Russell Perry, AIA, LEED-AP

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Russell Perry, AIA, is the corporate director for sustainable design and newly named managing director of the Washington, D.C., office of SmithGroup. A founding partner of William McDonough and Partners Architects in Charlottesville, Va., Perry has been a longtime advocate of sustainable design and what he calls “eco-intentional living.” With his new role, Perry hopes to bring “eco-intentional practice” to SmithGroup.

Education
I have a BS in architecture from the University of Virginia and MArch from the University of Michigan.

Why did you become an architect?
My father is a clergyman, and when I was a teenager, one of the things that he did in our church in Bloomington, Ind., was to put on an addition. He worked with a very talented architect named Evans Woolen from Indianapolis. Watching that process was very fascinating to me, so in the subsequent years when I began to think about career choices, what my skills were, and what I enjoyed doing, architecture emerged. At the time, the undergraduate program in architecture at UVa. was something to which you applied independently of the general college, so the decision was really made when I was 17 years old.

Who has inspired you?
I have a lot of inspirations. I take a great deal of inspiration from David Orr, who is the director of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College and former client. I think the clarity of his thinking about environmental issues has been a tremendous inspiration to me. E.O. Wilson, the entomologist from Harvard who has written on biodiversity and on the biophilia hypothesis, has been a significant source of inspiration for me as well.

Reading material
I just finished reading a book called American Chestnut, by Susan Freinkel. It’s about the cultural history of the American Chestnut tree—especially in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains—and then its loss at the early part of this century and all of the science trying to bring it back. I actually went through about a 10-year period of taking one of the hybrid Chestnuts from the American Chestnut Foundation and seeing if I won the lottery and got the one that was going to solve the Chestnut Blight problem, but it died this spring. I also have one of the last remaining American Elms in Charlottesville so I’m very interested in reestablishing the integrity of North American silviculture.

I also just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about the locavore movement, which I’ve been following. I’ve been reading about food for years and especially am a fond student of Michael Pollen and Wendell Berry and others including Felipe-Fernandez Armesto, who wrote a book called Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. I think food is one of those means by which we can immediately reconnect with the natural world. That there are children who don’t know that a carrot grows underground is very disturbing to me on a fundamental level.

On taking the helm at SmithGroup’s D.C. office
It’s very exciting for me. My professional history is that I started right out of graduate school in a firm known as Keyes, Condon and Florance. I became a partner there and was with that practice until 1994, at which time with another colleague and Bill McDonough, we founded William McDonough and Partners in Charlottesville. Through that very seminal period of ‘94-2005, I worked closely with Bill on a lot of groundbreaking sustainable design projects. In 2005, I came to the conclusion that the most valuable use of the skills, knowledge, contacts, etc., that I had was to put them to use in mainstreaming sustainable design into larger everyday practice. So, in just a couple of phone calls, I ended up coming back to SmithGroup. One of the predecessor firms is Keyes, Condon and Florance, so I went back to working with a number of colleagues with whom I had worked in the past and came back as the director of sustainable design for the whole practice of about 800 architects and landscape architects in 10 locations.

This idea of working in a multidisciplinary context as well as the scale of a national practice is very attractive to me. We have M/E/P engineering, environmental scientists, planners, landscape architects, etc. to leverage an integrated design process with a stable group of colleagues, not one-offs with different consultants. For two and a half years, that has been my focus.

Then I was asked just a couple of months ago to take on management of the Washington office of SmithGroup, which is the largest of the component pieces of about 200 people, and it’s an integrated practice. I saw this as an opportunity to continue along that trail of integration, so that sustainability isn’t just an add-on or piece of the puzzle, but it is the underlying structure for practice. A lot of us have spent a lot of time—maybe not under this name—trying to develop eco-intentional lives and asking what is it that we’re doing; how are we informing that by our concerns about the natural world, our communities, and the overall health of the systems.

We become engaged in some of the obvious things: recycling, reducing energy use, buying green power, eating local food, composting, gardening, planting trees, all of those things, and I’ve been very interested in expanding those personal choices into our professional lives so that our professional activities are aligned with our personal values. That begins to suggest an attitude about eco-intentional practice and that’s about in terms of the way we collaborate, the systems in place in our office environments, our travel, and the projects we do with our clients. As the managing director of the office, I am in a much stronger place to work with my colleagues to define and codify it, making it part of our everyday activities so that we’re not even thinking about a lot of these things. They simply are the way we do our work.

We had a meeting in Colorado Springs last weekend of the sustainable design leaders from 50 firms. We got together on our own to share information, strategies, procedures, outlooks, and advice. It was a support group that was, I think, universally seen as a huge step forward for us each in our professional activities. We met in a structured workshop setting for two days and shared generously. It reminds me of what I like about this group of people. We all know that we’re fierce competitors, but the generosity of spirit in this group was just spectacular and rewarding, and we all came away completely reenergized by the whole process.

SmithGroup’s commitment to sustainability
In my role as the corporate director of sustainable design, we have a network of people who are heading up the efforts, not only in each of our business locations but in a matrix organization in each of our primary areas of professional practice. This group is in place and within SmithGroup we have been sharing ideas and strategies and so forth for the last two and a half years in a very structured way, so these things are already happening, and when we have good ideas in one place they are being rolled out in the other locations as well. At the moment, I’m the only one of the group who is also a director of one of the business units, but the buy-in from our board of directors has been significant, and the support has been huge.

How did you become interested in sustainability?
I was in undergraduate and graduate school through the Arab Oil Embargo and the energy crisis—and the rebirth and interest in passive and active solar design. In that period, we had not yet begun to delve into the additionally interesting pieces about habitat restoration, water quality, water use, material toxicity, and so forth. I practiced for the first 16 years here at KCF with these interests in place and followed the literature and knew what was going on. Then in 1993, when Susan Maxman was the AIA president, she brought sustainability to the forefront; Environmental Building News began to publish; and the U.S. Green Building Council was founded, all in ‘93. In 1994, I made the professional commitment to make that the central aspect of my career. I had the good fortune to have met and had a number of discussions with Bill McDonough, and when he moved to Charlottesville to become the dean of the architecture school at U.Va., he needed to bring in someone to manage his practice. Chris Hayes, who was a brilliant designer working with him in New York, moved down to Charlottesville, and the three of us became the original partners in William McDonough and Partners.

Advice for young architects
I have two pieces of advice. The first is that it is going to be more rewarding the more closely you align your personal values with your professional activities. I’m here in D.C. and I go to cocktail parties around town and they’re full of attorneys, many of whom bemoan their professional life because it doesn’t happen to align with their values. When I say that I’m an architect, a lot of them are really interested in talking to me about what I do, because it sounds a lot more interesting than what they do. So, the first piece of advice would be to follow that instinct and to do it. There are lots of things to do in this profession that are intensely value-laden and do the things that align with what you believe in.

The second piece of advice would be don’t burn any bridges and keep in touch. The fact that I took 11 years and went off in another career direction and then was able to seamlessly reintegrate in with colleagues with whom I had worked before was in large part because I left on very good terms and kept in touch over the years. This is a very small profession. People who leave somewhere in a huff or don’t bother to keep in touch with folks are potentially missing massive opportunities in their career. We’re a fairly mobile group. You will run into people as you go forward in your profession. You should make sure that every parting is with a smile.