In 38 years as a licensed architect, I’ve been fortunate to work alongside talented, creative, service-focused design professionals, most often for institutions in service to humanity in fields such as health care, research, and higher education. Sustainability, and enriching the lives of those who experience the built environment, has always mattered deeply to that work.
A dozen of our projects earned USGBC LEED® certification, several at the Gold and Platinum level, and those were, without exception, more interesting, more beautiful, and more holistic than the ones certified at the lower levels of Basic or Silver. Surprisingly, the most ambitious certifications often returned cost savings of 10–20% against the original budget that was created not anticipating LEED at all.
The lesson has stayed with me: when a design process begins with challenging goals that demand new ideas and deeper collaboration, everyone, from designers and contractors to facilities teams and clients, walks away transformed, carrying momentum into an even more ambitious next project. And yet, even this is not enough to meet the urgent need to reset our lifeways, and the design professions that support them, in service to life and living systems.
Mindset
Traditional patterns of disciplinary training, practice, and mindset run deep. Architects and engineers are licensed, at their core, to protect the Health, Safety, and Welfare of the public. The concept of HSW sits underneath every state licensing statute, every building code, and every professional code of ethics we swear to uphold.
But HSW does not ask whether a building contributes to the health of the watershed it sits in, whether the materials specified support or degrade the ecosystems they were drawn from, or whether a project leaves its bioregion more resilient a generation from now. Certifications like LEED®, WELL®, and the Living Building Challenge exist precisely because the law is silent here. And they have helped begin the larger transformation that’s required.
Our minds, hearts, and sense of responsibility should extend further: to the aquifer, to the habitat/ pollinator corridor, to the soil, water, and climate, and to the child not yet born who will inherit what we leave behind. We must honor future generations and the lives of every non-human species in every act of design. The most basic design question should be, “How does this design help all life flourish?”
Designing for a Living, Thriving Future
In order to accomplish this, every design must answer a number of other questions. Are the communities, campuses, neighborhoods, and watersheds measurably more alive because of our efforts? Are they more biodiverse? Is the water cleaner, the soil more fertile, and the local climate more stable? Are the humans and non-humans flourishing together?
To accomplish these goals, we must use living systems as the model, creating designs that are nested, interdependent, and self-renewing. The lifeways of many indigenous peoples have demonstrated this reciprocity with the land for millennia, treating the more-than-human world as kin and collaborator, not merely as resource. Our approach to designing the technologies that drive modern civilization have much to learn and much to incorporate from these examples.
Practically, this means new tracks in professional education grounded in ecology and integrated design. It means better advocacy in our professional organizations, our licensing boards, our codes, and our firms, so the new standard of “design excellence” includes life-focused, regenerative metrics as the baseline rather than the exception. It means designing at the scale of watersheds and bioregions, not just parcels, because life doesn’t organize itself around property lines. And it means starting with humility, recognizing that we are not the sole authors of thriving landscapes, but participants in living systems that are far older and wiser than our species, or our professions.
For those of us further along in our careers, there’s a particular calling to act as elders and stewards, handing something better to those who follow. Younger architects and engineers are already asking harder questions than our licensing exams ever did. Our legacy won’t be measured by what stood without collapsing. It will be measured by what we left thriving.
That is what it means to design for life.
