Erica McBride is the Regenerative Operations Manager at Architectural Nexus -- known as Arch Nexus. She oversees the performance and integrity of the firm’s two certified Living Buildings, in Sacramento and Salt Lake City. Erica was honored with the Living Future Hero Award in 2025 and holds credentials as a WELL AP, LEED Green Associate, and Living Future Accredited professional. Her work reflects a deep passion for regenerative design and sustainable building operations.

Erica is living these buildings -- experiencing and nurturing them in a hands-on way. She shared some great stories with us about what that means (including days that require a squeegee on the roof in the rain or even a swim in a cistern!). 

She has inspiring advice about how the living building challenge is, as she puts it “so attainable! You really just have to, to think about the building as an ecosystem. Then ask: ‘How do all of these pieces within the building ecosystem fit together?’ Once you understand how your building likes to be operated, it’s easy.”

She also has thoughts about what could make it even better: She’d love to see the operations people at the table at the outset of the project design and planning. She believes that operations people have a lot of practical experience that could be leveraged as design decisions are made.

Jenn Taranto has more than 25 years of experience in commercial real estate and construction and serves as Vice President of Sustainability at STO Building Group, a major construction organization. Passionate about reducing environmental impact, she drives STOBG’s internal sustainability strategy, helps clients define CSR goals, guides project teams to achieve milestones, and supports efforts to lower costs and emissions. We talked with Jenn about her long-term role with Built Environment Plus, the New England-based regional green building nonprofit, and how such groups are supporting market and industry transformation. 

Jenn suggests that people working on sustainability in the construction sector should be “deeply curious, have loads of tenacity, and be interested in breaking systems to build better ones.” She was instrumental in getting the Contractors’ Commitment off the ground and shared its reason for being. “We saw a real need for a system to encourage companies to track progress and engage in this transformation, she says. 

As for how we’re progressing -- the movement, the industry, and society overall -- we asked Jenn if we’re where she thought we’d be by now. “Not exactly,” she said. “Where’s my hoverboard?”

Stacy Glass is co-founder and executive director of ChemFORWARD, a nonprofit that creates access to chemical hazard data and seeks safer alternatives in partnership with industry. Stacy drives partnerships, collaborations and stakeholder engagement to support this mission and her aim to end toxic chemical exposure and advance human and environmental equity. 

ChemForward’s theory of change is rooted in collaboration with industry and other parties -- the entire supply chain. What ChemFoward is really working toward, Stacy says, is “a world where all chemicals are vetted before use.” This would be a fundamental change. “We’d like to see no more hazardous chemicals entering circulation and existing hazardous chemicals being drawn down and replaced with safer alternatives.” She points out that chemical pollution is a significant threat. In planetary boundaries conversations, “novel entities” are in the high risk zone. 

Stacy notes that people -- consumers of personal products and building products and more -- need to be smart about how to ask for products that are as good as they can be. “We encourage buyers in all parts of the supply chain to be thoughtful about what they are asking for -- and not just ask for things that are ‘free of’ one thing. This can lead to what we call ‘regrettable alternatives.' Instead, as the entire supply chain knows more and understands developing metrics to measure progress in safer chemistry, we can all work toward better, safer, and healthier.” 

Kaarin Knudson is an architect, a writer, and an educator with more than 25 years’ experience in design, sustainability, and community building. Trained as a journalist before becoming an architect, her work has always focused on people and place. In 2017, after a decade in architectural practice, she organized the public-interest project Better Housing Together to address Lane County’s housing crisis. This work supported the creation of Eugene’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Lane County’s first Affordable Housing Action Plan, and Oregon’s landmark middle housing reforms. In 2024, she was elected as Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, with 73% of the primary vote and 96% in the general election. Kaarin teaches planning and urban design at the University of Oregon, and she speaks at regional and national conferences about sustainable cities, housing, and the work of guiding community change. She is co-author, with Nico Larco, of The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook (2024).

We discussed what this moment is calling us all to do. “I think we are building new muscles and new relationships and new patterns of behavior with one another,” she said. “This is challenging us to think about how to work in different ways and how to stay focused on the future that we want to build. The framing of the problem is going to determine the solutions. We have to be the people who are framing the problem in a way that allows the solutions to be more connected, more productive, more about advancing into this future together.” 

Kayleigh Houde is an Associate Principal and Global Computational Projects Lead at Buro Happold, where she is responsible for the harmonized development of new technologies within the open-source coding platform BHoM. Her leadership extends to chairing the MEP 2040 Commitment, participating in the ECHO Project and ASHRAE Center of Excellence for Building Decarbonization. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Parametric Life Cycle Assessment. 

We spoke with Kayleigh soon after the MEP 2040 and Carbon Leadership Forum had released The Beginner’s Guide to MEP Embodied Carbon, a critical resource that was eagerly awaited in the community. Naturally, we spoke with her about that effort and about the broader question of why embodied carbon is important for MEP practitioners. “We have coalesced a lot of data to to bridge gaps for the MEP disciplines and provide clarity about the MEP impact,” she says.

Kayleigh’s technical leadership is paralleled by her deep commitment to collaboration across disciplines, evidenced in many ways, including her work on the ECHO effort to harmonize data across disciplines and certification programs. 

“Computers aren’t the thing,” Kayleigh says of the potential of computation in climate work and the built environment. “They are the thing that gets you to the thing. Really, what computations helps you to solve are some of issues that we have in human collaboration. Sometimes we think we’re connecting but we are not really speaking the same language. Getting people to talk and collaborate is a big part of the solution in the computational work.”

As the Head of Sustainability for Henning Larsen, Kritika Kharbanda spearheads the global sustainability team’s initiatives, goals, and growth. She serves on the ULI New York’s Climate and Sustainability Council and is the co-chair for AIA New York’s Building Science Committee.

We talked about her journey from India to Japan, Denmark, and the U.S. We discussed storytelling and negotiations; evidence-based design; and her role with Pathways AI,a climate-tech startup using AI to automate Environmental Product Declarations; and her Substack. 

We also asked her about whether she feels like she’s a part of an industry or a movement (a question that feels more important now than it has since we began asking it in our first episodes in early 2020). 

“If I were just part of an industry,” she says, “I’d probably be doing my nine to six, designing buildings, and calling it a day. But in my head and heart, I feel called to join with others in learning and collaboration and advocacy. We are building relationships and working together toward tangible outcomes. This is a movement. I am part of it, and I think everyone should be a part of it, because just being part of the industry is not enough anymore.” 

As VP of Building Resilient Futures at Enterprise Community Partners, Krista Egger stewards the nonprofit’s national environmental programs, including Green Communities, Health Action Plan, Resilience Academies, and Decarbonization Hubs. 

Krista went to Oberlin and and studied physics and architectural history. After college, a stint with AmeriCorps introduced her to a kind of applied building science. “I had the opportunity to identify root causes and then make things better,” she says.  

Sometimes making things better means dismantling long-held beliefs. “For too long,” she says, “there has been a perceived predicament of whether people can build affordable housing or green housing, whether there can be a standard way to operate buildings or green ways of operating buildings. Those are false choices.”

The programs that Egger leads are leveraging capital and policy and resources to solve for barriers that prevent all housing from being affordable, healthy, and resilient. “We are centering the needs of people who live in housing to make decisions about housing.”

related links:
Health Action Plan framework
Green Communities Criteria

Dr. Upali Nanda is Partner and Executive Vice President at HKS. As the firm’s Global Sector Director, Innovation, she oversees HKS’s Research, Advisory, Sustainable Design and Cities & Communities services. Based in Ann Arbor, Upali has extensive experience leading research projects in design practice with a focus on the impact of design on human health and perception. 

Upali believes that the big problems will be solved by getting many disciplines together in conversation. One example, the FDA Home as a Health Hub Idea Lab, brought together housing designers, developers, technology developers, investors, healthcare providers, and others. 

All such work is rooted in Upali’s deep commitment to the integration of research into practice. That commitment has prompted to her to ask deep questions about people and place. “How can we design for humans without knowing how humans are designed?” she asks. “That question got me interested in how humans perceive and behave, and then over time, that evolved into this interest in human health itself.” 

Shannon Goodman is the Executive Director of the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta, which has redirected nearly 13 million pounds of usable materials away from landfills and generated over $6 million in community savings, including 450 in-kind material grants to nonprofits. Shannon also serves as Board President for the nonprofit Build Reuse, representing reuse-focused organizations across the U.S. 

We talked to her about running a nonprofit and about the changes afoot in the AEC field. “We are in the midst of a massive mind shift,” she says. “It's only going to work if people actually see that there is value. We have to stop thinking about these materials as waste. They are resources.”

Shannon’s vision for the reuse work is that “the entire process of what we do gets really sexy for people,” she says. “I look forward to a time when people are compelled by the stories they are hearing of what has been saved and reused. They will think, ‘I want a piece of that for my work.’ That is only going to happen if we make it really easy to tell those stories.”

Jonsara Ruth is co-founder and Design Director of Healthy Materials Lab (HML) at Parsons School of Design, where she is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the MFA Interior Design program. Alison Mears is Associate Professor of Architecture, Director and Co-Founder of HML and Director/Co-Founder of HML EU. 

Alison and Jonsara published “Material Health:Design Frontiers” exploring the intersectional and complex nature of material health. They also co-authored a chapter of The Regenerative Materials Movement (Living Future/Ecotone, 2024). 

This year is the Healthy Materials Lab’s tenth in operation. Alison and Jonsara’s close collaboration has been central to the Lab’s development and to its success in engaging people and changing minds and practices.

“Jonsara and I have a lot in common,” Alison says, “including a drive to use our design skills in the service of a higher goal to produce place for people that meet all their needs. We want to raise the bar. And we want to invite people in to do this work.”

Jonsara says their partnership works well because they have complementary skill sets and they’ve always been willing to hear one another out. “We value intuition and we respect each other’s experience. We are both committed to always learning and evolving,” she says.