Building a Green Team
Architecture firms decide between outsourcing sustainability expertise and developing their own farm team

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: Architecture firms looking to increase their sustainability practice are considering whether to augment their own internal knowledge base with external hiring. More and more architects are being hired to work exclusively on green and sustainable design issues in rapidly evolving capacities. Whether a firm chooses to augment its sustainability capacity by hiring from outside the firm or not, they often see eco-friendly design as an integrated part of their practice.

As architecture firms work to integrate sustainable and green design practices into their projects, they are faced with the choice of wholly developing these skills from within the firm or hiring them out externally. Today, in various capacities, more and more architects are hired in quickly developing roles to work exclusively on sustainable and green design issues. Many firms have managers who specialize in sustainable design and coordinate efforts of staff members who already have this level of expertise, and who work to increase the sustainability knowledge base of the staff. A lesser but growing number have dedicated, full-time sustainability staff to manage and design individual projects.

Staffing for the next challenge
Johanna Brickman, AIA, firm-wide director of sustainability for Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF) and based at the Portland, Ore. office, is one of these upper-level managers. At ZGF, there are eight full-time sustainability specialists, half of them hired in the past two years. Brickman says the firm’s goal is to build teams across the entire firm that can focus on particular areas of sustainability. ZGF already has 111 LEED®-AP staff members, including Brickman. This added sustainability work capacity has allowed them to do more research, she says. For her part, the added staff has freed her to deal less with minutiae and focus more on industry trends and sustainability tactics. She spends half her time working on projects (perhaps 10 or more at a time), and the other half focusing on management issues, like research and marketing.

Each of the sustainability experts at ZGF has a unique role. “We all have very different roles [and] very different expertise,” Brickman says—with individual backgrounds in environmental science, architecture, and engineering.

Chris Chatto, Assoc. AIA, was hired last May as ZGF’s sustainable design coordinator at their Seattle Office. His background is in energy use and environmental studies. He says that because each ZGF office operates independently, it’s important to have an even distribution of sustainability expertise. Like other architects hired to work only on sustainable and green design, Chatto says a large part of his job is to get the rest of the staff up to speed on these issues so that eventually they’ll all be able to do what he does. “We sort of have an ironic position,” he says. “We don’t want to be middlemen or the only types of people who know how to do certain types of analysis. We’re trying to get the tools we use to the teams so they can implement it directly and can focus on the next level or the next challenge. So in some ways it’s kind of making ourselves not necessary.”

In his new role, Chatto is a resource for all of ZGF Seattle’s architects and works on many different projects. But, so far, he says, his role is still evolving. “And I think that’s natural because, from my perspective, we don’t know how to do sustainable design yet,” he says. “It’s something we’re still figuring out as a profession and as a society.”

Evolving roles
As a new sustainability design director at HOK’s New York office, John Seitz, AIA, has also found himself in unexplored territory. “I tried to get a job description when we started discussions about my coming here, and nobody knew how to write the job description,” he says. “It’s so new within HOK that there really isn’t a baseline.”

Seitz is one of four such sustainability design directors the St. Louis-based firm has hired at the office level. Their eventual goal is to have a dedicated, full-time sustainability expert at each of the firm’s large offices. Seitz is the project manager of U-Life Northeast Asia Headquarters in Korea, which will be pursuing LEED Platinum certification. He also assists on other projects, facilitates green and sustainable design education opportunities, and is helping lead the greening of their own office and operations.

“The real impetus [behind me being hired] was to get somebody into the firm who would be dedicated to pursuing sustainable initiatives—everything from project initiatives to bringing the overall level of sustainable design up,” says Seitz.

This group of new sustainability experts evolved from the firm’s previous Green Team Network, which they formed 15 years ago. This informal network of sustainability-knowledgeable architects was organized by a part-time coordinator and helped establish HOK’s deep background in sustainability, says Mary Ann Lazarus, AIA, HOK’s senior vice president and sustainable design director. Lazarus helped to define the role these new sustainability experts would play. She says adding these positions has helped HOK “influence projects by becoming part of the discussion early.”

Grow your own
Many architecture firms realize that they cannot simply hire their way into sustainable practice. HOK is developing and training their own sustainability design directors from within the firm as well as hiring them externally. They have 580 LEED-AP architects already. ZGF’s Brickman sees sustainability as functioning best when it’s holistically integrated into the practice. “We really see it as part of architecture, as opposed to being an extra layer that you add on,” she says.

Other firms have held to this view to the exclusion of hiring external sustainability expertise. “We made a conscious decision several years ago not to have that one lightening-rod type of person,” says Patrick Thibaudeau, Assoc. AIA, Hammel, Green, and Abrahamson’s (HGA) coordinator for sustainable design. “None of us is dedicated completely to sustainability on one side of the equation. But on the other, this is all about what we do as a practice—all before LEED ever became a word that people knew—as a basic core of the values of our design.”

Thibaudeau warns that hiring designated staff members as sustainability experts can lead to “green washing”—when firms make claims of sustainability on certain projects that have been designed (no matter how marginally) by the firm’s anointed sustainability guru.

RTKL Chair Paul Jacob, AIA, also sees sustainability as having the strongest impact when it is developed holistically and internally. “We made the decision that we wanted sustainability really to be embedded in the company, much like we look at everybody in the company understanding good design,” he says. “[Just as] RTKL doesn’t have a director of design, we don’t have a director of sustainability—somebody to walk around and sprinkle sustainability on our projects.”