How a Big Firm Drives Big Change

In the latest episode of Deep Green, host Avinash Rajagopal is joined by Katie Mesia, firmwide design resilience leader and director of sustainability at Gensler. A central part of Mesia’s role is shaping Gensler’s culture to help the firm attain its goal of carbon neutrality by 2030.

She consults on deep sustainability strategies for projects around the world, working to reduce carbon emissions and minimize environmental impacts. She has also championed Gensler’s Product Sustainability (GPS) Standards, helping drive industry-wide adoption of more regenerative materials in architectural interiors.

Read an excerpt from their conversation below to learn how large firms can shift culture at scale, what it really takes to reach carbon neutrality, and where the biggest opportunities for impact lie today, or listen to the full episode on the Surround Podcast Network. 

Avi Rajagopal (AR): Gensler has a huge influence on the built environment because of the size and scope of the projects you take on. But your firm has also been a real leader in making commitments to sustainable performance in your buildings. Can you give us an overview of some of the commitments Gensler has made on its projects?

Katie Mesia (KM): As a firm, we have a goal to move toward carbon neutrality in all our work—everything from the products we design to master plans, as well as the buildings and interiors that fit along the way. With every project, we try to take a step forward by working with our clients and helping them move forward.

It’s also about working with individuals within Gensler so that each of them sees new opportunities in every project they take on. And then of course, when it comes to the spaces themselves, we work to reduce their environmental impact and increase the quality of the experience within the spaces we’re creating.

AR: And you do that at such a scale. I gave a brief overview of what you do, but I’d love to hear from you: what does your role look like? What is your day-to-day at Gensler?

KM: Well, as you laid out, the firm is very large. I spend about half of my time trying to reach all the employees at Gensler, because they are the ones who do the work. They’re the ones talking to clients, so I make sure they have the tools they need, the educational resources to support them, and the inspiration to make their projects more sustainable. That’s about 50 percent of my time, and I do that with my counterpart, Olivier Sommerhalder, who leads Design and Resilience with me at the firm.

The other 50 percent of my time is spent working with clients who have really audacious sustainability goals—people who are trying to do things that we’re not sure are possible, but we’re still working towards them. On those projects, there is always a lot of research, investigation, and curiosity. Maybe we meet our goals in the end, or maybe we don’t, but we learn a lot along the way and that filters onto the next project. I find a lot of joy in that curiosity and research.

AR: That’s amazing, because of course your industry-leading position often means you’re coming up with new ways of doing things—and the Gensler Product Sustainability (GPS) Standards are one example of that. Can you give us a quick overview of that project?

KM: The Gensler Product Sustainability Standards are an effort to reduce environmental impact through material selection. We started by looking at materials used in high volumes and that we had control over—meaning we wrote the specifications or selected them. It has followed the availability of data in its rollout.

There is a lot of data available around materials in the U.S., so that’s where it began. Part of the initiative is about making the work have less impact. But another big part is sending signals to the industry that this is important—that this is something that needs research and development, that this is where we’re going.

They’re also available to anybody that wants to use them. They’re not proprietary. We don’t keep them internally and in general, we don’t really believe in holding on tightly to the “how” behind sustainability. One of the great things about this space is that we share with each other, because it’s not right to solve a puzzle and then keep it to yourself. So those are available. We have other firms that are using them, and I’m just so happy when I hear that that’s happening.

You know, GPS has a couple of branches. The first is that we’ll continue adding materials to it. The second is that we’re trying to expand geographically.

Around the globe, we sometimes find ourselves in a peer advocacy position, where the information isn’t available and people just haven’t thought about it yet. And so, telling them that this is coming and that it’s important can really make a big wave and a big change in those markets.

Another thing we’re doing, as a spinoff, is looking at materials that have a very high impact but that we don’t have total control over. For instance, we’re working on a research project that will come out sometime next year about concrete—lowering the amount of carbon in it. In addition to reducing the carbon in, say, a square foot of concrete, we also want to look at: how do we use less of the material overall?

AR: I think the approach you’re laying out, Katie, really reflects—credit to you and your collaborators and peers at Gensler—your recognition of the role you play in the industry as a prime mover, whether here in the U.S. or around the world.

It’s also a pragmatic approach to the built environment in terms of how we make progress. I’m especially curious from your perspective today: what do you think is the state of sustainable architecture and design practice in the United States? Do you feel we’re making progress? Are we maintaining in some areas, plateauing in others? Do you feel there are places where we’re still falling short and need to be doing better?

KM: The landscape of sustainability in the U.S. has gone through peaks and valleys.

It’s been trendy. It’s been a good word; it’s been a bad word. It goes all over the place. I think for Gensler and for people who really care about the environment, it doesn’t matter so much what it’s called, as long as it’s moving forward. As the pendulum swings, sometimes the private sector is driving progress, and other times it swings to policymakers who are pushing it forward.

Right now, we’re seeing it in the hands of the private sector, and we’re seeing momentum there. The way that the current climate is pushing us is that we must be much more articulate when explaining why sustainability is important to the clients in each project. So that means we must understand our client’s business model, right? What is important to them?

I love that study that Walmart did where they put skylights over half of their store and then the sales went up. You know, there’s daylight over the cashiers and over half their products, and those products sold more, and those cashiers were more efficient—and they were afraid it was a fluke. Then they switched the products from one side of the store to the other. And again, the daylight helped products move faster. And I think that is a great example of a sustainability strategy. We’re not doing it because of the moral value of sustainability. We’re doing it because it is important to their business and it really helps them with their goals, while also having this great impact on the environment.

So, we’re looking for opportunities like that where we can tie business performance to sustainable features. We’ve done a series of studies asking: what does that mean in healthcare? What does that mean in sports? What does that mean in retail? Those have been very interesting for me.

AR: That’s very exciting. I think that reflects a broader shift in the U.S. industry these days—not starting from “we’re doing this to save the planet,” but rather recognizing that it’s a win-win all around. Does this approach mean a slightly different workflow for you, especially at the start of projects? Or working with clients a little bit differently? Do those conversations sound different?

KM: They require a little more research before you go in the room, right? You want to really understand the perspective of your client as a company—on sustainability and resilience. I also use tools like the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which has conducted nearly census-level surveys on how people feel about the environment, whether they believe in global warming, and whether they feel affected by climate change.

Those two things together can give you context when you enter a room—to know what may be relevant, and we may just reference business indicators if we feel that is the best way forward. Or we may talk about a drive towards carbon neutrality. And what the current climate is doing is it’s really pushing us to be more prepared.

By doing this, we’re able to reach more clients. And when the pendulum swings back, I can’t wait for that wave of momentum. At the same time, we’ve all gained a more nuanced skill in talking about sustainability and the planet.

AR: You’re making me feel so much better, because I do think it’s great that you’re putting in the effort, client by client and conversation by conversation, to make those advancements. Have you seen some of those conversations bear fruit? Do you have any good stories to share with us?

KM: You know, I have good project stories, but more importantly I think I have good people stories. I’ve been at Gensler almost 20 years, so that’s a lot of projects that have passed through. But the people are the same, right? The people stay. And so, I think as we have these conversations and as the projects move through, we also have to make sure that everybody at Gensler is inspired and has their own take on sustainability.

We also talk a lot about a designer’s body of work or a team’s body of work. You may be investigating something like a high-performance facade, and you don’t have to do that on one project. You can test it on one project and get the fin just right. And on the next one you can have the fin and then you can work on the glass more. And then on the next one you can add your next element and you can keep going until, 10 projects in, you really have this expertise in facade design.

AR: I love how you’re thinking about meeting this moment—not just in how we talk about sustainability, but also in terms of the long duration of projects over time. I think that’s absolutely fantastic. What are some of the persistent roadblocks or challenges—whether client- or business-oriented, or technical? Are there things we don’t yet know how to do the way we’d like, or ways we struggle to achieve the results we want?

KM: There are some consistent conversations that come up where multiple aspects of sustainability are linked together. So, let’s take that glass example. You’re picking a high-performance glass, but you also have a desire for views, which may mean that the glass wants to be clear. You also have a desire to avoid bird collisions so that adds a film on the glass. And then at the same time, you want to make sure that your building itself is not consuming too much energy, which usually means you don’t want a super high ratio of glass to solid. So, you end up with a little less glass and that circle of investigation repeats many, many times because it has conflicting choices.

We see the untangling of those problems. They don’t have a perfect answer, but if you can lay out all the variables and show how they’re connected, you can move through the conversation faster.

AR: And I’ll venture a guess, not being a practicing architect myself, that the perfect answer might be different for different clients, different buildings and different locations, right? The framing of the problem that’s the most important, or the understanding of the relationships rather than any one response to the problem. Is that something you see over and over again now that we take this holistic view of sustainability on projects?

KM: It’s very rare that the answer is going to be the same across any set of projects, because you have different motivators—and it’s in that customization and unique answer that you find joy.

You’re not rediscovering that these things are related every time—we’ve already established that. But figuring out how they fit together in each unique project, how that puzzle works, is the joyful part. I also think it’s very important to keep positive pressure on staying curious, being innovative, and exploring the things you do have control over.

It’s easy to spend too much time reading headlines that are upsetting or looking at the opportunities that you don’t have, but it doesn’t really move the work forward, right? What moves it forward is finding something that you can influence and then being curious about how you might do that.

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Listen to “How a Big Firm Drives Big Change” on the Surround Podcast Network.  

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