5th Annual Leadership Summit for Sustainable Design

“Inspiring Change in Sustainable Design” was the organisers’ objective at the Design Futures Council’s 5th Annual Leadership Summit, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S., from 16 to 18 October 2006.
by Dr. Matthias Krups

The summit provided a tour de force of presentations, group discussions and working sessions. Ray Anderson, chairman and founder of carpet giant Interface, Inc. and one of the world’s most environmentally progressive leaders on sustainable commerce, opened the conference. For many years Interface has been developing processes to make its operations environmentally sustainable. Ray’s talk showed that for Interface—a “petro-intensive” company—the ultimate vision was to prevent the company from ever having to take another drop of oil from the earth.

Over the course of the conference, presentations were made by both design practitioners and sustainability experts. Among the practitioners was HOK’s Mary Ann Lazarus, co-author of The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design, who spoke of HOK’s specific impact on carbon emissions. With 6.5 million square metres of floor space designed in the last 50 years, HOK has contributed 12.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the world’s emissions—roughly the equivalent of operating 63,000 cars on the road for half a century. HOK is now considered one of the industry’s most environmentally conscious firms.

Ed Mazria, environmental activist and founder of architecture firm Mazria Inc., Odems and Dzurec, updated the audience on his Architecture 2030 Initiative, explaining the “2010 Imperative: Global Emergency Teach-in”. This is an interactive web-cast broadcast live on 20 February 2007 from the New York Academy of Sciences targeting design schools, firms and government entities around the world.

Nigel Dancey, senior partner of Foster and Partners, highlighted the firm’s expertise in high performance buildings and showcased some of the firm’s most celebrated projects, including the Swiss Re headquarters in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the new Terminal 3 at the Beijing Capital International Airport.

Dr. Stephen Chu’s presentation was the highlight of the summit. Dr. Chu, co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, displayed a stunning breadth of knowledge of the science relevant to solving the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. “The world has a clear and major problem, with no global consensus on the way to proceed, how to achieve transitions to an adequately affordable, sustainable clean energy supply,” Dr. Chu said.

The 5th Leadership Summit will document its conclusions in the “Santa Fe Priorities”, designed as an addendum to the Nantucket Principles, the council’s original policy agenda laid out at its first summit in 2002. The Santa Fe Priorities will be published by the Design Futures Council and disseminated through multiple channels of communication, including FuturArc.

Design Futures Council is a leading U.S.-based architectural think tank.

About the Author
Dr. Matthias Krups is a member of the Design Futures Council’s Board of Advisors and the publisher of FuturArc.