Guest Blogger: An Imaginary Letter About Design and Sustainability

Dear college presidents, facilities managers, trustees, planning committees, and all of you who affect decisions about the built environment of your campuses (hint: if you’re reading this, that’s you) —

Gretchen Schneider

Thank you.

Thank you for showing leadership in embracing environmental responsibility in your building, even though it may not be the cheapest or simplest course in the short term. You’re not like other businesses — you’re in this for the very, very, very long haul, and if you can’t see the long-term benefits and paybacks of stewardship of our resources for the next generation, no one can.

Thank you for commissioning special and extraordinary buildings that inspire the imagination and spark discussion. And as in the classroom, not every contribution needs to be well-loved. Sometimes the controversial adds more substance to the discussion.

Thank you for also realizing that not every structure should draw attention to itself; thanks for paying attention to everyday landscapes, too. It’s often the simple things that have the greatest impact on our daily routine — the placement of a tree along a path, or the location of a door. Thank you for understanding how buildings and landscapes work together.

Thank you for recognizing that campus design is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

Thank you for renovating your mid-century structures rather than treating them as disposable relics and putting still more construction waste into landfills. This aging infrastructure was constructed in a very different economic and environmental era; bringing it up to date is a challenging and wonderful and important design project. The rest of the country can learn from how you re-think your 20th-century buildings.

Thank you for opening your campus walls to your surrounding neighborhoods, and for supporting faculty, staff, and student work in design that benefits “the other 98 percent.” Thank you for supporting not only high-profile projects that offer good photo-ops, but also behind-the-scenes research into new business and practice models that seek to make good design affordable for the diverse populations of our communities.

Thank you for challenging old ways of teaching architecture. The building-as-image slide lectures are not enough. Thank you for encouraging built-environment topics to infuse the curricula of environmental science, economics, sociology, psychology, and history courses, too.

Thank you for turning your campuses into classrooms, for including students in your decision making and discussing with them what, why, and how you are building. Even more important than all the landscape and architecture students on your rosters are those economics and sociology and political-science and journalism majors (to name only a few). These students will go on to decide the future of our buildings and neighborhoods; they’re the ones who will set the agendas; they will someday hire architects — and they’re the ones most likely not paying attention to this stuff right now. By teaching them that their decisions do affect the built world they live in, and by demonstrating to them that the built world of the future can be better than the one they come from, you will change the shape of our country. —Gretchen Schneider

Gretchen Schneider, August’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, taught architecture at Smith College before opening her own practice in Boston. You can read her previous posts here, here, and here.