Can We Design Buildings That Give Back?

In the latest episode, host Avinash Rajagopal is joined by Lindsay Baker, CEO of Living Future, the nonprofit behind some of the most ambitious and comprehensive frameworks for sustainable and regenerative design in the built environment. Through initiatives like the Living Building Challenge, Living Future advances a vision of buildings that give back more to nature than they take, creating places in true harmony with life itself.

Baker brings decades of experience across nearly every facet of sustainable design and construction—from her early work as a program manager for LEED, to serving as WeWork’s first head of global sustainability and impact. Together, they discuss regenerative design, transparency in building materials through the Declare Label, and what it will take to move from reducing harm to actively restoring the ecosystems we build within. Read an excerpt of their conversation below or listen to the full episode on the Surround Podcast Network.  

Avi Rajagopal (AR): To begin, can you explain Living Future’s vision for the built environment? What’s the big goal that you think we should be working towards?

Lindsay Baker (LB): I like a story and so I will say how it came to be that we focus on what we focus on. But I do believe that it starts with a vision, and the context of that vision was that Living Future emerged from the Cascadia Green Building Council in the early 2000s. Then the Living Building Challenge was launched and evolved into this nonprofit that focuses on things that all sort of relate to each other within this ecosystem that the Living Building Challenge birthed. And all of it grew out of those early years, when the green building community was just getting started.

I was there, thinking about these questions from the philosophical standpoint on which the green building movement was founded, which was: How do we get people to start on a path? 95 percent of our energy at that time was spent on getting people on a path towards better ecological and human health impacts for the built environment. But the questions were the first steps. How do you get them to think about and know that there are volatile organic compounds in paints and that we should really do something about that? Or that energy efficiency is a cost saving measure?

That was the focus at that time. For me personally, it really resonated to imagine the low-hanging fruit—even if that’s the metaphor I’ve gotten most sick of in the past 20 or 30 years. But that’s the reason we talk about it so much is because that was sort of how we started the green building movement: let’s do the easy stuff first. Meanwhile, out there in the Pacific Northwest, a group of folks were starting to think not about the low-hanging fruit, but about the end goal—where we were trying to get in the building industry—and starting from that perspective instead.

Now, that’s pretty common for us. For example, we think about that a lot when we think about things like the Paris Agreement on climate change. That’s an end goal thing. It’s about where we need to get to as a planet by 2050, 2030, et cetera. But back in the early 2000s, it was a group of folks who were really starting to think about what the end goal might feel like, and how we would get there.

So it was really planning backwards into what needed to get done. And those ambitions were climate ambitions, they were water ambitions, they were equity ambitions, health ambitions. So, really, multi-attribute. 

That’s one of the things that I find people don’t understand about the Living Building Challenge in general. Since we focus on health, people are always asking, ‘What’s your niche?’ And if anything, our niche is trying to help people get to that end goal faster, which is super cool and I love it because it means that we get to work on those ambitious questions with the kind of people who are ready to say: we have to realize this regenerative future as soon as possible.

There’s a bit of impatience there, and a belief that if you can clearly envision that future now, you’ll get there faster than if you’re just saying, “Okay, we should really get these VOCs out of the paint.” It’s a community of folks that really believe we need to push faster, we need to push harder. We need to make these transitions away from the way that we build as fast as possible—and sometimes in really deep and structural ways. 

That’s really heady, but that’s the start of conceptually who we are and what the vision is. Our ultimate mission is to transform the building industry into a world that is culturally rich and ecologically restorative. That’s a bit of our language about what we’re trying to get to. It involves actively enabling buildings to heal and regenerate ecologically, and I would also add, to support our health and our communities’ health.

AR: I want to underscore this idea of focusing on the end goal. What we’re trying to do here is really a reframing of the problem of sustainability in buildings—and in everything else—because, honestly, some decisions have to be made at that high level, right?

Otherwise you end up with dead ends and conflicts—and you’ve seen that over the years with Living Building Challenge projects, too. Sometimes you have to start with big ambition to understand how the pieces fit together. If you focus on one small piece, you might get that piece right, but at the cost of others. So, it was such a reframing of the movement at the time and it continues to be pretty much the only organization that’s able to encapsulate that larger goal for the built environment. 

You mentioned the Living Building Challenge. METROPOLIS has said that it’s maybe the most rigorous standard there is for buildings that are in harmony with life, with nature and with community. That’s definitely the big goal, but as you said, the program also birthed a lot of different things: that we recognize the goal, but we also give people incremental tools along the way. Can you talk about some of the big programs at Living Future, especially some of the relatively new ones? Give us a taste of the kinds of things you have in store for the broader built environment community.

LB: Honestly, thinking about the end goal has been the mindset that has helped us create these new programs because we started to realize pretty quickly when the Living Building Challenge came out, there were structural reasons why it was really hard for people to build buildings in the way that we had imagined them.

One of the hardest parts of constructing a genuinely good building in the world we live in today—I mean generally in America or other developed countries—is the materials you put in the building and your relative knowledge of what they are, what’s in them from a chemical perspective, et cetera.

One of the very first things we did was launch the Declare program, a product labeling initiative that helps people understand material transparency. Many Deep Green listeners are probably already familiar, but it’s basically a nutrition label that tells you what’s in the product—especially from a materials health and toxicity standpoint. The program has grown an incredible amount—it’s a very popular program and a big part of what we do here. So a lot of the work that we’ve been doing isn’t just on Declare as a label, but also pushing the industry more broadly to adopt and demand transparency for product materials.

You see that in a lot of facets of the world today—like the AIA Materials Pledge, Mindful MATERIALS, and other programs designed to build the momentum that came out of the Living Building Challenge—demanding that people ensure the materials they put into regenerative buildings don’t contain anything that can poison humans.

That was the basic premise. It seemed simple and straightforward, and yet it’s hard to do. Here we are, almost 20 years later, still trying to figure out how to get all that data—and that’s because we found that a lot of people have to work on that to make it possible.

I also want to give a special shoutout to our Just program, which was also created around the question: how do we get really good regenerative buildings? One of the things we found was that you need people who are committed to social impact. Basically, you need people who are committed to diverse teams: inclusive hiring practices and inclusive purchasing. So we created the Just program, which is essentially a community of practice for AEC firms and manufacturers—people across the building industry—to commit to transparency around their social impacts.

People submit information about their firm, and we give them a label that highlights how they’re progressing on the journey toward a positive social impact. But more than anything, it’s a way for firms that are committed to making a better world—from a social impact perspective—to find each other. 

It’s been a wonderful program that’s growing a ton and we are really happy to have all of those folks working with us. We have 556 Just labels since the program first launched and somewhere around a hundred thousand people that are now sort of a part of the Just community. It’s a really thriving group and it’s really wonderful to watch. 

So those are probably the ones that people know best in terms of the programs and the logos that we have out there. But we also run a membership program, we have online education, we have a big conference every year that’s coming up in April, called Living Future—this one will be hosted in Seattle.

Philosophically, one of the things I love about Living Future is that, yes, we certify buildings, but we see that as just one of the many tactics that we deploy to try to transform the industry, and we really believe that the other tactics are also important—including bringing people together to learn from each other and discuss what works and what doesn’t. And then there are things like having product labeling programs and building out the databases we need to help people access the right tools to make good decisions. All of that goes into it.

And if there’s one thing I wish we could change, looking back on all this time, it’s that people often conflate green building nonprofits with certification. I understand that certification is the most visible part for many people, but we do much more than that. Some days, I would argue some of that other work is even more impactful than certifying a building.

AR: Absolutely. Not to put a damper on this, but as part of our report, we did a rough analysis of what percentage of built area in the U.S. is actually certified by green building organizations, and it stands at about 5 percent or less. And that 5 percent is the tip of the spear, right? That’s going to open up pathways for many more. And we’ve seen that proven true in how green building in the U.S. has progressed—by setting standards that have influenced building codes and organizations’ own real estate standards. There has been so much change.

One remarkable aspect of your leadership—and that of your counterparts at other green building organizations—is the level of collaboration we’ve seen across the U.S., especially in the last year and a half. Can you talk about that alignment—that linking-of-arms approach—and how different groups working on sustainability in the built environment are starting to come together?

LB: This has been very much a passion of mine to help. Personally, I’ve always been a bit of a mediator. I have two older brothers and I’m the youngest and so I’ve always sort of been that type of person in the community to really say, “I think we’re all actually going after the same thing. Let’s figure this out.”

I think the green building movement has evolved and matured. We’ve heard a lot of people saying, “Hey, why does it feel like there’s friction here for all of us in the market transformation we’re trying to achieve?” That comes out of the nonprofits not necessarily working together or aligning, so pointing that out and saying, ‘Can you work on that?’ wasn’t new, right? That’s been evolving. 

I think many people feel it, whether they’re certifying a building and dealing with different paperwork requirements or navigating other complexities. But more recently, I—and I think many others—have started asking: now that the movement has reached a certain level of maturity, what does success actually look like?

There’s no real value in infighting or in saying, “We’re more important.” We all have to find the right ways to work together. If you look at other successful social movements, groups like Living Future that represent the vanguard are usually just one part of the broader effort. You need those voices that say it clearly and directly: this is where we need to go. We understand it may be uncomfortable, but that’s the goal at the end of the day.

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Listen to “Can We Design Buildings That Give Back?” on the Surround Podcast Network.  

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