Design the Future

For our latest podcast, we talked to Myrrh Caplan, who is Senior VP for Sustainability at Skanska and leads the construction company’s national sustainability team. 

Since joining Skanska as a Project Manager in 2005, Myrrh has helped shape Skanska’s national approach to sustainable building. She established the company’s first national Green Construction program and chaired Skanska’s first National Green Council. Myrrh has advised on nearly 300 certified projects and projects seeking LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL, Envision, and other certifications. She sits on the board of mindfulMaterials, serves on several industry committees, and participates in research with key partners. 

We heard from Myrrh about her passion for weaving a positive legacy through the work, and how she brings that to the projects and to the overall enterprise. She speaks about her team as a family that is “in it together” and she is proud of how shared success, to this group of people, “comes before egos.”  

She told us about a recent accomplishment, her work on the Associated General Contractors Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in construction (https://www.agc.org/climate-change-playbook). And we couldn’t resist asking Myrrh to talk about some notable recent projects, including PDX (the new airport in Portland, Ore., designed by ZGF) and the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station (in New York City, designed by SOM). 

Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd., in Accra, Ghana. 

As an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. This year, she joined the board of the International Living Future Institute.

She references the importance of breaking boundaries between silos and communities because, she says, “the materials that we work with surely do.” She is proud of her many collaborations across and between academic, industry, and communities: “We are are advancing top-down and bottom-up approaches to getting these biobased materials not just known but normalized” in the AEC community. Throughout her work, Mae-ling is inspired by the stories of how biobased materials were used over long periods of time in different societies, “which offer us clues for how they could be used today and in the future.”

Lu Salinas has been working in the green building industry since 2006 -- with firms and on projects in the US, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, where she works today. Her consulting firm, THREE Environmental Consulting, has worked on everything from small affordable housing projects to large infrastructure projects such as the New International Mexico City Airport in Texcoco. 

She grew up in Mexico in a family of civil engineers, and happened upon the James Wines book, Sustainable Architecture, in the early 2000s, which sparked her awareness of and interest in the field. 

She sees the international green building industry from Mexico and has built THREE to help advance the level of the work in that region. “I am especially proud of our company’s rule,” she says. “We always do what’s right. I think we have held to this -- doing what is right for the most people.”

Salins is proud to be a part of the movement, which she sees as “an infinite one -- in which people are passing the baton to others.” Salinas takes issue, however, with the idea that the next generation will be the one to address climate change. “The responsibility is with every generation that is currently living,” she says. “We all need to be doing something.” 

Cristina Gamboa is CEO of the World Green Building Council, an influential local-regional-global network focused on “the transformation to sustainable and decarbonized built environments for everyone, everywhere.” She is an economist with a background in sustainability, policy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships; as such, she is a trusted convener in international settings such as UN Climate Change summits and the World Economic Forum. Cristina is from Colombia and lives in London. Before she came to this work, she was an academic economist with a focus on international affairs and a passion for communicating. 

“Collectively, we’ve had a huge win, getting buildings on the global climate agenda. But with visibility comes responsibility,” Cristina says. “Now we have to make sure that the private sector is empowered to deliver progress.” 

She says that the finance community understands that buildings are the largest global asset class, and this is an opportunity. “If we get this right, they can invest in better assets,” she says. “If we work with the finance community and we find ways to delink emissions from growth and, for example, make sure that the retrofit economy really lifts off, we could unlock the benefits of a carbon-free and circular economy.”

Great strides have been made, she says, but there is work to do: “We still don’t have aggregated data to show change at scale. This is a gap that makes our movement vulnerable. The sooner we can quantify benefits, the better.” 

Stephanie Phillips leads the City of San Antonio's Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program. Housed in the Office of Historic Preservation, the program prioritizes building material reuse as a tool for affordable housing repair, traditional trades revival, economic innovation, equitable access to high-quality resources, and cultural and community resilience. 

Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio and is a 2023 J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize awardee.

Her work aims to foster collaborative partnerships that get us closer to creating a regenerative built environment. Part of Stephanie’s story is about how she came to think that “design is everything” and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. “What we are doing can happen anywhere,” Stephanie says. “It requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.”

Sandeep Ahuja is co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an AI-first consulting platform that aims to break down barriers in the design and construction cycle, creating a new network of shared information, interoperability, and accountability across projects and teams.

In addition to running cove.tool, Sandeep has recently co-authored a book with Patrick Chopson. Build Like It’s the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction is due out from Wiley by the end of 2024.

Sandeep is passionate about transforming the AEC industry with intelligent and innovative solutions to reduce risk and boost transparency. “We are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,” she says, “and put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.”

Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundation’s Ethical Materials Director. She works to advance the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the built environment. For the past two decades, Nora has been dedicated to creating change in the built environment through sustainability, resilience, and social equity work. 

Nora described the traction around the Design for Freedom work, and shared her excitement about a new public exhibit at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut. “With Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. “This exhibit is focused on the idea of ethical decarbonization," Riszzo said. "It  is exploring the link between the climate crisis and the embodied suffering that is happening in our built environment.”

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons designs environmentally conscious, energy-efficient, and resilient architecture that reflects a deep reverence for nature and human interconnectedness with the world. She has degrees in structural engineering and architecture and specializes in Building Information Modelling. She also works as an advisor for the Spinnaker Group, a division of SOCOTEC, focusing on sustainable certification of buildings in hot and humid climates. 

Her affinity for hot and humid stems from her home: Alyssa-Amor is from Barbados, an island nation, and she lives and works there now. She thinks that growing up with an acute understanding of human’s and human settlements’ vulnerability to nature and weather cycles has framed her thinking about design. 

She is exploring how best to leverage her cultural and design knowledge in an age of warming. “People say ‘build back better,’ but I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says. “I want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.” Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. “We are inviting people -- everyone! -- to engage, via VR, AI, and other ways. We are asking, can you code/build a city of the collective imagination?”

Dr. Janice Barnes is founder of Climate Adaptation Partners, a NYC-based partnership that focuses on climate adaptation. With technical training in architecture and organizational behavior, she helps clients to understand risks and evaluate adaptation pathways and link these to design and financing options. She works at the intersection of climate change, design, and public health and uses the question "how might we?" to frame her work. 

We talked with Janice about her advocacy and education work, her current client and project work, and more. She insists that “climate adaptation is part of design. We have a professional obligation to consider climate projections, explore what those mean, and then decide what you are going to do about that.” 

Janice uses a musical metaphor to talk about team collaboration. She says that she plays rhythm guitar -- and takes responsibility for bringing a lot of unconventional bandmates to the session. “In this way, I have found that I can contribute design thinking and bring climate science experts and epidemiologists to the table. What we come up with together is so much better -- a richer, more rooted system of solutions that do multiple things for stakeholders, ecosystem, and community.”

Paula Melton is the Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, which supports the international sustainable building movement with learning resources, community building, and other services. She works with editorial teams to develop and deliver webcasts, long-form analysis, and other guidance on BuildingGreen.com and LEEDuser.com. 

“We have problems that are caused by people being in silos,” Paula says, “and not being able or willing to communicate. We need to be thinking about people skills and processes in new ways.” She adds that progress in the movement really demands a lot of soft skills. “We are all engaged in change management as much as we are engaged in the mechanics of our specific discipline or sector.”  

Besides bringing deep knowledge and humor to the table, Paula is optimistic, despite being rooted firmly in a lot of data about the reality of the climate imperative and the challenges that face the built environment community. “We are asking the right questions and beginning to break down those barriers that have given us 75 different net zero standards,” she says. “We're having the right conversations, and I'm excited about that.”