Updated on 01/06/2021
Editor’s Note: This afternoon, a mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol Complex. Both houses of Congress had been in session to ratify Joe Biden’s presidential win, a result that President Trump refuses to acknowledge. Speaking midday at the Save America Rally in front of the White House, Trump vowed to “never concede” and stoked the passions of his supporters. After the rally, a contingent of protestors made its way over to Capitol Hill and, following an encounter with security, proceeded to enter the Capitol Building itself. They stormed into offices and attempted to gain access to the Senate and House Chambers, which had already been emptied and barricaded. One person was shot. The national guard has since been called out. These events represent a clear crisis of leadership, the repercussions of which will not go away anytime soon. But as the following feature article suggests, it’s up to the President-elect and his administration to turn crisis into opportunity.
At the end of a four-year experiment in governance by dismantlers of a responsible public sector, architectural leaders speak of the incoming administration in tones of relief, hope, and urgency. President-elect Joseph Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, observers find, face a cluster of crises requiring New Deal–scale activism informed by expertise in fields spanning earth science to complexity theory. The global climate emergency has grown harsher and harder to deny; national infrastructure has crumbled further while Infrastructure Week has become a Beltway punchline; COVID-19 has shortened lives, shuttered businesses, and driven urban gregariousness into hibernation, and long-festering social divisions have menaced people as well as democratic processes. Turning crisis into opportunity has rarely been so imperative.
Views on what the AEC industries can expect under Biden-Harris leadership range from granular policy recommendations to comprehensive rethinking of systems and values. Concrete priorities include equitable pandemic relief, affordable and sustainable housing construction, a nationwide extension of broadband, electrified transportation, and a decarbonized economy. Some frame these measures within aspirational visions of societal renewal and technological transformation (with or without the name Green New Deal). All commentators emphasize the need for dramatic action, with most calling for intervention on the environmental, equity, housing, and transit fronts that has historically occurred at the federal level.
A change of climate
It’s not as though there’s a shortage of prompts. The past year’s wildfires in California and Oregon resulted in “the worst air quality we have had in years from the heat-triggered smog and fire smoke, threatening our lungs during a deadly pandemic,” said Heidi Creighton, associate principal of Buro Happold’s Los Angeles office. Pointing to geographic disparities in health outcomes, the International Labour Organization’s projection that “a shift to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs globally by 2030,” and the outsize burden borne by disadvantaged communities, Creighton expects “the most diverse administration the U.S. has ever had…[to] work to ensure that investments of climate change dollars go first and foremost to these communities.”
Jonathan Marvel, founder of Marvel (formerly Marvel Architects) and Resilient Power Puerto Rico, draws on his experiences in postdisaster reconstruction and local-scale electrification for recommendations about both reversing federal neglect of the territory and accelerating the broader shift from fossil fuels to renewables. “We can all learn from Puerto Rico,” he said of his place of birth. “I see this whole thing from an oceans perspective: You think about the oceans rather than the continents when you grew up on an island, and so we’re all joined together by these oceans rather than divided by a continent.”
Meanwhile, the global COVID moment is “a pause button” revealing “our resiliency or lack thereof,” said Christiana Moss, principal at Studio Ma in Phoenix. She looks to demographic change and fossil-fuel-to-solar conversion as catalysts for a long-overdue transition from 20th-century paradigms to the “regenerative design solutions” of the 21st. “Ripping a Band-Aid off sooner than later is probably the way to do it. Frankly, there’s no time to wait. Solar is used in cloudy parts of the world. There’s no reason why this can’t happen in coal-fired places; it’s just an industry problem, and it’s a political problem. That’s all it is. It’s not a problem of technology.”
Keynes is back
Clarity about the steps required, said PAU principal Vishaan Chakrabarti, is essential: “What we’re all talking about is deficit spending. Let’s not be shy about saying this.” To emerge from pandemic-era economic contraction and create the broadly defined “infrastructure of opportunity” that generates good jobs, medical security, and a habitable environment, the administration must ignore political deficit hawks and recognize how progressive investments bring lasting gains. “No one’s broke when it comes to multitrillion-dollar wars,” he said. “No one’s broke when it comes to tax cuts for enormously wealthy people, right? Suddenly we’re broke when we need to invest in our own people… The idea that we’re broke is a broken concept.” Progressives would be wise, Chakrabarti added, to prune counterproductive processes that kept many major infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail lines from being “shovel-ready” under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). “There’s got to be a way to streamline certain stimulative projects right now. If you’re building mass transit, which is by nature green, why do I need a two-year environmental impact report?”
Sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen, director of UPenn’s Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative and proponent of the Green New Deal, sees today’s policymakers learning from history. “There are two causes for optimism: One is that the Biden administration has put climate at the heart of their economic development agenda,” he said. “The second is that the climate movement is incomparably vaster and more sophisticated than it was in 2009. The green portion of ARRA was small and barely visible, and ultimately it was caricatured as basically just Solyndra. And I think we live in a different world now, where the scale of proposed green investments is immeasurably higher, and instead of green being a kind of marginal tack-on to the broad stimulus…it is the logic of the stimulus itself.”
Although Biden distanced himself from the Green New Deal label during an October 15 town hall, the Biden Plan reflects consultation with congressional progressives on many Green New Deal aims. Much depends on administrative variables, Aldana Cohen said: “Will the United States catch up to Europe on green-building retrofits and materials, not just operational efficiency but transforming building materials themselves, in line with carbon targets and desire for healthier, more modern materials? Well, that kind of thing could really hinge on two or three senior appointments at the Department of Energy.” Multiple departments will work on climate policy, and Cohen hopes joint task forces will combine technical and political expertise. “Anything interagency can just fall through the cracks, so if the domestic-policy czar has enough power, then they should be able to turn all this collaboration into a strength. If the domestic-policy climate czar isn’t sufficiently supported by Biden, then I think you’ll just see a lot of PowerPoint presentations.”
Momentum building amid the headwinds
“A first and early test,” said Lance Jay Brown, a cofounder of the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanism and the AIANY’s Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee, “might be the support for the $30 billion Gateway Tunnel across the Hudson.” Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan, Brown said, arose in 2015 with the United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which “would use disaster crises as a trigger for more resilient development” in physical infrastructure. Brown noted numerous signs that in professional and governmental circles, the climate/energy realm is a resurgent priority. In architecture, the AIA just awarded its annual Gold Medal to Architecture 2030 founder Edward Mazria. Stirrings within government increase the likelihood that the U.S. will rejoin the Paris accords, as it does the “reconstitution of government components”—special task forces and commissions—that the Trump administration neglected or disbanded. During a federal leadership void, “we’ve all looked to mayors around the country as leaders,” Brown said, highlighting Biden’s appointment to cabinet-level positions of former mayors like Cleveland-area congresswoman Marcia Fudge (tapped to head Housing and Urban Development). Most recently, the president-elect named another ex-mayor, South Bend, Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg, to head Transportation.
Edward Mazria himself noted that “in order to meet the Paris Climate Agreement limit of a 1.5°C global temperature rise, the world must phase out all fossil-fuel CO2 emissions by 2040. The Biden administration’s goal of carbon-free electricity by 2035 moves the U.S. closer to meeting that target.” The AEC sector accounts for about half of U.S. emissions and thus “can expect near-term and local government adoption of zero-carbon building codes as well as policies and incentives for building-efficiency improvements, electrification and renewable energy generation, and low-to-zero and carbon-positive construction materials as outlined in the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis report.”
Obstruction of public-sector activity has been only partial, noted Brian Swett, principal and director of cities at Arup. “Against significant headwinds out of Washington,” he said, “there has still been a lot of progress in the last four years at the state and local level in terms of embracing resilience and the climate crisis and the need to begin to decarbonize—and rapidly do so—our economy by midcentury.” He is encouraged that Biden’s early appointments emphasize policy experience and professional credibility. “This is not a time where we have the luxury of being stuck in political debates for another two or four years.” Full decarbonization by midcentury, he continued, is “not an aspirational goal; that’s a must-have if we are to preserve the large segments of quality of life throughout a lot of the country that folks appreciate. We don’t have a choice to be carbon-neutral; we have a necessity.” Swett sees green policies gaining adherents even in resistant regions if progressives can summon the political courage to endure the kind of heat FDR took over New Deal programs. They will also need to be willing to communicate with nonexpert citizens, Swett added. “When I was at city hall, we called it ‘bringing the science to the sidewalk.’”
Trent Lethco, Arup’s leader of America’s transport consulting, stresses the necessity of federal policy in addressing issues that would otherwise overwhelm state legislatures. After the previous regime destroyed many climate-related offices and efforts, he said, “you need people who know how government works, who’ve run departments and agencies before, who can come in, quickly figure out who else to hire, and move both a rebuilding agenda around infrastructure and economy and a resiliency agenda around climate change and pandemic recovery.” The transition team impresses him with its grasp of “multivariate problems that require multivariate solutions” and a determination that “social justice won’t get lost in that rush” to reverse institutional damage.
New paradigms for housing
Affordable and resilient residences, many commentators stress, are an immediate national priority. Carmi Bee, president of RKTB Architects, finds relief in the hope that the Biden administration will take substantive steps toward addressing the housing crisis. “[It] is critically important at this time,” he said. “People need more than shelter—they need healthy, permanent homes in thriving communities.”
Ennead partner and AIANY past president Tomas Rossant looks to New Deal electrification and President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System as precedents for a transformative investment in public utilities, namely universal broadband. “Certainly, that immediately takes care of certain social-equity and social-justice issues,” Rossant said, by extending the advantages of work-from-home-or-from-anywhere logistics to more of the population—a pandemic adaptation that may prove enduring. Consequent changes in proportions of commercial and residential demand, in cities needing more affordable housing and facing an office-space glut, may drive rezoning to accommodate more flexible live/work spaces, replacing the 20th-century single-use zoning that inflicted daily commutes on much of the workforce and excessive vehicle emissions on the planet.
Such changes will call for imagination on the part of architects, planners, and owners. “What an apartment building is probably has to be rethought,” Rossant said. One measure sometimes bruited as a response to shifting demands, office-to-home conversion, is difficult when commercial leases within a building expire on different terms. Instead, he argues, “the change in legislation should be hybridized” to incentivize adaptations so that “simultaneously they update their building systems and the thermal resistance of the building envelopes to become sustainable.” This transition should address rents as well, he added. “New York City two years ago made a Mandatory Inclusionary Housing act, so every time a developer now makes a building, they really have to have affordable apartments in it. I think it’s time the Biden administration federalizes that…. Like the federal ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act], I have to include 30 percent affordable housing; in exchange for this revenue, [such a law would] help me convert office towers to apartments as well as make them green.”
Jonathan F.P. Rose, developer of green communities and author of The Well-Tempered City (2016), sees integrated systems thinking, particularly on the relations of housing and health and the electrification of buildings and vehicles, as a potent resource, which the Obama administration began to explore and Biden’s can extend. “We live in an ecology of ideas and mental frameworks and really have four years to shift those. And the key shift in the field of communities is, instead of seeing things in isolated pieces, a chance to see them all together,” he said. The smart-grid project outlined in engineer Saul Griffith’s Rewiring America (2020) strikes Rose as a way to align job growth, financial incentives, and green-energy expansion. He advises the Biden-Harris administration to embrace a “regenerative economy,” replacing “an economic system [that] rewards people for degrading the common good, either by polluting or exploiting labor,” with a more ethically grounded system where “you profit by how much you contribute to the common good.”
Jonathan Kirschenfeld, affordable-housing specialist and founder of the Institute for Public Architecture, also envisions fundamental changes emerging from today’s troubles. For starters, there will be an end to the destructive myth that “you need private actors to get something done,” he argues. “Why is that? The public sector does it in Europe: Go to France [if] you want to see what the public sector does, tax dollars at work, making beautiful urban plazas, forms, buildings, libraries, housing, all of the highest quality possible. Why can’t we do it here?” He also highlights a desperate need to find alternatives like community land-trusts to the default model of “speculative capitalist” urban development. “If Biden sees housing as a right, as opposed to a speculative vehicle for somebody to make a lot of money, we could have huge, huge change in this country, and we don’t have to have a full revolution. That would satisfy me as a Bernie-style revolution.”
The interests that would try to obstruct such endeavors are obvious. Few expect Congress to act as progressively as city agencies can, and Biden’s whole career reflects an instinct for bipartisanism. Moreover, Chakrabarti points out, governmental policies and institutions have long favored private interests over public, isolation over community, and this approach has led to multisystemic disaster, including “an urban/rural divide in this country that’s tearing us apart culturally.” COVID-19 has only exacerbated preexisting economic trends that have negatively affected Americans for decades. Even so, Chakrabarti senses we might be at an inflection point: “This is the moment to say we’re either going to invest in the country, and that’s going to be a way to pull the country together politically, or we’re going to keep going down the path we’re on, which is a path of ruination.”
