In less than six years, Ed Mazria and his nonprofit group, Architecture 2030, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have leapt to the forefront of conversations about the role of buildings in global climate change. They got there simply by pointing out that the built environment has a disproportionate effect on the burning of fossil fuels.

Making the world’s new building stock carbon neutral within two decades is the challenge issued by Architecture 2030. In fact, Mazria has made it clear that seemingly minor design decisions, multiplied by tens of millions of buildings worldwide—from single-family homes to college dorms to high-rise office towers—can help reduce global energy use to a shocking extent. Reorienting a building in relation to the sun not only can trim home energy bills but can keep tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. After all, if a well-placed window means you don’t need air-conditioning, then your local power plant doesn’t have to burn coal to keep the juice flowing. Here, Mazria explains what the climate-change debate all comes down to—giving us some hints for what’s next in sustainable design.

Well, Architecture 2030 actually came out of a lecture I gave in 2002. I was looking back at work I did in the ’70s and ’80s, when I first began to research issues of population, the environment, and pollution. Almost by accident, I learned about the increase in CO2 emissions. After that lecture, with climate change becoming a little more mainstream, I decided to look into how we, as architects, contribute to climate change. That was how I discovered that the building sector is the major contributing factor in CO2 emissions—and, therefore, a driving force in the effort to stop climate change. We then published our research, and we began getting lots of questions from people who wanted to know more—so we did more research, which led to more information and more questions. Then we formed Architecture 2030, a nonprofit research organization that looks into the connection between climate change and the building sector, coming up with ways to solve the problem. The more we discovered, the more we understood that architects are both major contributors to global warming and major parts of the solution.

The climate-change problem is really an energy problem. There are two sides to energy: There’s supply and there’s demand. Architecture 2030 began looking at both of those sides. On the supply side we discovered that there is indeed a silver bullet for the climate-change problem, and that’s stopping coal. If we do that, we basically solve the climate-change problem. But the other side of the coin is the building sector: We are the demand side of the coal problem. Because the building sector is the major energy-consuming sector, it’s where we need to make the most gains. The other two energy-consuming sectors—transportation and industry—are, in essence, being addressed, and that’s because they’re dependent on oil and gas. Global oil is peaking right now, and we’re moving closer to the peak of natural gas—so we’re producing less, and the price is going way up. That means we’re now turning to other types of fuel. But that’s also why coal is such a big issue: There’s plenty of coal left to burn, and the building sector is really the driving force behind coal. Seventy-six percent of all the electricity generated by coal plants in the United States goes just to operate buildings! That’s the demand that pushes the use of that fuel.

Our strategy is really to look for leverage points within the entire building sector, places where we can make the greatest amount of change. For example, our initiatives include supplying information to different legislative groups and professional organizations to help shape legislation. This information helps with building codes and with giving incentives to the building sector to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions through sustainable design. Now the California Energy Commission has adopted the 2030 targets—and will update Title 24—and they’ve even gone one step beyond for residential buildings: going carbon neutral by 2020. In fact, they call it “net zero,” not carbon neutral, but it’s essentially the same. The first city in the United States to put the 2030 Challenge into code was Santa Barbara: You can’t build a building in Santa Barbara unless you meet the 2030 codes. Just recently, too, the national energy bill called for all federal buildings to meet the 2030 Challenge targets. The American Institute of Architects, as a professional organization, is pushing aggressively for its members to adopt it, and many firms now are. So we are getting the information out to those people.

Once you were able to overcome the local climate through an infusion of fossil fuels, you could divorce form, function, and materials from the natural environment. You could then create any form you wanted, no matter how it might relate to the environment, and just climate-control it using fossil fuels. The iconic example of this is Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut: You’ve got 360 degrees of glass, and you’re supposed to be in nature. Sure, you’re in nature—visually—but you need a huge amount of energy to maintain that place. Glass walls claim to integrate nature and architecture, but in many cases they represent the divorce. So we have to look at how architectural design interacts with the climate and how we can apply new information, new materials, and new tools to that process. In the modern era, we look at science and technology to solve problems, but design is treated more like the packaging of science and technology. Prior to this, they were one: You basically designed a technology. But when you design a building, it’s not just to house technology or to slap technology onto it; the design becomes the technology. The buildings will actually be the systems themselves, operating in the natural environment, able to climate-control themselves through their interaction with the environment. Now we just slap new technologies onto buildings. This is what we call a “whole-building design” approach. All of these things can come together at the very beginning of the design process. It’s interesting that the advent of fossil fuels sort of disintegrated the architectural discipline from engineering and understanding how systems work into a series of individual skills that now have to be reconnected.

That’s right. We need to reintegrate the technologies and the knowledge that we already have back into the design process.

We heard that exact same question back in 1973! But making our buildings more efficient won’t wreck the economy. This isn’t a question of cost: It’s a question of design. Design is how you solve the climate-change problem. It’s ingenuity and creativity. Because if you’re talking about how a building interacts with the environment, and if you’re talking about designing with the environment, then you’re talking about cost-saving options. That can be how you site the building, the shape of the building, the color, where you locate your windows, how much insulation you use, what your interior finishes are like, if there’s natural ventilation—all those factors affect the energy consumption of the individual building. Then you can talk about the building in relation to its community—and that’s where planning comes in. If you plan a pedestrian-oriented community, rather than a community that’s based on sprawl, you cut down on vehicle miles traveled. These are just basic design questions, and they don’t cost anything extra. They don’t add to the cost of the building—in fact, they cut costs down. And that is the best way for architects to help address the issue of climate change.