How Can We Design Buildings to Heal, Not Harm?

Avinash Rajagopal: It’s been almost three years now since you stepped into the role of Chief Sustainability Officer at Perkins&Will. How’s that been going? What does that feel like for you? What’s feeling good about it?  

Jason McLennan: Well, it’s been going great, and it’s proven to be a good decision. You never know when you do these things; when you sell your company to another company. I had a good sense, given the people involved at Perkins&Will, that it was gonna be a good fit. And it certainly has been. I think the most rewarding thing has been the comradery. Even though I had a great team—a McClennan design team who all came with me to join Perkins&Will—at times I felt a bit like a lone wolf in practice, a small team consulting with different architects around the world. But with Perkins&Will, it’s become more of a large family affair, with many colleagues I see often and have the opportunity to build lasting relationships with. 

AR: Perkins& Will has had a similar approach to the green building movement as you’ve had, which is to build frameworks, to build tools, and to share those out. Has it felt like you are able to kind of amplify what they’ve been doing and fit right into that? Are you seeing a kind of synergy happening there? 

JM: I’m certainly trying my best, and the good thing is that there are quite a few people that are philosophically aligned. It’s a very large company, so you can imagine that our clients and our projects run the spectrum of interest in regenerative design. For some projects and some teams, we are able to go deep quickly, and others maybe need a bit more convincing. But, in essence, why I decided to partner with Perkins&Will was to increase the scale of the impact that I was having. I’m always looking for scale jumping—that frame wherever I can. Perkins&Will is involved with billions of dollars of construction all over the globe. So, to have an influence, even in a small way, with that kind of magnitude of impact is big. That’s why I did it. I’d like to think that we’re making great inroads in many areas. We have a long way to go, and we’re doing our best to get there as fast as we can.  

The Origins of Living Building Challenge

AR: This idea of regenerative design you mentioned in passing—it’s a kind of scale jumping, right? Let’s ask the big question: what should the built environment be, and how it can do good? I think that idea which is at the heart of the Living Building Challenge, which you wrote. Where did that idea come from? Can you take us back to the creation of the Living Building Challenge and that framework of living design, regenerative design?  

JM: The origins of the Living Building Challenge—I could frame it in a couple different ways. Certainly, when I was in college studying at the University of Oregon, I was obsessed with this idea of: how do we make the most environmentally friendly building possible? We didn’t use the words regenerative design. 

I didn’t use living building as a name yet, but I was really interested in that question. I went specifically to University of Oregon to study with some professors who had been thinking about a lot of these issues—maybe not all the issues—but I kept wondering: why can’t we do the greenest thing for water, energy, health, and materials and figure this all out? Why can’t we be that smart? So in some ways, it was really born in college and university— trying to answer that question from myself. Even before that, I grew up in a very polluted city in Canada and participated in the regeneration of my community, along with many others, in the community known as Sudbury, which was devastated by nickel mining. 

Eventually we transformed and regreened the entire community. We won a United Nations commendation, and so I saw what real regeneration looked like—to go from lifeless rocks to green suburbs was pretty amazing to grow up with. And really that’s what started me. I knew I wanted to be a green architect since I was little, but I didn’t have all these words and ideas yet. After I graduated, I went to work with Bob Berkebile, and I was looking for a way to describe what I was thinking—this truly sustainable level of sustainability. I was inspired by John Todd’s living machines for water treatment. I liked the word living, but I didn’t like the word machine paired with it. That’s when I said, well, we should call these living buildings and have living futures and living lifestyles. Let’s use the framework of life. And that’s where the name came from—eventually in 1998, when I first published an article on the living building. 

AR: I didn’t realize there was a John Todd connection—he won the Buckminster Fuller Prize, just like you.   

JM: Yes! I’ve known John for years. 

AR: Do you think the Living Building framework is still relevant in architecture today? We’re constantly being told which crisis is the most urgent—climate, health, equity. But regenerative design suggests these issues are interconnected. What do you think about that framework today?   

JM: I think it’s more relevant than it’s ever been, and more needed than it’s ever been. A reductionist, single-issue approach doesn’t get us where we need to go. Incrementalism doesn’t match the rate of ecological decline we’re facing. Our rate of innovation is not keeping up with the rate of the decline. The only way forward is a sustained awakening of the human heart—embracing the full spectrum of what life needs. So yes, I think it’s more needed. It’s just a daunting challenge as ever.  

AR:  And this idea of “what life needs” is not a bar we usually apply to architecture. 

JM: No, not for a long time. Certainly, the way we used to build was naturally in accordance with life’s principles because we didn’t have the technological know-how to sidestep if you will. Most of humanity’s history has been building in accordance with what life means as well. Then we took a turn in the industrial revolution, and some would even argue earlier than that. We forgot about this connection to the fundamental needs of life of which we are one mere small part of.  

AR: What are some of the ways that you’re finding ways to design for life in your recent projects? Are there any strategies or ideas or frameworks that you’ve been testing or demonstrating?  

JM: We use the Living building Challenge all the time, even if we don’t get certification for every project. It is a philosophical framework that we use. Any place that we work in, we accept that place is special, sacred, and unique. We want to understand how it functions, how it should function if it’s not functioning in the way that it used to as an ecological system. Most of the sites we have are now part of a broken industrial landscape. We begin by understanding the land—what’s there, what’s missing, who’s impacted, how the place used to function ecologically, and how we can begin to repair it to the best of our abilities using the power of development dollars. To create feedback loops that are regenerative, it is important to acknowledge that it’s only life that regenerates. It’s not our egos, it’s not our designs, it’s not our architecture. We start inviting life back into our projects in a way that is authentic—and life, if given the chance, is incredibly resilient and will come back with a force. 

Stop Thinking Small Scale, Start Thinking Bigger Scale

AR:  One of the projects you worked on recently, The HMTX World Headquarters in Connecticut, is a great example. A Living Building Challenge project—and one that METROPOLIS honored with a Planet Positive Award. Can you share how life was invited back there? 

JM: It’s the headquarters for HMTX industries, and Harlan Stone is the client that was the driving force behind the project. We preserved wildlife corridors, built around mature trees, and didn’t flatten the land or blast the granite. We worked with the site. When you’re inside the building, you feel like you’re in a treehouse. That’s because the mature trees are just 15 feet away on all sides. It’s more biophilic than anything you could design artificially. Nature doesn’t care about aesthetics—it cares about actual impact. 

AR: That direct experience of nature is so powerful. And yet, despite these inspiring projects, the big picture can feel discouraging. Carbon emissions are still high. What progress are we making with sustainable architecture and green buildings?  

JM: We are winning battles, but we’re losing the war—that, I think, is the issue. On one hand you can look at how far we have come in terms of understanding how to do this—the technologies, the economics, the regulatory environment—everything has gotten better. We have lighthouses like living buildings. But we also have lots of bad buildings, bad community planning, bad urban development, and there are more of us every year, and we keep consuming in unsustainable ways.  
 
The green building movement can simultaneously celebrate success while also having to acknowledge to itself that we failed—and we’re going to have to completely change our tactics if we want to solve things in the time that we have left. We need a strategic shift. I’ve even talked about “the death of the green building movement” as a provocation—because we need something new. We’re holding a summit in September around that whole subject soon.  

AR: It sounds exciting. I think we are overdue for the rethink—because in a way the creation of this framework of regenerative design of living buildings, youou called it a scale jump. I think of it as a leapfrog, right? Stop thinking small scale, start thinking bigger scale. 

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Listen to “Designing to Heal, Not Harm” on the Surround Podcast Network. This season of Deep Green is produced in partnership with Mannington Commercial. 

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• Architecture
• Preservation
• Sustainability

• Deep Green
• International Living Future Institute
• Jason McLennan
• Metropolis Editors
• Perkins&Will
• Perkins&Will & McLennan Design
• regenerative design