By Kira Gould, Allied AIA
What if architects could find, understand, and reconcile materials in much faster and effective ways -- deploying them with confidence around attributes such as embodied carbon, human health impacts, and other critical sustainability criteria? That’s no far-off goal to Anne Hicks Harney, FAIA, LEED Fellow, who is one of three new leaders to join the AIA COTE® Advisory Group this year.
Harney has more than 30 years experience in the field; she currently runs Long Green Specs (LGS), in which she focuses on specification writing and building materials assessment. (Fun fact: Her specs are both long and green, but her firm is named because she is based in the Long Green Valley of Maryland, where she loves to bike the many trails.)
Harney recently wrapped up industry leadership roles on the AIA Materials Knowledge Working Group and the USGBC Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group. “I’m excited to bring my materials expertise to AIA COTE® and see how we can advance this part of the knowledge effort at AIA,” Harney says.
In recent years, Harney has been delving deeper into material transparency. “I have been exploring ways that we can improve the material content of the products we build with,” she says, “while keeping a close eye on traditional metrics that assure our buildings meet aesthetic, cost and performance requirements,” Harney says she is encouraged by the influence architects have had over these past few years.
“As a spec writer, my life is just one long research project,” Harney says. “I use tools -- my own and publicly available ones -- that I use to track sustainable material attributes so that I can find the best materials for any job. Tools like that can save time, energy, and money. My goal is to help the AIA develop tools to make this easier for architects.” One such tool is the recently released AIA COTE® Top Ten Toolkit, on which Harney was a contributor; see materials tools here. Harney is enthusiastic about Architecture 2030’s Carbon Smart Materials Palette. “There are many resources for building material health impacts right now, but the info on embodied carbon is, right now, a little bit thin, though I hope will be become more robust over time.”