As an architecture professor and practitioner, collaboration is part of my daily routine. I invite interdisciplinary experts into my classes just as I invited them to be a part of my design teams. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you will see that this year, I hosted commissioning agents and mechanical engineers in my 5th year workforce housing studio and just a couple weeks ago, I hosted social workers, nurses and psychologists in my well-being thesis studio. The written and verbal reflections of the guests and students after these workshops revealed a truth. None of us know it all, but together, we can sure learn a lot. As highlighted in my last chair letter, thoughtful collaboration is a focus of the COTE Leadership Group (LG) this season. Collaboration, as a first step in our renewed 2025 grassroots efforts, leads to spreading awareness and inspiring action.
I am energized by the many organic conversations each of the LG members have had with other AIA Climate Action Design Excellence (CADE) representatives this year so far. These exchanges are building relationships with folks with similar goals and are helping to spread awareness between our groups. Each of the informal conversations I have personally had this past month have also yielded achievable, impactful action items – one of which quickly became an outcome, announced on Earth Day (thank you to Lindsey Falasca for doing most of the lift!). There is beauty in this. I encourage you to schedule some meetings like this in the coming weeks and see where they lead. I would love to hear about any ideas you come up with, please feel free to reach out to me to share your thoughts: cote@aia.org.
Speaking of spending time with people who have similar goals, what better opportunity than the upcoming AIA’25 Conference in Boston, June 4-7? Kira Gould and her communications team has once again compiled a COTE Guide to AIA’25. Each year, this valuable resource helps all of us navigate the tremendous, and sometimes overwhelming, amount of content available during the conference, while also pointing to several opportunities to gather in conversation, such as a favorite of mine, the COTE Open Forum, which will be on Thursday, June 5, from 11am – 12:30pm. Hope to see you there!
Robin Z. Puttock, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, is an Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University and a practicing architect with over twenty years of professional, national award-winning, sustainable design experience. She is the editor and contributing author of Teaching Carbon Neutral Design in North America: Twenty Award-Winning Architectural Design Studio Methodologies (Routledge 2025) and is the project architect of many LEED certified buildings as well as the first US Department of Education Green Ribbon School recognized by President Barack Obama. Robin serves as the 2025 Chair of the National AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Leadership Group.