Designing for Tomorrow: Sustainability in a Shifting Landscape

[00:00:00] In the latest edition of the Gensler Design Podcast, sustainable design emerges as a pivotal

[00:00:14] trend among the eight shaping landscape of design in 2024. As we confront the challenges

[00:00:20] of extreme weather and climate instability, the call for sustainable design rises above

[00:00:25] preference. It's now an urgent necessity. Because of Gensler's scale, we shoulder a profound

[00:00:32] responsibility to address the climate crisis through our work. How do we navigate the path to

[00:00:37] decarbonization? That's the topic we dive into in this episode. I'm your host David Calkins,

[00:00:44] the Regional Managing Principal of Gensler's Asia Pacific Middle East Region, and I'm glad

[00:00:48] to welcome you to another episode of the Gensler Design Podcast. Joining us today to navigate

[00:00:56] through these evolving trends are Juliet Morgan and Wang Yi-chun. Juliet is the ESG consultancy

[00:01:03] director and global leader of Gensler's Climate Action and Sustainability Practice Area based out

[00:01:09] of our London office. Meanwhile, Yi-chun serves as the Regional Leader of Gensler's Climate Action

[00:01:15] and Sustainability Practice Area in the Asia Pacific Middle East Region. Welcome to the podcast,

[00:01:21] Juliet, in Yi-chun. It's great to have you here. Hope you're having a great day. To get started,

[00:01:26] though, maybe we could start with you, Juliet, if you could talk a little bit about your background

[00:01:30] and your journey through sustainable design to date? Sure, and so 20 years ago I was studying

[00:01:37] to be a surveyor and learnt some sustainable architecture techniques at the Centre for Automatic

[00:01:42] Technology and Wales. My professional career has been on the client side, so asset management

[00:01:46] and development of buildings. I'm not an architect. About 60 years ago, I got involved in refurbishing

[00:01:52] a 400,000-foot tower, and the Net Zero conversation was happening, and we were looking at extending

[00:01:59] the building in cross-laminated timber, and I got really interested in materials and laminated

[00:02:04] bamboo and how you can use biogenic materials to reach Net Zero. And also about the role of urban

[00:02:10] wildness and what that does for wellness both for people within the buildings and outside of the

[00:02:14] buildings. So that took me to offsetting some development projects which gave me direct experience

[00:02:20] of what's involved in actually getting a building to true Net Zero, and some strategy writing around

[00:02:26] Net Zero policy for business till 2030. And from there I came to Gensler, so a lot of practical

[00:02:32] client side experience of the delivery of the concept of Net Zero through to the doing of Net Zero

[00:02:37] and how that relates to biogenic materials and rewilding the public. Well, really interesting.

[00:02:42] I mean you're very committed to the built environment. Maybe we'll talk a little bit later about

[00:02:47] the impact that the built environment has on the environment as a whole. So you tune can you tell

[00:02:52] us a little bit about your background and how you got into sustainable design in resilient?

[00:02:57] Yeah, for me started about slightly more than 20 years ago when I was graduating my Amok in Singapore.

[00:03:04] It's a bit of being competitive and avoiding work at the same time. So this was when I was going

[00:03:10] to graduate. So I was searching for an additional angle to make design proposals more compelling.

[00:03:15] This was the time when the Singapore National Library at Bougays was just being done,

[00:03:19] and the university actually consulted on it for building performance. They did a whole bunch of

[00:03:24] simulations to optimize the design, made it much more comfortable using less energy, a lot of

[00:03:29] automation. And this was also an early case of sky gardens as well as performance based contracts

[00:03:34] of buildings, and it was really compelling and I thought that was a very good example of how

[00:03:40] architecture is going to be practiced in the future. So I approached the professors involved and my

[00:03:44] journey started from there. Turn out all of them were trained in building performance in Carnegie

[00:03:48] Mallon. So I did the same day sent me off to Carnegie Mallon. I did a doctorate in building

[00:03:52] performance and a short stain as a green building consultant over there that came back to Singapore as a

[00:03:58] professor in architecture for a couple of years to refine my thoughts on integrating building

[00:04:02] performance in architecture design, which is what we refer to as a sustainable design nowadays.

[00:04:07] I joined the building industry about that data goal running a green and healthy building

[00:04:12] certification company in Shanghai. After the decade, I was looking for a better platform to make

[00:04:17] greater impact since the majority of certification work in Asia is post design when everything

[00:04:22] is completed, the building is under construction, then we get caught in to consult on getting

[00:04:28] lead or well or green marks certificate. So you can almost caught head rearranging

[00:04:32] deck chairs under the Titanic. And I was very lucky to find and join Genslid this year. It's a very

[00:04:37] positive community that is also actively exploring how it can increase its positive impact at scale

[00:04:43] versus the ability. Well each and we're really glad that you did join us and we're thrilled to

[00:04:48] have you here in the Singapore office and we know that you'll make a big impact across our

[00:04:52] whole APME region. So now maybe you all could help us set the context a little bit and talk about

[00:04:58] how important our buildings are and the impact that they have on the environment of the world as

[00:05:04] a whole. Could you just sort of lay that out for everybody that's listening? Sure, thanks for the

[00:05:09] question. So emissions from building operations and construction account for about a third of global

[00:05:15] energy related emissions. So it's about 13.6 gigatons of carbon. So transport industry, everything

[00:05:22] else is about 63 percent but actually buildings is a good 37 percent and it breaks down between

[00:05:28] residential, commercial and construction industry. So we have quite a significant impact on the world

[00:05:35] and it's the the challenge and mission and opportunity of our time to try and juice that.

[00:05:40] Yeah exactly. You know we spend most of our times and buildings in urban lifestyles so that

[00:05:44] definitely leaves a clue to the importance and the huge impact that buildings would have in carbon

[00:05:49] emissions like Julius mentioned or the end users are roughly transport industry agriculture

[00:05:54] and then buildings and it's about one third one third one third where agriculture the last piece

[00:06:00] varies depending on what kind of economy we're talking about and in the case of Singapore where

[00:06:04] we don't have agriculture where we are compact city so transport it's a little bit more efficient.

[00:06:10] The statistics actually would skew down towards building an industry. So in Singapore the

[00:06:15] buildings actually account for slightly higher almost 40 percent and transport agriculture is very

[00:06:20] small. And so what we do as architects and designers is really really important. How can we begin

[00:06:26] to improve the situation make things better from an emission standpoint at least? Yeah,

[00:06:32] as with any and all problems in life or professional settings the first step to addressing something

[00:06:38] is to recognize it that it is a problem to pay attention to it and to be able to quantify it.

[00:06:43] So there are too many aspects of carbon emissions and buildings and body carbons in terms of the materials

[00:06:48] they are used and an operational carbon in terms of energy used to run the building. We need to have

[00:06:54] a sense of the size of things and we need to have a needle that tells us if things are moving

[00:07:00] the right direction and I think that's the biggest challenge. Talking about design solutions,

[00:07:05] design actions strategies tactics I'm not that worried. I think most architects and designers have

[00:07:11] been trained in this sustainable design has always been a part of good design. So I think

[00:07:16] the biggest challenge at our hurdle here is the culture change of including this quantitative

[00:07:21] number base what I call performance measurements and quantifications early on and during design as

[00:07:26] one of the many dimensions in a design process and design decisions and reducing emissions is

[00:07:32] the same challenge since it is actually part of building performance. So I'm saying is that architects

[00:07:37] and designers do know the concepts and strategies of emission reduction such as optimizing materials

[00:07:42] and finishes, reducing thermaganes, air conditioning needs but that is very hard to translate to actual

[00:07:48] design tactics activity when we don't have benchmarks targets numbers fast and useful quantifications

[00:07:55] and when there's without all these numbers we can imagine that the designer would move on to other

[00:08:00] pressing issues and challenges. What we need to help them or what they have to do is to have all

[00:08:06] these benchmarks and targets for embodied and operational emissions available and the second is

[00:08:12] to have calculators and tools that will give them active feedback wherever they are at any point

[00:08:17] in design. Then the designers can really flourish in driving the impact of the design in terms of

[00:08:22] design for net zero and it's the same gamut processes from responding to climate passive strategies

[00:08:29] out of programming, minimizing spaces, spatial diversity, appropriate types of resource and energy

[00:08:34] uses, singularity, active systems smart controls and finally maximizing green orables.

[00:08:41] Yeah I also think there's a kind of hierarchy of things we can do so the first thing we can do is

[00:08:46] prioritize retrofit and there's retrofit available of buildings you can save about 40% of carbon

[00:08:51] and I mentioned biogenic materials earlier on. Using grown materials cross laminated timber

[00:08:57] my cellium is insulation there's lots of opportunities to use biogenic materials so less on kind

[00:09:02] of hard construction methods more on building and composting buildings and then each

[00:09:07] in mentioned passive design strategies but also looking at things like site conditions and

[00:09:13] orientation to reduce solar gain or increase cross ventilation. One of the things that we ask

[00:09:18] buildings to do is do everything for us so we have codes in various places that require us to have

[00:09:24] heating and cooling and we can take some of the engineering or the energy load off buildings

[00:09:29] by being more adaptive as humans so being more open to temperature tolerance. And then there's

[00:09:35] a lot of conversation about design for end of life but there also needs to be design for beginning

[00:09:39] of life. Trying to minimize construction waste look at opportunities within circular economy

[00:09:46] reduce on-site vehicles or electrification of on-site vehicles having a digital twin

[00:09:51] say meta tagging materials in buildings and then considering whether there's opportunities

[00:09:55] that offsite manufacturing so there's plenty of levers and your chance absolutely right about

[00:10:00] need to quantify but once you've quantified then you can pull all those different design levers

[00:10:05] to reduce the embodied and operational carbon. You're a global leader at the firm Juliet

[00:10:10] and so you mentioned a whole bunch of strategies just here but is there anything else that we're doing

[00:10:15] particularly against there to try and make a difference along these lines? I think the most

[00:10:19] interesting one recently is we've reached out that thing called Gensel product standards GPS

[00:10:24] which are essentially the 10 most commonly specified materials that we use on most of our projects

[00:10:29] and we've set some sustainability standards for those products which means that our designers

[00:10:33] can permission them on any project and have absolute confidence that they meet our sustainability

[00:10:37] targets but also that our supply chain compliances. And so if a product doesn't meet those

[00:10:44] sustainability that Gensel product standard now it won't be specified in the Gensel project.

[00:10:49] Yeah just tap on more than what Juliet just mentioned there is also the potential for Gensel to

[00:10:55] move the entire market along to see action in the whole market particularly in APME where product

[00:11:01] disclosures are not that commonplace with data availability is not that mature yet there's a sort

[00:11:07] of paralysis in action because from top to bottom you cannot set a standard because the designers

[00:11:13] don't know how to deal with it, designers don't know how to do it because the products do not

[00:11:16] disclose and it goes around and around. And Gensel is breaking that vicious cycle by saying hey we

[00:11:21] are going to take a position on sustainable standards which will encourage vendors to start disclosing

[00:11:28] a little bit more and that would then upstream support national jurisdictions in forming local standards

[00:11:34] and courts around products sustainability. So I think what the GPS is doing in this part of world

[00:11:41] will also have movements along policy and other benefits as opposed to more of an implementation

[00:11:47] level in Europe or US. Juliet could you give our listeners a little bit of a sense of our climate

[00:11:54] action and sustainability practice globally in terms of the depth and scope of our efforts?

[00:12:00] Yeah we're about 70 practitioners worldwide spread between North America Latin America,

[00:12:07] Europe and Asia Pacific Middle East so we have global coverage within our climate action sustainability

[00:12:13] practice. As a group of professionals we're comprised of predominantly architects and engineers

[00:12:18] and most of our service offerings are around whole life cycle assessment and certification

[00:12:23] but we also do strategy work so we can help guide on setting net zero pathways, portfolio review

[00:12:30] peer review so we can do peer review so one of the ones that I'm really appreciative of at the

[00:12:35] moment is Ten Gresham Street in London we were invited in to do a peer review what that meant

[00:12:41] was that we were able to push the design team to go from Bream excellent to Bream outstanding

[00:12:47] that enabled our clients to access borrowing at a more competitive rate they've been able to

[00:12:53] access green finance and then through the design process it became apparent that the ESG's position

[00:12:59] for the building hadn't been captured and so our teams worked on life cycle assessment or whole

[00:13:05] life carbon assessment for the whole building and in going through that process identified that

[00:13:10] as a retrofit it was one of the most competitive buildings in London so that gives a really great

[00:13:15] opportunity for the developer to position it in the market. It was a project that changed the lens

[00:13:20] of how we approach place and disclosure about place relative to the commissioning bodies and

[00:13:26] is a good example of how when you bring in a peer review you can get some rigour around the design

[00:13:32] process that brings better outcomes so the building leases faster and it has better finance rates

[00:13:37] and is less impactful on the planet but more impactful on people and yeah it's a nice example

[00:13:43] of what happens when we can work through Bream peer review whole life cycle assessment and ESG reporting.

[00:13:49] So I have heard that you all are going to be making a joint presentation in a couple of weeks at

[00:13:54] a key meeting of many Gensler leaders that we call the super meeting and I think one of the things

[00:14:00] that you're trying to achieve is really a higher degree of awareness and education and issue

[00:14:06] a call to action our firm is very committed. You tune talked about GC3 and maybe you could just

[00:14:11] define what that is for us but then talk a little bit more about how education and consciousness

[00:14:16] raising is important in the sustainable design movement. Definitely the GC3 Gensler cities climate

[00:14:22] challenges are target for all our designs to be net zero ready by 2030 and I would turn it around

[00:14:30] and say that it is about our own awareness and capabilities that when we are putting up designs

[00:14:35] that we are very conscious of the larger context in which our buildings and our designs and what

[00:14:41] would be the most feasible economical practical and impactful way to deliver net zero kind of environment.

[00:14:49] Obviously a lot of it has to do with the grid, the transport infrastructure, the circularity

[00:14:55] of some of the materials and waste systems within the municipality that our buildings or design

[00:15:00] exist and it varies a lot across geographies and especially markets. So I think awareness is to me

[00:15:08] the simple one and I don't think awareness is a problem. I think the challenge is when does all the

[00:15:15] external influences of how markets work, what the other stakeholders are motivated by,

[00:15:20] the incentives and regulations and unless the rest of these market factors are in place to motivate

[00:15:26] and reward a stakeholder to work on some of its sustainability. Then awareness and skilling

[00:15:31] and education is just as with harry. Yeah I think the super meeting conversation is a really important

[00:15:37] one I've been doing course in EK design and the way that nature communicates and we are nature

[00:15:43] humans have human nature is that when you get a murmuration of birds or a show of fishes they

[00:15:49] communicate wing to wing or fin to fin. So when you change one person it cascades through a system

[00:15:54] and the system has what in ecological terms we call emergence so it's really critical to us to keep

[00:16:00] seeding within our community changes and discourse so we're finding a lot of different emerging

[00:16:04] regulations and inconsistency in different parts of the world around where there's building standards

[00:16:11] whether they're mandatory whether they're compulsory and so we're not operating in an environment

[00:16:15] culturally that has uniformity to and that's quite challenging. So it's not like hey I know about

[00:16:21] climate change I'm done now I can go and design a net zero building because the regulator environment

[00:16:26] in which our clients are operating and where they're operating is moving really really quickly

[00:16:32] and when you couple that with the scale of the problem we can cognitively know it we read the

[00:16:36] press and it says code red for humanity's been issued that this is last chance to lean but I think

[00:16:41] what happens is when we design and we design in a net zero context that gives us permission to

[00:16:47] continue spending carbon. That for me the education piece is about understanding the context of that

[00:16:52] carbon there is what's called a carbon budget of the world and there's a finite amount

[00:16:57] of that carbon available to be shared amongst everybody so you can go on a country carbon calculator

[00:17:03] and work out country by country what the rate of consumption is so I plugged in the figures for

[00:17:08] the UK yesterday at the current rate of consumption we would cross our carbon threshold in 2035

[00:17:14] that same calculation run for Saudi Arabia yesterday said that they would cross at existing

[00:17:19] rate of consumption in the next two years. So these are peer reviewed scientifically accredited

[00:17:25] so as global designers we need to be mindful of the fact that when we're commissioning designing

[00:17:31] working with clients to construct and are in that carbon economy doing it within the context of

[00:17:36] a finite amount is why designing to net zero is so critical for us because that's our contribution

[00:17:43] to this global effort that we're engaged in with our clients. So pivoting slightly artificial

[00:17:49] intelligence AI is something that our firm is really interested in and trying to figure out how

[00:17:54] to best utilize that on behalf of our clients. How are we looking at utilizing AI, AI driven tools

[00:18:02] to move us toward net zero? Yeah buildings are complex systems but stemming from

[00:18:10] causal relationships that might be nonlinear non-continuous but follows lots of physics right so

[00:18:15] technology or digital technology is obviously going to be very useful for dealing with large

[00:18:20] data sets from designing to operating low carbon buildings but this distribution of buildings

[00:18:25] is important to consider as you choose your flavor of AI or for the task that you're talking about

[00:18:30] like reducing carbon. I say that because there's a lot of confusion on the use of the term AI it could

[00:18:35] be in popular usage today AI equals generate AI but generate AI is not equals to automation, machine

[00:18:44] learning without getting caught up in that debate maybe I'll just say design technology or digital

[00:18:50] technologies. So in design optimization and building controls for reducing carbon the older variants

[00:18:55] of such digital technology like machine learning and automation are already very useful

[00:19:01] such as automated lifecycle carbon, the conversations as we choose materials as we

[00:19:06] spec materials and our great example is G Planet a digital tool in Gensler that helps with

[00:19:12] automated workflows with carbon related sustainability analyses so G Planet is still being refined

[00:19:18] continuously with the aim to include more and faster sustainability analyses that will help our

[00:19:23] designers do more in carbon reduction. So Juliet just in simple terms what do you think the biggest

[00:19:30] problem is at this point and what are we trying to do to fix it? By far the biggest problem is the

[00:19:36] carbon emissions and the challenge we have is that it's quite hard to design out carbon from the

[00:19:42] things that buildings are made out of so if concrete was a country it would be equivalent to China

[00:19:48] in terms of the amount of concrete emissions in the world. The major challenge for us is innovating

[00:19:53] in materiality and having that materiality be code compliant and insurance compliant and fireproof

[00:19:59] compliant there are innovations happening in the most impactful aspects of the built environment

[00:20:04] industry so low concrete is coming through it was a net zero concrete been produced by Hidalberg

[00:20:10] in Germany there is recycle steel a steel is a big emitter but the amount or availability of global

[00:20:16] recycle steel demand far exceeds supply. Buildings are in many senses not dynamic so it's hard to

[00:20:24] retrofit without spending any more carbon and it's hard to construct new without spending any more

[00:20:29] carbon and we're having to do that from within an environment where a huge proportion of the carbon

[00:20:34] is driven climate change so I would say the biggest problem is carbon but we get really sidetracked by

[00:20:39] only the carbon conversation that we are living in the middle of a species collapse and there's

[00:20:44] an interrelationship between those two things so what you'll see in the next few years is a lot more

[00:20:49] reporting around impacts on nature water pollution improvements in biodiversity and those things need

[00:20:56] to be seen hand in hand in terms of the role that the built environment from place so reducing

[00:21:00] body carbon and design and construction operational carbon and operations but also when we design having

[00:21:06] an eye to what's the biodiversity that's been displaced what's the impact on water and then

[00:21:11] the last piece of this in a kind of hierarchy is our ability to be resilient and adaptive as communities

[00:21:18] so we know from climate modeling that a number of places are going to be under heat stress or

[00:21:23] climate stress or flood stress and so how are we designed to be sensitive to those future

[00:21:28] scenarios when none of what we built anticipated that stuff is again a serious challenge because it

[00:21:35] puts us back in that place of needing to spend more carbon to solve some of those problems so

[00:21:39] this is all a pursuit of balance that's not something that you can legislate for

[00:21:45] yet you can start at this conversation around a conversation about culture and education

[00:21:50] and I think when we have a context for making decisions and that context is how we're trying to pull

[00:21:57] the different levers but do it in such a way that the Native American tribes talk about designing

[00:22:01] for seven generations in future there's a lot to be learned from thinking about very long time

[00:22:07] decision making and taking responsibility for our decisions today. So our firm is really committed

[00:22:12] to shaping the future of cities can you talk a little bit about how we can impact cities positively

[00:22:18] in terms of sustainable design and what the future of that is and how important that is?

[00:22:24] Yeah over the next 15 to 20 years I think urbanization population is going to grow by modern

[00:22:30] and billion there's a lot of building that's going to happen and the context of the development in

[00:22:35] this part of the world invariably means that we're looking at city centers and probably not the

[00:22:40] sprawl model. I think what Gensela is doing or Gensela is the potential to bring impact at skill

[00:22:47] is the way we think about and design the urban scape and the buildings we have to be a little bit

[00:22:52] positive and imagine that the infrastructure, the transportation, the energy sources and our

[00:23:00] artistic holdings are doing their part and if they do their part then we have no excuse how do we

[00:23:07] design buildings in this sort of a context? We have to design buildings that are way more integrated

[00:23:14] with the rest of urban scape and giving back to the urban scape rather than staying as isolated

[00:23:21] parcels and isolated glass boxes and we need to help encourage dialogue and changes as well as

[00:23:28] supporting cultures and activities that will be the backdrop of future existence.

[00:23:35] So Juliet maybe just to wrap up can you talk about how you see the future of sustainable design

[00:23:40] and I guess I would ask you directly do you foresee a future where it's just design it's not

[00:23:45] sustainable design anymore? It should always have just been design. I think we are going to see

[00:23:52] a significant shift to a conversation about regenerative design, designing in partnership with nature

[00:23:59] and being much more mindful about the interrelationship between the building and where it's offset carbon

[00:24:05] goes. It's something that's referred to as nature ecosystem services. I think that's a really

[00:24:10] uncomfortable expression. It's not nature's job to tidy up after us but we need to look at that

[00:24:15] interrelationship between buildings and cities and how it affects the hinterland and the role of carbon

[00:24:20] sinks in oceans or forests, peak lands. So I think we're going to see a lot more around eco design

[00:24:26] systems thinking interrelationship carbon accounting but a shift towards beyond net zero so

[00:24:34] hopefully conversations about nature positive and regenerative design. Well thank you both.

[00:24:40] This has been great. Do each of you have any advice for potential clients that might be listening?

[00:24:46] I would encourage clients colleagues who take sustainability seriously. I think a lot of us are

[00:24:53] hiding behind the inertial of legislations of governments of international dialogues which

[00:24:59] understandably takes a long time to progress but I think it's also because of the inequity between

[00:25:06] people who make decisions and the rest of society that suffers the consequences. So at some point

[00:25:12] that's going to change but I think in the meantime it's very important for us to not just keep working

[00:25:17] on good practices within what we can do but to also try to push envelopes across stakeholders whether

[00:25:24] it's people we're collaborating with, people that's supplying to us or governments that are

[00:25:29] working with. Mine would be understand the scale of the problem and the urgency of the problem

[00:25:36] in the context of global carbon budget and country carbon budget and not doing things as legitimate

[00:25:41] as doing things so thinking as much about the design decisions that you don't need, the things

[00:25:46] that you can do without is as valid as designing more stuff in, have a true handle on your carbon

[00:25:53] output but also your relationship with water and biodiversity and habitat and species.

[00:25:58] Well Juliet, you tune your contributions and insights have been truly invaluable. As we conclude

[00:26:04] it's abundantly clear sustainable design stands as a formidable force against climate change

[00:26:10] offering tangible strategies to curb emissions within our built environment.

[00:26:14] Genseles initiatives are at the forefront charting a course toward a carbon neutral future

[00:26:19] strengthened by the bedrock of education awareness and technological advancement.

[00:26:24] Artfeld thank you to Juliet and Yichun for sharing their wealth of knowledge and experience with

[00:26:29] us today. Thank you for tuning in, I'm David Caukins and I look forward to our next encounter.