could do something that's full on, completely designed in a virtual space.
Rives Taylor: That’s right.
Taylor Martin: So that you could actually go into the space with a VR goggle on and have AR and you could see what the space could look like and sit at where your desk would be and look around and think, you know what? I really don't like that window there because when the sun comes up at like 11 o'clock, it's just going to blare and…
Rives Taylor: So talk about a different audience. I can give the glasses to the person who's going to live in the space. I give the glasses to someone who's going to own the space and say, “Golly! I didn't realize that it had many expensive windows,” or give the goggles…. same thing to those who are going to operate it and say, you know, “I’m going to have to stay on top of this particular light fixture because that light burns out every 10,000 hours.” We actually have used that same AR/AV augmented reality to help those who look at their building to say, “So what does it mean to operate it? What does it mean for the human beings in it?” And then we've even gone further with some, having built it, and looking at various kinds of sensors to say, “Alright. We designed it for this way, but is it being used this way?” It's now called…I’m going to get the word right… computable space. We're actually seeing how the space gets used and if we have to fine tune, not just the existing building that is done, but we now have learned for, say the next generation of buildings, what didn't work with the human beings using it. So, there's this throughout the entirety of the process, Artificial intelligence really is helping us make better decisions in integrating with our clients and their client's needs.
Taylor Martin: Oh, my God. That just made me think about something. Like, I could see somebody having a specialty in architecture of being somebody who is going to program the AI for a very specific space to do very specific things that runs through all these models and then kind of flags them, if you will, like, “Okay. We need to worry about floors 14 to 28 because of this.”
[0:40:21] Rives Taylor: It's already happening. We have a team with Gensler with a firm with whom I work. We're looking at that with some projects of large scale for some of the tech companies. Exactly.
Taylor Martin: That makes total sense. And, you know, when you can just run an application… I mean, you may not be able to get the real nuts and bolts, but you can get to the point where you have a human eye comes in and gives them a little bit more guidance of where they should be looking, where they should be putting their investigation, you know, eyeballs on.
Rives Taylor: And back to what you were saying earlier, Taylor, which is where people work in collaborate. It's not working. How do we make that space better? Or how do we make that resource better applied? Because, once again, those buildings are there. They're the armatures, whether it's an office building or a school. You know, the armature that we have to apply our modern culture, modern needs, modern challenges of accessibility in a continually evolving way. And so, how do we make those armatures work better? Which, again, means I don't throw those away. They have a long life. They support wellness. They probably use less energy because they don't have, you know, spaces under utilized that are fully air conditioned and heated and lit. In fact, everybody's using it, and, you know, we're healthful. And again, that whole conversation of density and collaboration, you know, we're going to come back to that. We're not abandoning the cities or, you know, collaborative spaces, we just have to respect perhaps some of the armature of mechanical systems, our cleaning system that need to respond to the challenges we currently have.
Taylor Martin: I think about all that. One of the things that you talked about where people come into the office and they have a certain task at hand, and they need quiet space. So, they might have this little bubble booth where they're just nose to the grindstone, working on a project. They need to get knee-deep into something. No phone calls. No one walking by. No alerts on their laptop.
Rives Taylor: Yeah. It's a cave. Exactly.
Taylor Martin: That’s what I call it- the cave. And then I can see the very next day, you know, you complete that. And then you come back and then you want more of a collaborative environment because you're kind of living on this, you know, I finished that and now I can talk to my colleagues about it.
Rives Taylor: And share with people.
Taylor Martin: Yes! And share with them and then show them in a space totally different than what you were at before. And then maybe then you go back to what is your “typical” space where you might have a cubicle of sorts.
Rives Taylor: So, really off the whatever… but you know, there's some creative thinkers at my Alma mater, MIT, saying, “Why can't we do that with a house?” You know, one day I'm not feeling well, and I want a cave. Another day, I want to… and, again, in an environment that perhaps I can't have like each big house where I have one room for each of my lives. Instead, what if I have a suite that can modify itself on what I need, you know, from the furniture to the walls, to the mechanical systems, literally having a transmutable environment that aligns with who I am that particular day and whether I'm having more people over, etc.
Taylor Martin: I can't agree with you more. Oh, my God, so there's these people… I see a lot of them in Asia where they'll have these very small spaces that's like a one bedroom or a studio, Swiss army knife apartment, where they go in there, and they move a few things and all of a sudden, it's the living room. Then they move a few things and then it's a dining room and then it's their bedroom. And then it's something else.
Rives Taylor: That's right.
Taylor Martin: I kind of think of residential architecture in that same way where, you know, my wife and I keep talking about building our own home. And, you know, we're extremely specific about what we want to do.
Rives Taylor: The challenge of two designers! [Laughing]
Taylor Martin: Absolutely! We argue over color all day long, right? So, you know, one of the things we keep talking about as a requirement is that every room has got to serve at least two or three purposes. It has to be able to be reused in a different way to maximize its space. And then the other component is we call it the healthy home. We want to create a healthy home, not just a sustainable home, but a healthy home is also sustainable. It's healthy for the people, the person living in it, also helps promote, you know, longevity. That's our goal. Now all the things to get us there, we don't know what all those are, but that's our goalpost we want to aim for. And hearing you talk about all these things makes me realize, okay, I need to do a lot more reading. I got a lot more books to read.
Rives Taylor: [Laughing] Well, or just talking to people. There's so many conferences and sharing. I mean, that's, if anything, this era of virtual whatever, is the fact that we're doing a lot more sharing and saying, “Let’s all work together toward a better outcome.” There's just… There’s a lot of, you know, from rethinking the house to the new hotel, to workplaces, you know, even something as specific as science labs. There's a lot of thinking about… You know, it's time to step back and say, “Does this make sense?” You know, I really think there's some positive opportunities here, even this challenging time.
Taylor Martin: Well, speaking of this time, this challenging time… How long have you been a professor or instructor for?
Rives Taylor: Well, I gotta say, can you imagine trying to get the young and enthusiastic future designers aligned with this? I've been working at a variety of places since the mid-eighties, though I have been at both Rice and University of Houston for just at 30 years. I started as a five-year old granted, you know. It was… It was amazing to start that early.
[0:45:18] Taylor Martin: [Laughing] Of course you did!
Rives Taylor: No. I've been… I've been teaching long enough that I have colleagues who I was lucky enough to have students who are now, you know, teaching with me or I'm now teaching, you know, their kids or people I went to school with, I’m now teaching their grandkids. We won't go much farther there…
Taylor Martin: [Laughing]
Rives Taylor: But you know, the evolution of things is really, you know, kind of a really interesting conversation. I think the challenge for me is that I think the students have always aspired to do the same sort of thing, but we now have a lot more challenging outcomes. We need to be a lot more aware of how things work, frankly. That's part of teaching the students is how to get a grasp on even understanding future thinking
Taylor Martin: Is there like a class on that, like just future thinking for architecture and sustainability?
Rives Taylor: So, in theory, you know, most studios by their very nature are introductions to, you know, looking at scenarios and gathering information because, you know, design is about creating a future place. I will say some of the best programs do indeed have, you know, trends, analysis or case study analysis that says, “Let's learn from the past to apply it to the future” And I will say that I can think of a handful of programs that in partnership, whether it's with a business school or perhaps with, you know, engineering doing future casting, I'm seeing it more and more. But it has not been a kind of a consistency of architecture. Usually, it's you learn from historic past and learn from kind of the icons of designers and projects, etc.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. But with that AI you were talking about before in VR/AR, I mean, you have all those things where you're looking, I think, more present than we ever have.
Rives Taylor: I think that's a very interesting idea, Taylor, is we've got a number of amazing technologies that can help us scenario plan for the future. I just don't know whether the designers are there yet, whether it's kind of once you get through practice, you start saying, “How can I understand what's going to happen better so I can prepare for it.” You know, somehow getting the young professional, just knowing the basics of how buildings stand up or how you deal with certain materials or code requirements in ADA and so forth, take a lot out of them. So, part of our challenge is what's the kind of Maslov's priorities…. what do I learn first and last? And that's kind of the pedagogy that each Dean and each school really hangs their hat on. You know, the whole idea of design studios is total immersion as you know.
Taylor Martin: Well, I wonder if people that are in the field right now that are doing these amazing new things with AI and VR and AR and whatever, I wonder are they cataloging their successes, their stories, and be able to publicize it. I mean, I was thinking about the medical community. They have tons of medical journals where when you find out something, you put it out there in a journal for the whole world of professionals to see. Is that the same case for architecture? Do you know these really new, innovative ideas, do they hit the print so people know or do….
Rives Taylor: As I said, there is now so many venues to celebrate green design or high-performance design. If anything, there's many venues, but the problem is, you know, do I have a regular path that I sort of check every day, every week to see? It's just, there's so many tools, so many resources by virtue of the passions of so many people, there's now organizations that look at, you know, kind of reviewing all those resources and see which are the best of the resources. You know, research about research, which, you know, it used to be, I would laugh about that… kind of the deep green is let's study the evolution of green rather than understanding green design. But increasingly, I can see that genealogy are understanding like art. Who's got the track record to see the evolution that, you know, a Pollock painting. I could do that. Well, no. In fact, there's, there's a great deal of preparation and sort of lineage to how those paintings evolved as an example. That's kind of the way sustainable thinking or high-performance thinking is, which is it's not going to be, you know, at the spur of the moment, it's based on analysis. And so, therefore there's, you know, the case studies, the resources that have track record, are particularly appreciated versus something that comes out of the blue. If you get my drift, which is kind of like the idea of the collective and the idea of having some weight based on engagement by a variety of thinkers versus someone is creating a brand-new theory. Which, you know, 100 years ago, the thinkers were few and far between that had time to step away from the practice. Now, by virtue of our scale of our industry, scale of our population, scale of culture, there's a lot of competing thinking. And the thinking that seems to kind of have the best outcome is that collaborative thinking. The thinking that's gained traction because there's been engagement and kind of rigor applied to it.
Taylor Martin: I can only imagine what it must be like when you're in a classroom teaching all this to students. And I can only imagine that there’s just a mountain of questions you're going to be getting from them.
[0:50:07] Rives Taylor: Yeah. And of course, different people learn different ways, so that's a whole another interesting issue with architects, which is, you know, how do you get your arms around where you fit in the large field of architecture- sustainable or otherwise- though, we believe every project needs to focus on this. So, it's all in the very interesting evolutionary process of what education is in general but architecture in particular.
Taylor Martin: Do you see architect students double majoring in something you typically wouldn't see before or…?
Rives Taylor: Well, you know, what's interesting is I see it both ways, Taylor. I see both architects having interests not just only in things like engineering and energy design or planning or kinesiology, you know, human factors, but I'm seeing them branch into different kinds of biology and different kinds of environmental studies, looking at natural systems and flows since there can be, even in architecture, a lot learned from natural systems. The old, Janine Benyus, and her notion of biomimicry- learning from natural systems. But I also see a lot of economists and a lot of scientists and various engineers of the bio-sciences who see the discipline of architecture, taking abstract concepts and turning it into tangible realities. You know, we're all project managers of projects. There's a lot of recognition that the discipline of one and the technical data focus of the other could really, you know, work well together.
Taylor Martin: Wow. That just goes back… kind of circles back to what we said at the beginning, you know, so many different eyeballs, so many different points of view, bringing in that collective idea and understanding and different rays of light. I find that to be quite intriguing, actually. I mean, where are they going to be when they're our age? What are they going to be talking about? [Laughing]
Rives Taylor: Well, and I think there's a very interesting subtext to this, which is one of our challenges of the profession. And it comes back to what you said at the outset of our time, wonderful time together is, you know, that the prospect of what it means to be a designer and all of these challenges, creating the built environment and, you know, getting it built. And then once it's built, how does it work? We’re a discipline that's not been very diverse, and we need to be, by the very nature of creating the built environment for 7.5, 6-7 billion people that are anything but aging, white guys like me. You know, the diversity of viewpoint, historically, has not been where it needs to be in either our colleges of architecture or in the practice. And whether it's perhaps ramping up the partnerships all the way from grade school to high school on about the practice needs and relishes the diversity of insight. But, you know, our clients and who we work with in the community… back to understanding, you know, A to B or the straight line is not exactly what supports in the built environment, what our human population needs.
You know, we need to listen, not ad nauseum and never get anywhere. There's a lot of argument about, you know, planning, planning, planning, or theory without action is “diarrhea.” But we do need to have a collaborative process that, you know, we've seen that in planning for a long, long time, you know, the notion of city planning is no longer the Robert Moses's or the, you know, the white guys with power saying, “This is how I want to lay the city out.” And it's now finding its way down to product design and finding his way down to design of, you know, the workplace or the, you know, very bright and very diverse professionals and intellectuals that our communities really entail. And that's a big deal in schools now, and needs to be, that we awaken the fact that it's not you're designing for yourself. You know, that was some study I did ages ago. When we design environments, who do we design it for? Do we design it for a mythic, all women, all man, or me? And very often the designers in the past said, “Well, what would I like? How would I go through this space?” And it really is an interesting, I mean, a bit of a digression here, but that's really a challenge with our inclusive design thinking, which is very much, by the way, embedded in our resilience, sustainability thinking today. How do we make sure universal design means that everybody gets the same thing? That doesn't mean everybody gets the same, you know, outcome. And that's kind of a challenge, not only society-wise, but in our design approaches from, you know, product design again to interiors and, you know, getting into a door of a building.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. When you… when you talked about biomimicry, I always think about… I see some of these images of new buildings and new concepts, and they're just magnificent looking! And I see a lot of them in the Middle East, as well as in Asia, some in the United States, but I'm always blown away by just the sheer beauty of them. And then when you start to read all the details of all these different things that they took into account to make sure it's sustainable and the wellness, resilience, it brings me hope, you know, for the future, I see more beautiful environments of urban architecture, and I can only imagine how that's going to trickle down into residential. I’m hopefully optimistic of what I see and hear and read and all that.
Rives Taylor: We need optimism in this day and age. I appreciate that, Taylor. Thank you.
Taylor Martin: Absolutely. Rives, how can our listeners reach out to you? I mean, do you have, like, a LinkedIn page or a social media or you want someone to join your class? Where do they go?
[0:55:07] Rives Taylor: Well, I was going to say, I teach at both Rice and U of H and, you know, there are sometimes continuing ed opportunities there, though it's been a bit of time. But no, I've got the LinkedIn and Facebook both, you know, with my business, but also personally. You know, Rives, not many of us, middle initial ‘T’, last name Taylor. You know, I have a cadre of folks in those various media, and I do occasional tweets when I travel to things like the Paris Climate Accord or other events. I don't just do it, you know, wonderful dinner, let me take a picture and tweet or otherwise. So, I tend, you know, emails, you know, with students and so forth. It's a variety of communications, but, you know, LinkedIn is a good place to start. I do believe that sharing information via the LinkedIn site is where I can often not only share, but connect people, which to me is the most important thing with a media approach.
Taylor Martin: I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today, Rives. Thank you so much for being on the Triple Bottom Line and sharing with us this wealth of knowledge. I'm almost, like, mentally exhausted just by hearing all the things we've gone over today.
[Both Laughing]
Rives Taylor: Marathon! Yeah. You can imagine my poor students with, you know, a class where I try to break it down to one topic a week, right? But no, I appreciate having the opportunity to share insights and get a better perspective, I think, of different insights and appreciate collaborating with you, Taylor.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. It was great. It was really wonderful. And I can't wait to share this with our listeners. So, Rives, thank you so much. I wish you all the best, and I look forward to the next times our paths cross.
Rives Martin: Thank you, sir. You have a great weekend and thanks everybody. Take care.
Taylor Martin: Alright. Over and out!
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Female Voice: Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewing on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.
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