Taking Up the Challenge

Thanks to ballooning gasoline prices and smoggy tailpipe emissions, Americans tend to think first about their automobiles when they look for ways to save the environment. But architecture is a far more significant part of the equation than we might realize.

Many scientists say the coming decades will be crucial in turning around our greenhouse gas emissions. If we don’t reduce our pollution outputs significantly, they say, it will be almost impossible to avoid catastrophic climate change. Yet there are hundreds of new coal-fired energy plants on the drawing board. Why? Because we need the electricity to power the structures in which we live and work. Fully 76 percent of the energy produced at these plants will go to operate buildings.

In 2002, Santa Fe, New Mexico–based architect Edward Mazria looked at these facts, realized their implications, and decided to found a nonprofit called Architecture 2030. The mission of the organization is to help stop global warming by quickly transforming the way the construction industry plans, designs, and builds buildings.

In January 2006, the nonprofit issued its 2030 challenge: It proposed that architects start designing buildings, developments, and renovations to meet a fossil fuel, greenhouse gas emission, and energy consumption standard of 50 percent of the regional or country average for buildings of the same type. The standard would then be increased incrementally until 2030, when buildings would be designed to be completely carbon-neutral—in other words, using little or no fossil fuel to operate and offsetting any use by purchasing renewable energy credits.

That might seem like a tall order, but the building sector has begun to embrace the idea. Groups such as the American Institute of Architects and the U.S. Conference of Mayors have made the challenge a priority. And scores of architectural, design, and engineering companies have committed themselves to meeting these rigorous standards in all of the work they do.

One such company is Meyer Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd., a Minneapolis architecture firm. The company’s director of sustainable design, Sean Wagner, says he heard Mazria give a lecture and was inspired. “It was just one of those things that made perfect sense,” he says. “Once he came out with the challenge [in early 2007], I sat down with the partners here in the office and I made a personal commitment to adopting it. Within a day or so, all the partners came back and said ‘We need to do this.’ We were the first architecture firm in the state of Minnesota to sign on.”