Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Our labor is so dependent on this particular economic model that as workers, architects and construction workers alike have a real difficulty imagining themselves working in any other way. And it's because our livelihood is completely dependent on this mode of production. And so for Arctic to have jobs in the existing economy, we have to keep development going as is. If we're going to recognize climate as a real problem in a serious way, we have to recognize that development can't continue.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Welcome to Feld Architecture Breeze blogs where our editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name is Charlie Clemos, editor, currently based in Amsterdam, and you were just listening to Elisa Itilbe from the architecture Lobby's Green New Deal Working group, one of several members of the group who I'll be talking to for this episode.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: The Architecture lobby is a grassroots organisation of architectural workers that advocates for just labor practices and an equitable built environment. Founded in the United States and international in membership, the architecture lobby brings experience and expertise from many design fields, architecture, construction planning, landscape engineering, academia. To protect the rights and livelihoods of all workers, the lobby's Green New Deal working group focuses on organising for ecological justice as it relates to architectural labour, the built environment and sustainable futures for all. Right now, the Green New Deal Working group is organizing for a just transition through policy response, consciousness raising within the architectural industry and coalition building across architecture, engineering and construction. Their recent projects include an eight point report responding to the Green New Deal for public housing titled toward a radical transformation of housing and the built environment. As they've explained, this response identifies the business as usual approach to building performance, growth, economics and private capital that is embedded within the Green New Deal policy. As written, the architecture lobby Green New Deal Working group is also engaged in an ongoing just transition campaign, public and private workshops and pamphleteering. Most recently, the group is engaged in direct action through the alternative Building Industry Collective, a New York based campaign that aims to bring together a political constituency of building sector workers around just transition principles.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: To give a little summary of the.
[00:02:16] Speaker C: Discussion early on, we covered the origins.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Of the architecture lobby generally and its Green New Deal working group specifically.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: After that, we discuss some of the opportunities for and impediments to organising for a just transition collectively across different arms of the building industry, with a particular emphasis on the presumption that a green transition may harm the employment prospects of workers in the building industry. We then finish with a discussion of greenwashing, particularly the role that architects and the architectural media play in facilitating this phenomenon, and the possible ways architectural workers can realize genuinely ecologically sustainable projects.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: But first, since there are five voices in the discussion, we start with a round of introductions.
[00:03:01] Speaker D: My name is Ryan Ludwig. I'm a registered architect in New York, but I am a full time academic. So I teach at a school in Providence called Roger Williams University and have been involved with the architecture lobby and specifically the Green New Deal working group for about the past two and a half years. I was a co coordinator and then coordinator of the working group, but recently stepped down from that position to just be a kind of full time member. So maybe, Adair, would you want to go next?
[00:03:35] Speaker E: Hi, I'm Adair. I work in affordable housing in New York City. I'm an architectural worker that works on third sector nonprofit housing in New York City. I've been a member of the group for about three years. Yeah.
[00:03:50] Speaker F: Hi, Josh Barnett. Good to see everybody. I'm also a registered architect based in New York. I work for the New York City Housing Authority. I've been here for about more than 20 years, and I'm a rare union architect working for the public sector. I'm a shock steward on my job in DC 37. I work in my union's climate justice committee, which is very active. Also member of the democratic Socialist labor branch and housing Working group. And I've been a member of the architectural lobby group for about three or four years, I think, working mostly with the Green New Deal working group. It's just great to see everybody.
[00:04:23] Speaker G: Hi, I'm Geneva. I am an architectural designer who works for a high performance builder in Bend, Oregon. I've been an on and off member of the Green New Deal working group for, I think, maybe two years and more involved maybe in the last, like, eight months.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Elisa Iturwe, and I teach at the Cooper Union, also a full time academic. And I've been a member of the lobby since 2019, since the formation of the Green Ideal Working group, which is when I joined the lobby. I was one of the first coordinators, and then I coordinated with Ryan for a little bit and excited to be here.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: I wonder if one of you wants to, since it got mentioned several times in your introductions, just say a little bit about the architecture lobby but also the Green New Deal working group.
Would one of you want to take the reins on that?
[00:05:15] Speaker E: I could speak about that a little bit. The lobby got started in 2015 advocating over architectural work conditions and for the value of architecture work. And that started with sort of guerrilla tactics and campaigns. And then I think in the next two years, after that it sort of formalized into a structure of local chapters and cities and schools and working groups around specific topics. This group in particular formed after house Resolution 109 for the Green New Deal was introduced, and that was before I joined the group. So I don't know if somebody wants to speak a little bit more directly to that.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I can jump in. When the resolution was passed, a message went out from the New York chapter saying that the next meeting was going to be dedicated to discussing that. And basically, at that meeting, the working group was formed. And so we've been doing a lot of different things since then. The first thing we did was to annotate HR 109, basically from the perspective of architectural labor and really trying to bring attention to how questions of architectural labor are affected by this, bringing a kind of critique to some of it. And then we've continued working in that way. We also did a larger policy response document where we, I think this was a year ago or so, read all of the GND legislation that had come out to date, and wrote a longer policy response document, started to get in touch with policymakers, starting to give them our perspective as a non industry affiliated architects that are simply concerned about climate change, giving them information and looking at how, from our perspective, the legislation needs to go further. And we had a lot of fruitful conversations there. But we've also been focused on coalition building and also rallying architects around the idea of just transition. Our position is that architects, like energy workers, are embedded in the fossil fuel economy, and so we need to demand, adjust transition. So that was the framework for that policy document, and that's been the framework that the working group has really been using. And so we've been writing pamphlets, we've been hosting events to raise awareness around these issues.
[00:07:26] Speaker C: Great.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Thanks. It'd be nice to perhaps briefly sketch a just transition for the building sector. As I was reading the document. It is structured according to kind of proposals.
Yeah, maybe spend, like, a few minutes talking about the proposals in adjust transition for the building sector.
[00:07:44] Speaker D: I can maybe start and maybe even build on a few things that Elisa was saying, which also has to do with where we're coming from and what we see in the industry, in particular the economy of the building sector itself, and the sheer fact that as architectural workers, we're a diverse group within our working group, but in the lobby, different places, different levels, different points of career, that we ultimately can't do the work that we want to do, that we feel really needs to be done to address climate change and ecological destruction more broadly and we're limited by the kinds of projects that are out there, by the economics of the building sector itself. And so through this kind of formation of a position, we really develop, I'd say three points that we think are problematic within the current economy of the building sector. One, simply the fact that the industry itself consumes large amounts, still consumes large amounts of energy, large amounts of land, large amounts of materials, and is fundamentally still extractive and still a high emitting, fossil fuel dependent industry. And the second part would be that it's also fundamentally market driven, that the vast majority or all projects are motivated by profit. And we see that as fundamentally in opposition to the kind of work that we think really needs to be done. And then alongside that, our livelihoods as workers, even as academics, in certain cases, are still predicated on the industry that is grounded in continuous growth. And so this is where we feel like in order to actually begin to address those conditions and to be able to do the work that we feel that we want to do, need to do. We're arguing for essentially a just transition for the building sector itself. And I think one thing that's important also to kind of parse out a little bit, is that many, if not most, fossil fuel workers, as we move away from those, hopefully or inevitably will need to be retrained or reskilled, I mean, some maybe can apply those skills in productive ways. That isn't necessarily the case for us, or at least in general, meaning architects, we have a lot of useful skills already. It's not so much a question of reskilling our workforce or the workforce. It's actually a question of restructuring the economy of the building sector itself. And I think that's something that then we do have some proposals, as you mentioned in the policy document at the end, which begin to think about what those things would need to be in order to create those possibilities.
[00:10:12] Speaker E: I think one more thing I would add to that is, again, this started with a reading and familiarization with the GND legislation. And I think when we began reading it, we found that even within the GND legislation, from our perspective as workers, a lot of this still wrapped around a similar sort of economy and production of housing, like it still was individually project based, focused on building performance, and focusing on private land management. And we found, like, there's so many white papers and there's so much writing on climate in the construction sector, but really not that much from a labor perspective, especially not when it comes to architecture. And architecture is a professional discourse, sticks with a very technocratic kind of line on optimizing the system. So I think this is kind of the foundation for our group, really, on what a kind of labor approach to the Green New deal, to the built environment would look like. And I think, as Lorian mentioned, from this, we start our just transition campaign and come back into engaging directly with architectural workers and now building trade workers over questions of what a just transition for our industry could look like and what kind of building sector that could build.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: This reminds me a bit of the building trades organizing panel that you sent along, which I thought was really nice to see that happening. I don't know to what extent this full panel connected to architecture lobby. Was it like an architect's present?
[00:11:47] Speaker E: I could speak directly to that. That trades panel we shared was from labor Network for sustainability, specifically their young workers project. And this was a conference they held last fall, and a few of our members attended that. And since then we've been talking more directly and trying to start projects and supporting lns and some of their organizing around the climate march in New York City, for example, next month. But that's sort of like where we're going since all of this just transition campaign has focused really on architectural workers and workers in engineering professionals. So that's sort of like the required reading in terms of where we're pointing and the kind of groups that we're trying to engage with.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: That means it makes sense to sort of pose the point, since you mentioned it before in your last statement just then, how important it is to be engaging with other organized workers. And I have a quote here. We know what's rational about the systems, and we know what's not rational because we see it and we live it. That was spoken by the host of.
[00:12:50] Speaker H: The panel building trades workers. We're working twenty four seven in every part of the land you could imagine. In the cities and the towns and in rural areas, we build, we maintain all of our waste management systems, all of our energy systems, all of our transportation systems, everything that you see around us and all the things that you don't see. And we know, we know what's rational about the systems we have and about what's not rational. We see it and we live it. So this is a constituency that we want, you want involved in designing response to the climate emergency. These are people. We're people. We're expert in uncertainty. We're expert in adverse conditions and figuring things out as we go along in problem solving and in working with limited resources. We're also experts in the failures of the class system because we live it every day, and our bodies are on the front lines of all of the pollution and all of the chemicals that are contributing to the climate crisis.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: That was Amy Calendrella, an operating engineer with Local 98 in western Massachusetts, speaking to the building trades panel from the young worker Convergence on Climate, which took place in 2022 and was hosted by the Labor Network for Sustainability. You can find a link to the video in the show notes. Yeah, there's something really powerful about that, and powerful about the fact of architects organizing, then bringing them exposure to other organized workers. Right. That these conversations rarely happen in one's experience as an architect. In the architect's office. You might have a few encounters on construction sites with workers, but that kind of out of work setting doesn't really occur. And it's something that certainly in the Netherlands, it was very early days, it was just very cheering to see. I don't know if you wanted to speak a bit more about that. This sort of experience of how organizing brings you into contact with other organized workers and the potential for that.
[00:14:48] Speaker F: I mean, I can jump in on that. There is traditionally, as a registered architect, long standing architect, there's always been this antagonism, both real and cultural, between design workers and construction workers. Right? This mutual animosity about who doesn't know anything.
But especially given the famous blue green divide in terms of environmental issues. I can remember being at the first big climate march in New York City and holding up a sign against fracking and having somebody from the electrical workers union tell me to take it down that their position was not to oppose fracking or any kind of pipeline work, which is any kind of work that would mean work for the construction work. It was a very precarious industry. And so, as Ryan said, what we're trying to do is posit an alternative so people don't have to make those kinds of decisions. We're all kind of caught in that capitalist web of being forced to work on projects that either are anti environment or have a lot of greenwash. Somebody has to design a 60 story luxury tower that might get a lead platinum rating, but really, is that really benefiting sustainability or social issues? And we have to design it, somebody has to build it, but in the long run, it's really not benefiting or addressing the climate crisis. And so we're also working with a group, trade unions for energy Democracy, and one group that we're working with, AbI, alternative building industry collective, I'm getting the name right, is holding a forum after the march on specifically labor sustainability and the whole struggle about how to bring people together. You would think because we are all caught in that same web, there would be a natural alliance. But it's easier said than done to get everybody on the same page to fight against, as Ryan said, the business interests that are pushing for these kinds of projects.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Interesting. That antagonism I was going to also mention. So, yeah, through working with dutch trade union Federation, which is the main organizing body for architects in the Netherlands, the person who is the director of this, maybe worth being in touch with afterwards, is also on the board of the Building and Woodworkers International and through that has been doing some work in Qatar. Actually, we interviewed her, so you can check out that interview earlier this year and it was interesting, one of the things she said, I think it might not be on the podcast, but it was in conversation that workers in Qatar aren't asking for the work to stop. It's not really about the World cup should never have happened, that construction work in Qatar should stop because then their livelihoods are finished and it becomes this very intractable suppose, you know, like difficulty and yeah, probably the only, and it's maybe a bit of a milk toast solution or response to that is to just, I guess, keep the conversation going.
[00:17:31] Speaker D: I was just going to maybe add one other follow up, which is just to give a little bit of context or how we got there in a couple of sentences, which is to say, I think it's something new for us as a working group engaging with the trades, but because of what we started to realize was necessary, I. E. That it wasn't just architects, that it was the building sector itself, the economy of the building sector, which of course includes building and construction and trades workers, that it actually was really necessary for us to begin to figure out, like how do we even start? Where do we start? And we're sort of just beginning that in addition to keeping some of our other projects or campaigns going, there's a few things running in parallel. But the work with the trades is really the third kind of pamphlet in this series. So where if the first pamphlet was really outlining what a just transition for the building sector, like why it's important what it is, what a just transition is. Our second pamphlet was about actually how building a union and organizing within our own industry is actually a climate action and relevant to climate action in the future. Because if you're bargaining as a greater collective unit, you have more influence over saying, hey, we don't actually want to work on these kinds of projects that are destroying the environment, that are relying on fossil fuels that profit very small minority group of people and to the detriment of the majority. And so unionization in that context can provide material benefits, but should be considered and understood as a climate action. And that's something that we've just started to also informally connect to folks who are in that process of considering whether or not that makes sense for them in their workplace, and trying to advocate and say, hey, in addition to these things that unionization in general can bring, climate action should be on that list, and it should be something that you could incorporate into a bargaining agreement. And then the third pamphlet, then that's the one where we really are trying to think about expanding even beyond architecture and directly connect with the trades. And Adair mentioned some of the kind of collaboration which we're trying to initiate in terms of some other organizations that we think can also help us make those connections and provide insight that we just don't have, to the extent that we do pick things up on the job site, of course, and talk to folks. But it is a different experience. And I think we've also come to realize that's really important and that those alignments are necessary if we're actually trying to achieve what we're saying that we think needs to happen in terms of a just transition for the whole sector.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: And if I can also just add one thing, I think this is what differentiates our position from other groups that are also doing climate action or even other centers of discourse around sustainability in architecture. And so I think the workers in Qatar saying that it's not about not having the job, that is exactly the point, right? Because our labor is so dependent on this particular economic model that as workers, architects and construction workers alike, have a real difficulty imagining themselves working in any other way. And it's because our livelihood is completely dependent on this mode of production. So that's a really central part of our critique, because I think we're the ones that are willing to say our work is compromised. We love what we do. We're architects, we're better for worse, but we have to recognize that our work is compromised. And so the kind of change that needs to happen is not just around the typical things we talk about in the built environment, like efficiency and such, which is why Adair was mentioning that the GNd legislation had a lot of focus on those kinds of things. And so in our statement of our position, we were very interested in saying, that's not enough. The architectural lobby, I think, for many years was focused on kind of exploitative hours and the kind of the conditions of our labor. But we're adding this other question of the building sector economy in itself being a problem. And we don't find that a lot of people are willing to say that, to say it out loud or take that position because it would compromise our livelihood.
[00:21:29] Speaker F: So there's a real fear.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Right? So the people who are lobbying on behalf of architectural labor in Congress generally are groups like the AIA, which are interested in making sure that architects have jobs. For architects to have jobs in the existing economy, we have to keep development going as is. If we're going to recognize climate as a real problem in a serious way, we have to recognize that development can't continue. So we have to recognize that our labor has to also be restructured. And so to Ryan's point also, that that doesn't mean retraining us. There's a part of our position that is also saying it's not that we want a different job, it's just that we want our labor to be applied to a different kind of project. And so that's also what differentiates our position is that I think we're trying to say we want to work on something else. We want public commissions, we want to work with land managers, any colleges, to think about settlement patterns differently. We want to think about housing differently. We want to think of housing as a human right. What does that mean in times of climate breakdown? So it's also just about asking what our labor is engaged in.
[00:22:28] Speaker F: No, I absolutely agree with everything that Lisa just said. It's just know when you raise Qatar, it just brings up the statement that Zahadeed made several years ago talking about workers in know, but these unbelievably medieval conditions. And she actually said if that's happening, it's the government's responsibility. Just had this completely tone deaf remark just absolving her as a designer from any responsibility for the working conditions of the construction workers. And that's obviously anathema to where we're coming from. Coming much more from the perspective that Elisa was talking about. But know taking a step back look at from the union point of view that we have allies in the union movement because there is a concept now, at least in the US and other unions around the world called bargaining for the common good, where we want to make sure know unions as a whole. Because my union really focuses on what we call wallet issues. They don't even fight for that a hell of a lot. But the whole idea about having housing as a union demand, having green projects as a union demand, making sure that we're not working on causal projects, prisms as a union. Demand is something. The teachers have been very good on that a lot of unions in this country. So we're looking along those lines to try and make sure that we don't have this artificial separation between what we fight for on the job and what we fight for outside of the job. And so bargaining for the common good is still challenging to a lot of the union leadership here, but it is taking hold, and I think it's very much something that we want to plug into.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: I'm wondering if you had some thoughts beyond just maybe concrete proposals, what could be done to shift thinking? Is it a case of education or is it through alternative media or organizing? Where do you think the effort lies in effectively changing the notion that growth is a fact of life, a natural process, and something that we have to just keep doing? Maybe just throw in this notion from the cultural theorist Raymond Williams about the structure of feeling of our time, basically an approach to the way we think the economy works and the way that things develop and the way that society reproduces itself.
We feel differently about that at different times. And this article or the book by Elizabeth Pop Berman about how efficiency replaced equality in us public policy, but same thing kind of happened across the world, right? The tendency to sort of see is this policy not for the common good? Is it good for value for money? And how value for money really permeates development to this day and will continue until we do something.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: Well, as a group, we've had that conversation many times and landed on different things over time. But I think that there has to be a conversation that happens within architecture, because we do feel that in many ways, architects are kind of walking into the profession without the needed awareness that these kinds of issues require. So there is a conversation with architects that needs to be had, but we also feel like there has to be these coalitions across the building sector recognizing the plight of other workers. So that's a conversation that needs to happen as well. And we think that there's a conversation that needs to happen with legislators. So in many ways, the answer to your question is not simple. It's kind of like an all hands on deck and we need to do everything, and it's at all scales everywhere, which in some ways maybe isn't a useful answer because it feels overwhelming. But I think that we have to keep an eye on all of those different conversations in order for structural change to occur. So the nature of the change we're looking for is structural. So inherently, it's going to require action in a lot of different places.
[00:26:18] Speaker D: Maybe I'll jump on that and add a couple things. And it's true, we have talked about this kind of question in the group and through things we've read and never come to a kind of specific consensus for what our position relative to the group and maybe not necessary. But I'd maybe throw one thing out there from someone like Damien White, who's written a little bit about just transition gnd legislation, other things in this vein, who his position is essentially that we need degrowth in some areas and we need massive growth in other areas, and kind of what Josh was getting at. Do we need a 60, 70 story luxury skyscraper in Manhattan, or do we need affordable housing in the Bronx or something like that? I mean, there's a lot of money out there, right? The federal government has provided billions of dollars in the last bit of time since with the COVID pandemic and all of that. There's money out there, but it's a question of where it's going. And so someone like Damien White would, I think, anyway, advocate for massive investment in things like public transportation and public power, et cetera, as opposed to having it go into sort of private interest, something that we might see in more recent legislation. The IRA. There's some good things in the sense, or it's had some good effects in quotes, in terms of people taking advantage of what's in there to make upgrades and increase the ability to reduce their emissions in certain ways. But it's all incentivized. It's all through tax rebates, et cetera, tax incentives, rebates. So I think that's something where when ElisA talks about what really needs to happen to make structural change, that's where I think those kinds of even legislative initiatives are perhaps just limited. They're not actually getting at the root, which I think is what we're kind of putting on the table, at least in part, or at least in relation to the building sector, and maybe throw out one other quick thing in relationship to work that our group has done relative to this space a little bit. Is that part of our initiation or helping to initiate what Josh mentioned, the alternative building industry collective with another group called science for the people? It first initiated itself around a local law in New York City called local law 97, which has a part of a suite of laws that were passed in 2019. And this particular law is really rigid in terms of emissions and targets, sort of big buildings, and really has a lot of high penalties. And so we felt like this was something that was useful for us to get behind and advocate for its proper implementation, because something we saw or we're hearing about was that it was passed into law and it has these good kind of goals that are aggressive and have penalties. They're not just incentive based, but its implementation is sort of up in the air. And it wasn't clear through the legislation. How would that actually be achieved? Can those reductions be achieved simply through carbon offsets, which are questionable at best, let's say, in the current way that they're organized and structured. And so we felt like that was an example of a piece of legislation that was doing some of the right things. Well meaning, but even when passed, is still being impacted by, let's say, status quo forces that are trying to undermine it. And so this is where organizing, using our voice, advocating for legislation, et cetera, policy, it's sort of multifaceted in terms of how we imagine it actually leading and also kind of achieving the structural change that we feel is necessary.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: I mentioned it'd be nice to talk about the mainstream architectural media approach to reporting on new environmental projects, where it's very easy for starchitects to propose an unrealistic project, such as Biarch Engel's group's oceanics, and also the proposals that they've done for neon port in Saudi Arabia. But we're doing an article on another project in Malaysia, biodiversity. And the interesting thing about that one is that it's requiring a huge amount of sand extraction in order to reclaim land for its realization. And you mentioned in the announcement or the video you sent me, the talk at Cooper Union. Yeah. The importance of the three aspects of the building trades, like why it's a fossil fuel work. And the other one, and something we haven't really talked about yet, is the resource extraction element. I suppose that's implied. So I was trying to sort of pin together two questions here. Maybe the kind of disconnect between the professed sustainability of a project and the amount of resources, the embodied energy required, but also the environmental degradation in order to acquire the materials to produce architecture. I'm very aware that it's something that you are talking about, but it would be nice for you to just give you a platform to really talk about how to kind of bridge or address this disconnect as it manifests with mainstream architecture.
[00:31:23] Speaker G: I can speak a little bit to that, I guess, just from the perspective of where I work, which is a very small company and still struggles a lot, I think, with issues of PR architecture or greenwashing. So it's just kind of interesting because it's like, if it's happening at a scale as small as a five person company, like thinking about larger firms, I feel like that's just almost like a larger translation of the same kind of machine. I think what our group has been advocating for around reframing the architectural profession from the stance of us as fossil fuel workers and from the labor perspective is really important and helpful for kind of interrogating the operations of those machines of kind of pr, greenwashing stuff, because it helps us to sort of entangle ourselves with all of these contingencies that exist in the building sector when it comes to what we're specifying in projects and supply chains that are a part of that, and the workers who are a part of those supply chains and the workers that are a part of the building of the project. There's just like so many different, like I said, kind of contingencies that we're entangled with. And when we position ourselves as the worker, then I think it helps us to build these coalitions, leverage those contingencies to build coalitions, I guess.
[00:32:54] Speaker B: So.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Just to clarify something about your question, are you trying to get at the disconnect between architects feeling like they have this capacity to imagine things and that that is sort of progressive and interesting, but then you also have things that are proposed and are totally unrealistic? Is that the tension you're trying to get at?
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Pretty much, yeah. My brother is an architect, and he was saying that there's really very little that an architect chooses in terms of the materials that go into the build. Right.
The idea of it being ecological is more of its performance. Right. How it performs after it's being built, rather than the materials that are required to produce it. But something becomes ecological, at least when it's promoted in the PR from the firm or in the architectural press as ecological for its performance. But evidently, many sort of ecological buildings are very much not right if you consider the full process involved in producing it. So, yeah, my question was, to what extent or how are you dealing with that?
[00:34:02] Speaker F: As a quick example, one thing we deal with, especially in a real estate driven town like New York, is the tension between adaptive reuse and property values. And even in something like public housing, there's a project now at a development called Chelsea Elliott where they're going to demolish two towers and replace them with supposedly two ecologically more sensitive towers than the buildings that were built 40 or 50 years ago. But they're not looking at the whole lifecycle of the building, what's going to be thrown into landfill. They're not going to deconstruct these buildings to reuse the materials. Everything's going to be carted off because it's cheaper to do it that way.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:36] Speaker F: It's not that that housing doesn't need to be renovated. It certainly does. But they're just saying now we'll just knock it down and start over, because when we look at the square foot costs, that's going to be cheaper. But it doesn't really look at what's the long term effects. And we see all the time about low level buildings that might be structurally very sound and even occupied that are being demolished because a developer can generate a lot more rentable square footage with a tall building that again, might even get lead platinum certification. But again, in the long run, you're putting much more pressure on the infrastructure, throwing a lot more stuff into landfill because again, they have a perspective. We can make a lot of money off of this. So we deal with that kind of tension all the time. What we really want to do is push back against that and say that's not how we want the whole design process to be driven. And luckily, this demolition of these two particular towers in public house in New York is getting a lot of opposition for a lot of reasons, including the fact that the whole demolition replacement process is inherently not sustainable.
[00:35:33] Speaker D: On your comment, Josh, the foster tower, the chase tower that's going up is maybe a good example of that as well. That is, I believe, all electric but took down like a 60 plus story building. They tried to reuse as much of the material as possible, and I think we're apparently quite successful. But at the end of the day, they're taking advantage of zoning that change to get to build a bigger building and to use a lot of materials and use a lot of extractive processes. So there's something we haven't called for it, but it's certainly something that's come up in some of our conversations around do we need to have a moratorium on certain kinds of buildings, let's say, which goes back maybe to earlier comments around where areas that perhaps need to reduce and where areas that we need to invest in. One thing, just to call it out in our policy response document, we do have something at the end which does talk about values of a project, which we talk about as whether a project is shovel ready or shovel worthy. And this is something that we, I think, haven't fully elaborated on, but it is maybe just to say, like, even with federal legislation that could provide a massive amount of money towards projects that we need, like housing or even green infrastructure, there is still the potential that those projects are going to go to ones that are on the shelf ready to go right now, because we need to see that money go somewhere fast. We need to see progress. But those projects were designed probably years before, different focuses, potentially different values. And so one thing we were throwing out there as a kind of proposal in the response document was to think about, what is it? Not just a shovel ready project, but a shovel worthy project. And that covers more than just materials, does cover things like labor, social ecological, justice, and kind of prioritizing certain things, rather than just trying to get something built quickly that does maybe meet a need, but doesn't necessarily get to some of the kind of deep structural changes, and I would say value changes that we think are really important and necessary for the sector.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: I think, in part, the focus on labor is meant to circumvent that issue. Kind of the possibility of greenwashing is more difficult when we're saying, but the whole premise of the industry is a problem, right? So I think that it's through our attention to the economy that is producing architecture right now that we're able to make that critique. And so then we can level that critique against a building that is not trying to be ecological or one that is right. Because either way, they are entering into these dynamics that are about prioritizing wealth accumulation. And to do so, you're totally dependent on an extractive economy. And then you hire the architect at a very particular stage in that when the parameters of the project have already been set. So the labor of the architect is not only engaged, but basically just kind of sucked into this thing, whether you like it or not, if you want to build. Right? So the question for us is, how do you change the conditions in which architects are built so that you don't actually have that condition where an architect will say, you know what? There's not much that I can do, right. We hear that all the time, and we have a lot of practicing architects in the lobby. It's a majority, and in addition to other forms of architectural workers, of course, but the majority of our membership are practicing architects. And so there is a full awareness that most of the time we feel like our hands are tied. And so that is the emphasis on just transition, that we're recognizing that our livelihood is embedded in an economy that is no longer tenable. And even the quote unquote greenest projects are still embedded in that economy. So we're going to level our critique against that as well. So until we can really disengage from the foundation of a fully extractive economy premised on wealth accumulation, we're not going to be doing anything that sustainable or that ecological. It's just going to be perpetuating the problem. So we don't engage in design as a group. We're an organization that's focused on labor, so we don't make design proposals. But I think we are in a position to look at the conditions in which design occurs from a labor position. And then that's kind of where we take a scan and say it as we see it.
[00:39:52] Speaker C: After recording this conversation, the group wanted me to share a short addendum quote this is an open project. Change in the building sector will be difficult to achieve and it will take sustained organizing by and across groups representing different parts of the sector. If you're doing similar work, reach out. We want to talk to you. We call for allies across the building sector to work together toward a just transition. End quote. For updates, you can follow the architecture lobby Green New Deal working group on Instagram at Arc lobby underscore GND.
