Carole C. Wedge, FAIA, LEED AP

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Carole Wedge is president of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott and chair of the Boston Society of Architects’ (BSA) conference planning committee for the 2008 AIA National Convention and Design Expo in Boston. A member of Shepley Bulfinch since 1986, Wedge was elected its president in 2004. As part of her work to emphasize the firm’s commitment to sustainable design, she led the effort to achieve LEED certification for Shepley Bulfinch’s offices and was one of the early adopters of the 2010 Imperative and 2030 Challenge.

Education: I went to the University of Colorado in ’77 and started off thinking I’d be an oceanographer. Then, through a circuitous path, I ended up in environmental design. For CU, that was a renegade solar power/architecture/environmental design program, so we were all focused on how to design more sustainable communities. After completing the architecture program at Colorado, I wanted to see some of the architecture I’d studied, so I moved to Paris and spent the better part of a year traveling in Europe and going to school in Paris.

The world was my education. I went to lots of museums and buildings. I toured all over Europe and spent a lot of time in Italy and Greece and, like any architecture student, finally saw all the things I’d been studying and learning about. I think that spending time outside your native culture expands your horizon in a phenomenal way.

After college: When I came back, we were in a recession. It was the early ’80s, and I interviewed at lots of good firms that were perfectly happy to talk to me because all of their work had stopped, but nobody was hiring anyone fresh out of school. I worked in a department store and did a bunch of jobs to make ends meet. Then, I took a job on Wall Street as a portfolio manager’s assistant and became a stockbroker, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise and a great experience.

It’s amazing what architects do in recessions! I learned a lot about money and about business. I grew up as a professional and worked with clients and saw their expectations. I worked for an interesting woman who was a broker and helped her manage her client accounts. I then took my broker’s license and started managing little accounts on my own. Wall Street’s a really interesting place and for the first year and a half you’re soaking it up like a sponge because it is so different. The stock market first broke 1,000 when I was there. It was 1982. I remember there were companies that were floating this crazy new idea of a fax machine and no one was sure anyone would buy one. It was cool to get to know the analysts who would look at companies and innovation and try to understand which innovations were going to thrive and which ones were great, crazy ideas but didn’t really have a market. I learned a lot about business in an accidental way.

Then, when my company in New York said that the environmental design degree wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go professionally, I started taking MBA classes. I thought: “I’m really an architect in disguise. I should go back to architecture school.” I moved to Boston and went to the Boston Architectural Center (BAC) in 1986.

Stepping into the profession: I liked the BAC program because I could work in a firm during the day and go to school in the evening. When I went there, it had grown out of an apprenticeship philosophy and had great relationships with firms around the city. Shepley Bulfinch was where I first started. I went to the work curriculum office at the BAC and asked what offices I might go interview at. I interviewed at Shepley and a few other firms in town and started working here in the mailroom. Back in those days, we used to hire young architects to work in the mail room to run prints and errands, open the mail, sharpen pencils, help put the models in the car, drive the principals, and basically do all things to help the team. The best part for me was that I learned a lot about what was going on in the company because I would read the mail. I knew what all the jobs were doing and I met all the principals and got to know them, because they were the ones who were the most frenetic and needed the most help from the mailroom or the print room. I did that for about a year, and then I was transitioned onto projects. I feel like Shepley was my training ground. Shepley taught me to be an architect as much as school did.

Interest in sustainability: When I think about it, it goes back to high school. I had a great biology teacher who taught us about earth science and that led to thinking I wanted to do something in oceanography or biology in college, and that took me over to environmental design. Each step was following a path of loving the environment. I was the kid who always wanted to go on a camping trip or to the beach. I loved the outdoors, so it all fell together.

The program I was in at UC was focused on alternative energy and alternative design because the oil prices of the late ’70s had everybody concerned that oil prices were going to continue to skyrocket and we needed to address that. Colorado has the right climate and predisposition to do a lot of solar power, be more creative, and want to use land effectively. There were a lot of faculty who were champions and leaders and who taught us about the interconnectedness, and I think that’s always been with me.

The other part of sustainability is vernacular architecture. Historically, it was always part of architecture to design in touch with the land. I think, in many ways, the industrial revolution let us take a vacation from totally understanding our impact on the environment and allowed us to be insensitive to the environment.

I remember the first time I went to Taliesin East. It was a 100-degree day outside Madison, but the theater that was dug into the ground was 60 degrees. The whole tour wanted to stay there all afternoon. They’re not new ideas, but we’ve only rediscovered them in the last decade. I think we’ve really reached the tipping point culturally.

On the 2030 Challenge and LEED: I was at a Design Futures Leadership Council meeting through Design Intelligence and Ed Mazria [AIA] was one of the speakers. I had never met him before, never known his practice, or the fact that all of those buildings he was designing were using so much less energy in pretty pragmatic ways. He wasn’t doing anything over the top. He wasn’t using systems that people couldn’t understand or adapt to their homes in a very easy way, but when he did the 2030 presentation to the group of 100 people—mostly architects but all designers—I think everyone in the room felt changed. I remember one person saying, “I feel like we’ve all been given a terminal diagnosis simultaneously. If we don’t do something about it, who will?”

Many of the people in that room were presidents or managing principals of big firms and had the power to bring about significant change. Many were already doing a lot of innovative things with their clients, but for me it became important to walk the walk. Probably the most challenging thing for Shepley Bulfinch has been to effectively measure what we’re doing and measure it in a way that we can look back and see how much of a difference we made.

I think that’s where the USGBC LEED® program came from: you can have lofty goals, but can you truly measure if you executed your goals? The 2030 Challenge and the 2010 Imperative became a touchstone for us. I shared it with the other folks in our office who were focused on sustainable design on their projects, but also on having a bigger discussion about the impact we could have.

Transforming a historic firm into a sustainable firm: I would say it’s been somewhere between not at all difficult and sustainable design is always more complicated. You have to select the right team to work together, and it’s a learning curve for clients. Oftentimes the systems that were installed in the buildings on their campus aren’t running sustainably, so it’s part education. For our firm, it’s always been part of sensible building, so it doesn’t feel more than a couple degrees of thoughtfulness over from what we were doing anyway.

But, I think it involves a much more thoughtful beginning to a project: siting the project and thinking about the opportunities for the landscape and about what other team members need to come in and brainstorm about the sustainable potential of a project. The clients are everywhere from incredibly progressive, being coached by their constituents, students, or faculty, to not as well informed people who are looking to us to help them understand the impact that they can have. Just like every other design project, it’s easy to get people excited about it. It’s more of a dedicated process to execute it.

What can members expect at the AIA Convention in Boston? I think they can expect to see some interesting surprises. Both the tenor of the convention and the theme of We the People are to stretch the role of architects in society and inspire, invite, and encourage people to participate at a much larger level, understanding the bigger impact of their role.

It’s been 16 years since the convention has been here, so there are a lot of wonderful new buildings in the city and in Cambridge. There’s been a lot that’s gone on in housing, and in museums, colleges, and universities, so for architects who love to experience a city by seeing the new buildings, I think they’ll be really invigorated by that.

We’re working on doing outreach with the community and bringing students and emerging professionals into the convention. I was in San Antonio in 2007, and I thought it was a great convention. People were really inspired by the Going Beyond Green theme. I felt like there was allegiance and alignment across professionals about sustainability, but I felt like senior and professional architects who were pretty far along in their career were the average attendee.

When I talked to Richard Fitzgerald at the BSA, we decided that we could have a powerful impact by trying to make the convention more diverse and encourage more emerging professionals to attend. The BSA has been great. Nancy Jenner has led development of a scholarship for emerging professionals. We raised money so that emerging architects can apply for a travel fellowship to get to convention. They can get in through the scholarship program. They can get travel funding. We’ve worked with Wentworth to set up dorm housing, so people can get very affordable convention housing.

I know that the AIA has been reaching out to NOMA and AIAS to say it’s really important that the future architects attend the convention. It’s not just for principals and leaders in firms. It’s to represent our whole architectural community, so I think people will experience the convention as more age diverse and as a mentoring experience as much as anything else.

Current read: I just bought the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and I’m a little intimidated by how intense it is. It’s about the food cycle. I toggle between fiction and really interesting non-fiction, and I’m always interested in things that are a little bit off center, but it talks about where food comes from and how we develop our food. We have a cabin in Vermont, so I’m always interested in the organic farmers and how they make a living and what impact that has on the way we live and the whole cycle.

Downtime activity: I do stuff with my girls. They’re 11 and 17 and we have a lot of fun together. We’re always doing projects—it’s a very design-centric family. My husband’s also an architect, and there are a lot of artists and creative folks in his family, so it’s fun. The holidays for us are a really creative time, as we’re making things for people. I think design is part of my life in all these different places. You don’t really notice it until someone asks you about it, sharing that with our children has been really fun for us. They do occasionally ask for the no-architecture vacation, but we make them go visit museums and buildings.