1999: That year marked the first time I taught a class on building construction materials and methods to architecture students. I added a lecture on new ideas about green design, striving to explain the concept of sustainability with use of the nifty 3 “e’s” Venn diagram.The field of sustainability studies has come a long way since then,maturing into a pressing set of professional opportunities and challenges facing today’s students.
2004: Five years later, I arrived at City College as a “mature” graduate student, already a licensed Architect with twelve years of combined professional andteaching experience, and a toddler at home. After completing the Spitzer School of Architecture’s one-year Urban Design Program, I went back to practice and tocompleting the book manuscript for Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions forRedesigning Suburbs (Wiley, 2008; updated 2011) which I wrote with Ellen Dunham- Jones of Georgia Tech. The book, which received the PROSE Award for best book in architecture and urban planning that year, gathered case studies of obsolete 20th century auto-oriented development types—dead and dying malls and big boxstores, faded garden apartment complexes, vacant office and industrial parks—thathad been redeveloped, reinhabited, and/or regreened to new uses and forms.
The latter half of the 20th century generated many square miles of wasteful, auto- oriented buildings and landscapes, thrown up like disposable packaging, especiallyin North America. The retrofits demonstrated realizable improvements on the stillstubbornly dominant patterns of sprawl. We dubbed the approach “incremental metropolitanism.”
2008: That fall, I returned to CCNY as an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design. I begin year twelve on the full-time faculty as newly elected Chair of the Department of Architecture. In this role, I have the pleasure of supporting the Sustainability Program’s courses and faculty housed in the Department of Architecture, including the program’s able and accomplished Director, Professor Hillary Brown.
2018: While I have been an associated faculty member of the M.S. in Sustainability all along, only last year did I advise a SUS Capstone. Sajeeda Chin and DarinaMayfield’s project, “Sustainable Aging in Community: Using a Lifelong Framework toTransform Two New York Suburbs into More Equitable Places to Grow Old,” developeda thread of suburban retrofitting research I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. My forthcoming book with Ellen Dunham-Jones, The Retrofitting Suburbia Case Studies: Designs for 21st Century Challenges, is a sequel of sorts to Retrofitting Suburbia, focused on how to raise the bar on suburban retrofitting projects and policies. It includes a chapter on retrofitting for an aging suburban population in ways that are sociallysustainable, in terms of equity. How?
By designing and planning for people to be able to age in community, with dignity, inresource efficient, supported ways.
Working with Darina and Sajeeda was super rewarding. The openness-with-rigor of the capstone format (so different from typical architectural design studios), their diligence in conducting research and documenting results, the interdisciplinary approach, the regular meetings—all of these features made the process work smoothly, while leavingroom for the project to evolve in response to findings and insights along the way. Notthat the capstone is a cakewalk! My hat is off to students in the M.S. in Sustainability Program, who study while juggling demanding work schedules, family responsibilities, and punishing commutes.
2019: It has been 20 years since I prepared my first sustainability lecture. Much has been accomplished since then, in the generation of new knowledge, theoretical and applied, and in the level of awareness in decision makers and the general public of the grave risks we face. But there remains oh so much more to be done.
