State's Architect Articulates His Priorities: Sustainable Buildings & Healthy Place-Making

Stephan, it's been about a year since we last interviewed you, and we're most interested in what progress you've made in realizing the ambitious agenda that you outlined for us then. Specifically, could you update our readers on your office's role in approving both state and local school district facilities?

I'm really pleased with the last year. Obviously there's been a tremendous upheaval in California government. The beginning of the year started with some uncertainty about where we would be several months down the road. But, I'm more than encouraged. The direction of the State Architect's office has been very well supported.

Our move to partner with communities and with school districts to try to achieve better school projects – healthier, neighborhood schools – continues to be supported. We continue to work very closely with a number of agencies on the sustainable building task force, trying to continue to create high performance, sustainable public buildings for the state. We're continuing to take a look at codes and standards with a different perspective. Each of these priorities, as I noted, are being done with the full support of the Governor's office.

So, all the way around, we have not missed a step. And,we are finding ways of actually doing better with more support coming forward, and certainly a great deal of attention being paid to the issues and the areas that we felt were very important.

Re school facilities and your office's plan approval process, let me quote from one of your past TPR interviews. With a little bit of frustration in your voice you said, "when you're talking about a $100 billion program, there's too much at risk not to share best practices and information. Schools will change the face of our communities for a generation to come. This is one of the largest, if not the largest, capital program ever embarked upon in this country, and it does have significant community impact." Has your office made any progress on tracking best practices so that they can be more easily shared with school district around the state?

We're continuing to make progress there. We have a very robust, some say the most robust, resource site online for school design and construction. The URL is www.sustainableschools.dgs.ca.gov/sustainableschools , and it is a complement to what the Collaborative for High Performance Schools has been doing. But we continue to grow our website in every area. I invite anyone to take a look at it. It's getting a significant number of hits every day. Designers, facility managers, and school district officials are visiting it from all over the country.

In addition, we've been very successful over the last year in encouraging and obtaining the endorsement of, CHPS, for example, the Collaborative For High Performance Schools, and more community college and K-12 districts. LA Unified School District, for one, the largest in the state, second largest in the country, has endorsed and adopted those standards for performance, helping facilities for their major building program. And, as we know, CHPS' sustainable standards include the issues that are not simply about building performance, but are also about neighborhood and community and siting and all the rest of the important issues that if we address correctly will encourage school success and student success in the end.

Stephan, you also noted in that same interview, that state facility funding formulas and regulations ought to encourage school districts to find opportunities to leverage their scarce dollars and match them with dollars for parks, libraries and housing to build healthier neighborhoods. But you concluded that a realignment of state priorities for such purposes was difficult. An increasing number of agencies and congressional committees are examining the nexus of public health with school siting and design. What role, if any, do you believe architecture and planning have re realizing the advantanges of co-location with schools of community assets and service programs?

It is difficult to encourage partnerships at a community level to share resources-and not for alack of willingness, but for a number of other structural reasons. There are so many that it's hard to list them all. But, I do think that architects can see these alternatives and define a vision about what's possible with increased collaboration. Being agents for collaboration is an important contribution that architects do make and can make for the process. We're all citizens first. We all live in communities. Our children attend California's public schools. We all, as a result of our licensed status, have somewhat of a social contract to help these challenged public agencies see the options – the alternatives – that are out there and to help them achieve even more through collaboration.

So, being agents for the children who occupy these schools, agents for our communities, and trying to encourage partnership is an important function of a designer. We've tried to model that here at DSA through our partnership program, where we've successfully partnered with three school districts in the state and we're seeking to expand that partnering process to community colleges and others. The opportunity to step away from the project itself and to look at the program, taking a lead at the program level is something architects are well suited to do. And we are seeing increased leadership from the design community in how these big capital programs move forward.

You proudly boasted in that same TPR interview, "we have changed the objective of the state to be now around the notion of sustainability." Please amplify on both how you have managed your department's focus and on the significance of the new Caltrans building in Los Angeles as evidence of that mindset change.

Time does change. Sustainability, as we define it, is about a great deal more than what a lot of people feel it to be. It's not simply about greening buildings, but it's about understanding building performance first; the connection between design and health issues; community health. UCLA has great research underway that deals with community health issues and environmental health issues. The Governor has shown incredible leadership in appointing someone like Dr. Richard Jackson as the state's public health officer, because he's also a leader in these areas of connecting public health and environmental and design issues together and to try to help us understand how to make healthier communities.

So, what we're talking about is an incredible network of seemingly disparate issues and seeing where the links are between them. For example, as regard to joint use, where is the nexus between public health and design and construction? Where is the nexus between where children learn and positive schools and neighborhood and community revitalization? We know they exist, but you can only discover those, for example, as the state did with the Caltrans building. The Caltrans building was an incredibly successful collaboration between a large state agency and local government – the city of Los Angeles – that resulted in a project that is incredibly noteworthy. A world class architect, a project that is coming in on time and on budget, but one also that's a gift to the community of Los Angeles, contributing in a major way to the public space downtown and to the cultural precinct that the city of Los Angeles has been creating in that area for sometime. So with that building, the state has proved that it can and is doing things differently. It is focusing on issues of importance, not just housing employees, but also recognizing plans and context and partnership. At the same time, the state is recognizing how important it is to protect our natural resources – be concerned about energy consumption and material usage, and all those things that in the end will define not just a good building, but a great building.

Two more questions, Stephan. The state is abuzz with the recommendations of the California Performance Review report on state government. How has the state architect's office, a department of the State Resources Agency, fared re that report?

I don't really know. I'll tell you that I can't opine on the report very much. The Governor has yet to evaluate it. It's in the midst right now of a series of public hearings that will draw to a close soon. I feel, as far as schools are concerned, however, very positive about the recommendations to try to create more clarity in how the state addresses its role with regard to school design and construction in a manner that is reduced of any redundancy. This notion of a one-stop shop has been talked about for a number of years. I know Andrew Adelman, for example, in Los Angeles has done a tremendous job at bringing together a number of different agencies into a single location without ever changing a reporting function or a budget. But given the idea that customers come first and it's our job in government to not only ensure health and safety but to partner with our public agency partners in delivering seats and healthy schools. And so, we do support the customer first-the recognition that we share a responsibility with other locally elected individuals serving on boards-and together we can do a better job if we understand how to cooperate.

Stephan, let's close with a question growing out of your recent election as Chair of the California AIA. What do you intend to accomplish? What will be your priorities?

It's just going to be an extension of what I've been trying to do in my position in government for the last four or five years, but more related to practice. For all the time that I've been in practice, and now in government, it's been fairly plain to see that the design and construction industry is incredibly fractured. And, we are all challenged to try to do the best that we can with what appear to be dwindling resources. There's a little anecdote that we pulled out some research that we were doing here sometime back about productivity, and the fact that design and construction is so resistant to productivity improvements – similar improvements that have been seen in manufacturing and other service sectors. People point to the issue of technology as an example of a solution. But I actually feel that we have to work on relationships, and the fact that we don't often come together as an industry to discuss the issues that we have in common.

So I'm hopeful over the next year or so that we can find opportunities and engage across activities – architects, engineers, landscape architects, contractors, construction managers, program managers, etc. – and find ways of engaging with each other with the goal of providing some benefit for our respective sectors of the design and construction marketplace. But, more importantly, providing some benefit to the communities and the society that we serve by working on increased quality, lower cost – recognizing the life-cycle of projects rather than first costs only; working on developing a knowledge base through the experience that we all have, identifying best practices that are cross-cutting in our industry. It's a huge undertaking, but the very beginning of it is to bring more people into the room simply to change the conversation. So I hope to take one small step in doing just that – changing the conversation a bit.