For ARCHITECT's September issue, we talked with Washington, D.C.–based architect and educator Bradford C. Grant about sustainable design. Here, Grant—the interim chair of the Howard University Department of Architecture—shares his insight.
What does your role entail?
Leadership, managership, and stewardship, of the Howard University Department of Architecture, including teaching, academic administration, fiscal and monetary management, and leadership within the College of Engineering and Architecture, the larger university, and beyond.
How has the definition of sustainability evolved throughout your career?
Sustainability was thought to be uniquely and solely about environmental, economic, and ethical issues, but the topic has grown to incorporate intersectional issues of racial justice, community design, material and chemical composition, social and personal health, and other encompassing societal problems. Sustainability has evolved from a niche, marginalized area of scholarship and teaching to a central component of architecture education, research, and practice, bridging the silo of architecture to a broader, multidisciplinary project.
What role do architects and designers play in ensuring a sustainable future?
Given the contribution of buildings, infrastructure, and human-made landscapes to climate change—and other environmental and ecological issues—architects, designers, and, especially, architecture education and educators have a major role in ensuring a sustainable future.
What’s your institution’s approach to sustainability?
We are incorporating teaching broad and/or specific issues of sustainability in nearly all of our courses and educational opportunities making it an integral part of architecture education throughout the curriculum, co-curricular activities and the larger college experience.
What’s your institution’s biggest obstacle when it comes to sustainability projects and education?
Due to the singular expertise or silo nature of sustainability education, bridging disciplines and organizing and offering more interdisciplinary and collaborative classes and educational experiences in the academic and University setting is a challenge that we face.
What’s a sustainability achievement that you are particularly proud of?
I am proud of the Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society awarded to myself and a faculty colleague in 2020 and 2022 respectively. The award is given for innovative courses around climate change to be taught at ACSA member schools.
The jury selected two separate courses offered at Howard University which sought critically to understand the intersections of climate, infrastructure, architecture and policy. This program is critical for us to advance the Department of Architecture’s sustainability educational mission in a robust and innovative way.
What’s a project by another group or individual that you think is pushing the boundaries of sustainable design?
I am watching some of the innovations happening in the affordable housing sector. There is a values alignment with leaders designing and developing affordable housing as they conceive and execute on sustainability, health, and equity issues that advance positive change. For example, I am following the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Minnesota, who is pioneering a new way to build homes with a hempcrete wall system, a natural and healthy alternative to traditional construction. This project strikes at the core issues of sustainability, racial justice and culture.
What research are you following right now?
I’m really excited about the work that Healthy Building Network is doing to advance the science around high volumes of toxic chemicals and plastics used in building products. They also reveal the environmental injustices and health inequities perpetuated by the ubiquitous products we all use to construct our buildings. Not only does HBN do rigorous research, they translate it into simple and actionable guidance that ranks products in a red (worst) to green (best) scale in their latest “InformedTM” initiative. I’ve been working with them to better understand how chemical pollution and toxics disproportionately impact the health of Black and Brown communities across the life-cycle of products or what I call embodied environmental racism.
[Editor’s note: Grant is the immediate past board chair of HBN.]
What’s the most pressing issue in sustainability right now?
Sustainability issues are too fractured and isolated, and they often do not use an equity and justice lens to achieve scaled and inclusive success. Although climate change is very pressing and needs our attention, this tunnel-vision focus excludes other key issues. Per the Stockholm Resilience Centre, there are nine planetary boundaries that must be managed—only one of which is climate change. We’ve crossed what the Centre calls “safe operating” for six of these nine. Better understanding how to achieve planetary health—for everyone—will require holistic and integrated solutions. For instance, selecting building products only through the lens of embodied carbon, without understanding their toxic chemical profiles as Healthy Building Network has researched, risks disastrous, unintended consequences for health and justice. Optimizing decisions that consider both issues will accelerate results that advance an equitable circular economy. I challenge all architects and architecture educators to achieve and teach about both decarbonization and detoxification of products.
If you had to recommend one book or text on sustainability/sustainable design, what would it be and why?
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. This book is a great series of edited essays, poems and other art focused on solution-oriented conversations on the Climate Crisis, from diverse women (scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, designers etc.).
Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis, edited by M. Paloma Pave. A great book that speaks to the metropolitan regional equity movement focused on innovative policies and local case studies.
Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn. This very interesting book looks beyond sustainability to regenerative practice in environmental design.
How do we teach the next generation of designers and architects about sustainability?
We need to teach in a more inclusive, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intersectional way. We need to embed community, racial justice, equity, and ethics into our teaching of sustainability. While much of sustainability education is training students in the technical aspects, it is important, and maybe more important today, to highlight the larger aspect of public policy and public actions that architects can influence. Lastly, we need to move to more experiential teaching of sustainability, having students see and gain an inherent understanding of sustainability firsthand by learning in communities with timely case studies, community engagement, and exploration.
An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in the September 2023 issue of ARCHITECT.
