Please join us for a COTE book talk on 17 April, 1-2pm ET. Carl Elefante will present about the book and discuss it with reviewer Lori Ferriss. This session is presented by COTE national and the AIA Middle Tennessee chapter COTE. Register at this link. This session is FREE and worth 1 CE/LU.
Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future is Carl Elefante’s message to the profession honed over the course of his significant career: as a practitioner dedicated to breathing new life into old buildings, as a visionary leader of the profession, and as an emissary communicating the importance of architecture to the public. While it is nearly impossible to do justice to the depth of thinking and detail of historical research narrated within the book, its primary message is simple and clear: to flourish in the face of the unprecedented challenges of today, architects must move beyond our obsession with the new and instead look to the buildings that already exists and to pre-industrial methods and mindsets (and cultures around the world where they are still in practice today) to design a healthy, equitable, and beautiful home for the future.
In Carl’s words, “This book is written to help architects recognize the unconscious biases of our brief, energy-glutted, modern era and to reconnect with principles and practices that avoid, rather than repeat, misconceptions about architectural quality and urban livability.”
Going for Zero is a powerful wake-up call. Carl unapologetically confronts designers of the built world with responsibility for shaping and addressing the dual climate action and climate justice crises; and he offers the hope that if we get it right, we have an “unprecedented opportunity” to leverage architecture in service of a better future. “As the creators and beneficiaries of the modern world, we cannot refute our culpability. The actions required to curtail climate change also have the power—and obligation—to heal the damage from our modern way of life.”
The book is organized primarily around the three themes of climate, justice, and urbanization. Within each of these topics, Carl contextualizes our current challenges within millennia of human design and construction. While not history for history’s sake, this retelling is critical to understand what we can learn (and why we must learn) from the past to responsibly design for the future. Through a survey of many of the most important works in our field, Carl shows us how to investigate everything from building materiality to city planning regulations to understand how past design philosophies and approaches to building have led to positive and negative outcomes. This practice of starting by understanding what has come before will not be new to preservation architects for whom stewardship is at the core of practice, but it is one of the primary challenges the book holds up to today’s mainstream design culture.
Carl illustrates how architects and design professionals are uniquely positioned to create solutions to problems our profession has deliberately or inadvertently contributed to over the past century. As Carl writes, “Our skill sets as conveners, coordinators, and communicators have never been more needed. Our training to investigate problems thoroughly and synthesize complex and sometimes contradictory priorities has never been more useful.”
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the book to me is the groundwork it lays to imagine a new era of design and construction. The historical narrative clearly demonstrates the power of design movements to shift not just the aesthetics of our buildings, but our lifestyles, health, and culture. While this power has had tremendous positive impact, for example in mitigating contagious disease during the 19th century, it has contributed to the dire climate and justice crises we face today. Carl argues that architects must take ownership of “our agency over people’s health, happiness, and possibilities.” I am left imagining what the role of the design professional may be by the end of my career. What lines between disciplines may be erased? What new disciplines will be created? How will the scales of material, building, neighborhood and city interact? And who will take a seat at the table?
Lastly, one of my personal favorite takeaways of this book comes in its Afterword and Acknowledgements. We can only do this work together. Find the people and communities who share your vision, who inspire you, and with whom you can accomplish what you have set out to do.
This book brings to a wide audience Carl’s incredibly clear call to action and compelling demonstration of the importance of understanding the past to truly build a sustainable and equitable future. Complemented by graphics by Adriana Barbieri that distill very complex ideas into very simple images as effectively as the text, Going for Zero will be an impactful and likely eye-opening read for anyone who is looking to make a difference through design. I eagerly await the audiobook narrated by the author so that every reader can benefit from the full experience of Carl’s persuasive message.
Lori Ferriss, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Built Buildings Lab, is an architect, structural engineer, and preservationist focused at the intersections of building reuse and climate action. A co-developer of the CARE Tool, her research in establishing carbon accounting methods and standards of practice for existing and historic buildings has been featured in publications ranging from the Journal of Architectural Conservation to Architect Magazine and presented at the UN COP climate conferences. Lori served as the 2023 Chair of the AIA Committee on the Environment, sits on the Climate Heritage Network Steering Committee, and is a Senior Fellow of Architecture 2030.