Navigating Sustainable Design with Cooper Carry's Sustainability Leader, J.D. Harper

The American Institute of Architects 2030 commitment challenges the world of designers to adopt sustainable design practices. As an early signatory, Cooper Carry developed a comprehensive Sustainability Action Plan in 2010 that outlined our approach for achieving design excellence through sustainable design. Part of that plan included hiring our new Sustainability Leader JD Harper, who shares how designers can navigate the ins and outs of sustainability and how to encourage hesitant clients to embrace the trend.

Q: How can designers make sure a project is classified as sustainable?

JD: : A lot of people ask, “What makes a building sustainable?” But then I always ask, “What are we measuring ourselves against?” If there are certain goals, like making a building net-zero, then you are addressing the energy consumption and embodied carbon of a building. But you could also explore optimizing other resource streams like water and waste. As designers, I think we are uniquely positioned to respond to climate change as a design problem and you do this by creating a dialogue to determine what's the most responsive strategy for the context of a given project. This should be part of the discovery phase for every project. Here are some good questions to ask yourself during this phase: What are the natural gifts on site that we can work with? Do we have really great solar capacity for optimizing daylight? Will there be a lot of rain we can reuse in and around our project? How can we optimize our on-site resources? How can we use new technology, or make the available technology more efficient and effective?

Q: With climate change being such a hot topic, many firms are trying to become more sustainable. Where do you recommend they start??

?JD: As designers, we must start by considering the building’s connection to the community, its connection to the users who are going to spend time there, and its connection to the environment around it. It’s almost like a living organism - it has to be adopted, it has to be accepted, it has to function and flow within the ecosystem where it lives. Cooper Carry has more than 60 LEED-certified projects so far, but I want to grow this focus in our firm by making sure building performance and human health measures are part of our first client discussions and considerations of a project. I think it’s also important, especially if you are at a firm that is just starting to integrate sustainability into practice, to create and educate a team that is knowledgeable about sustainable design, as well as about the requirements for rating systems like LEED or ILFI that focus on reducing the carbon footprint of a building. Firms should also initiate conversations about sustainability with clients and their communities, and even determine areas of improvement in the carbon footprint of their own company. As firms grow in their sustainability endeavors, each designer should become more knowledgeable on the subject and gain skills to design holistically, turning sustainability into a team effort within the practice.?

Q: How should designers approach the idea of sustainability with their clients?

?JD: It is important to make sustainability personal, to link it to a client’s values, and meet them where they’re at. Some clients will want to sell a building, others will want to own and operate, so those are going to be two different conversations. This is especially true when architects and clients need to navigate building performance requirements from local municipalities and building codes. For clients who want to sell their building, the building performance and human health aspects become marketable ways to improve the overall value for the investment, and therefore, the owner. For those that hold on to their buildings, there might be opportunities for a longer ROI, where maintenance and operations will be critical components in decision making. At the end of the day, every project is an opportunity to help repair our relationship with the environment, and it just makes good business sense to do it.?

Learn more about J.D. in the link below.