Scott Rodwin "Awareness of the built environment" **** [MUSIC] Hello. And welcome to Mindful U at Naropa. A podcast presented by Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I'm your host, David Devine. And itÕs a pleasure to welcome you. Joining the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions - Naropa is the birth place of the modern mindfulness movement. [MUSIC] Today we welcome Scott Rodwin of Naropa University. An adjunct faculty teaching green building design in the Environmental department. Scott is one of the leading green architects in the country. Thanks for joining us Scott. [00:00:58.02] SCOTT: My pleasure. [00:00:58.09] DAVID: Could you uh please just elaborate a little bit and introduce yourself and also tell us what you're going to be teaching us today. [00:01:04.04] SCOTT: Certainly. So, I graduated from Cornell University with an architecture degree in 1991 and moved out to Boulder where I have been living ever since. I have a 13-person design build company. We both design the buildings and we're also the contractors for the builders. We specialize in green building and have for the 26 years that I've been in business. We focus primarily on residential. We do some commercial as well, but our mission has always been to push the envelope of sustainability. I have taught green building officially for the city of Boulder and Boulder County and for - I taught at a Waldorf school for 12 years before I came to Naropa a few years ago and started teaching a green building class. [00:01:45.02] DAVID: Awesome. All right, so what are we going to be talking about today? [00:01:48.11] SCOTT: I always think of green building as being a much broader topic than just the technical aspects of how do you build energy efficient -- passive solar and things like that. I always start the class - the green building class by helping students to have a new appreciate and awareness of the overall build environment. Because that's really where it starts. If you don't care about it or are unaware of what's happening in the build environment -- there's not much impetuous. There's not a cause for you to actually take the extra efforts because it does take more effort, more time, more energy and more thought, more care. And more money in order to build more sustainably. So, there has to be a reason. You have to be looking at it and say oh my god - I am seeing that my energy bills are high. I am seeing or I am becoming aware that's impacting my personal health or the health of those around me. I am seeing that it is consuming resources at unsustainable rate. They're cutting down the forest. So, once you see all those. Once you gain an awareness of your relationship to the physical environment then you can move into ok we understand why this is important. We understand what's happening. Now, we can talk about the technical aspect of how to build green buildings. How to design sustainably. So, this is how I start every class. I ask students, first of all, to keep a journal. We have what are called their - the sketch books or the journals where everybody gets a real beautiful hardcopy sketchbook and then they start taking notes and they personalize it. And, I ask them to start observing and every class we have a number of homework assignments. For an example, I'll say on your way to class today did you come to class -- or to Naropa on the same path that you do every day? In the same way. You're carrying your mocha, latte, whatever, Frappuccino. You're looking at your smart phone. You've got your headphones on and you're walking on the same path that you've always gone. Or you're biking or whatever you are doing. And that when you are doing you're closing off your awareness of the world. The class always starts with letÕs go talk and we start walking around campus and when we walk I ask people to tell me what they observe. And then record them in the sketchbook and we look at the - the physical environment differently than we normally do. Sometimes they ask people to stand upside down to you know bend over and look at the world upside down. Or to look at it as though they were a different kind of person. We actually use this in the architecture world when considering things like handicapped accessibility. We say what would it be like if you were looking at the world from point of person in a wheelchair? Uh or if you're mobility impaired or if you're blind or deaf or have some other uh something else that would be covered by the accessibility ADA. And this is just something that we do at architecture school. That we learn as architects to look at what kind of physical environment are we creating for people. So, one of the questions that I ask people on the Naropa campus is what's missing? What could we do here? We might be standing in the central courtyard and say what would make this place - this space a better place. And students will say oh a fountain, a garden, a covered shaded area where we could sit and study. Benches, hammocks. Uh connection directly into one of the other buildings from the courtyard side. Better views. Uh renewable energy. All these things and they start popcorning ideas saying this is what we would like to see to make this place better. And that's the fundamental question of architecture. And of sustainable design in particular of how do we make this better? We're not just responding to the immediate needs in front of us such as we need a thousand square feet to add a classroom. We're asking the question of how do we - make the opportunity of creating a classroom into something that is as wonderful and nourishing and sustainable as it possible can be. How does it create a great learning environment? How does it also become part of the beauty of the campus? How does it contribute to the sustainability of the campus? All these things are wrapped in. Sustainability is very often thought of as being this technical overlay to all the other rules and requirements necessary for building. And we don't look at it that way. I look at it as the starting point. Part of the holistic design. When someone says I need a thousand square feet for a classroom - we'll ask questions like why did you need it? What are you trying to achieve? Who is going to be there? What experience should the students have in the classroom? Should there be a living wall in the classroom? Should there be flexible seating? What kind of indoor / outdoor connection are you looking for? What kind of natural daylight. So, these are the sustainability aspects of the questioning. And then they go back to the holistic design on the space. Going back to the awareness - the built-in environment - part of what we do at the beginning is we don't just focus on buildings. Because very often when an architect is asked to get involved in a project we're asked to design a room. A building. At most a block of city but itÕs a block is very, very - itÕs usually just an individual piece of property. And itÕs important for all of the students here to understand that sustainability can never be achieved solely on a building scale. We have to look at the planning that goes behind it. The values that create the planet. And then the buildings are really the micro parts that come later. That come after the city has been planned. So, the question of how we live. One of the questions that I ask the students right at the beginning is to envision their optimal life. Do they want to live in a little town in the middle of nowhere deep in a forest? Do they want to live in a medium sized town like Boulder? Or do they want to live in a great big city like Denver or a giant metropolis like New York City. And if so, to tell me about what the quality of life is. That phrase - quality of life actually becomes the fundamental question or filter through which we look at every aspect of the sustainable design projects that the students then do over the course of the class. The class actually goes from micro to a macro scale. At the beginning, we have them do a project where they research a particular aspect of sustainability. Solar panels, straw bale walls - whatever is their particular interest. Then half way through the class we have them design a building. And we have everybody work in teams because in the real world that's how you actually do it. You interact and everybody has got a piece of the puzzle. So, then they build a building. Whether itÕs a classroom or home or whatever it is that they design we have them create that and teach them all the rules for building a green building. Then lastly, we have them sit a green building in the context of the city because at the end of the day if we're only creating a building for you and me - say you know one person or a couple or a family - our impact is small. But when we're looking at the sustainability of an entire ecosystem meaning a town or a city - then we're starting to impact sustainability on a large scale. So, you can't just build a green building in a city where you have to drive everywhere. That's not a green building or you can't just build it out in the middle of nowhere if you still have to drive everywhere to get all your resources met. So, we set the green buildings - in the context of the larger ecosystem of humans. How do we create a city that actually functions as a sustaining ecosystem? And how does your house or your school or your office become a vital part of that? One that is in harmony with it. As a big part of that we unpack and unwrap the entire process of how we got there. We talk about the history of building - of green building. Of technologies, of transportation, of frankly macroeconomic systems, tax law, financial incentives, mortgages. We actually look at things that you wouldn't think are necessarily part of green building, but understand that everything right down to whether or not you decide to put solar panels on your house - is based on a variety of - of factors including things like whether or not you get a rebate from the federal government or from the public utility company. And whether its allowed by building code. So, when we start to set all of this sustainable design solutions that the students that come to class are most interested in - into the context of how do you make this thing? Students find that green building or architecture and buildings in general touch every aspect of their lives. Where do you get your food? Where do you get your education? Where do you make money? Where do you do business? Where do you live? Where do you go for your healthcare? All of these things are tied into the aspect of sustainable developments. Sustainable planning. So, when students are asked - or when I ask students to record and journal their path from their home to the classroom that day - I actually give them an assignment - I say let's do it differently. Your assignment today is to take a different path - or a different process, a different journey to get from point A to point B so that you start to notice and be aware of your environment. What's the ground made of? Is it asphalt, concrete, dirt, grass, flagstone? What is it? Where does the water go? Because that just came up as a major question for the city of Houston. Houston has no zoning regulations. They built willy nilly and they paved over almost all their permeable surface. So, when the hurricane hit - Hurricane Harvey hit - all the sudden the water didn't have any place to go. And it wasn't all the sudden. ItÕs the accumulative impact of 50 years of decision making process from the sustainable planning perspective. Made up of individual buildings and individual decisions but all through this filter of them not paying attention to where water goes. How we recharge the soil. And they have other problems too such as their transportation. They have perpetual gridlock and then traffic. They have smog and pollution. The have enormous energy and utility bills because of the way that they design and think about things. ItÕs not necessary. I always take every bad example as an opportunity for how we can do well. So, the class is not judgmental of Houston is bad and Boulder is good. ItÕs that Houston now has an amazing opportunity to rewrite how they are going to rebuild. Are they going to look at where does our water go? And how do we use energy? How do we become more resilient? How do we function better from a passive point of view? Passive in my mind means being in harmony with your environment. So, part of this question of becoming more aware of your connection to the physical environment means actually observing how you personally are affected by your physical environment. As you're walking from your house to the classroom that day. Were you cold? Were you hot? Did you walk in puddles? Was there sunshine on you? Were you walking by traffic? How could your experience lead to a higher quality of life for you? The first step of answering that question is becoming aware of your current situation. To actually expanding your senses to becoming present and conscious to what's going on. This mindfulness is a foundational principle of sustainable design. With all sustainable design whether we're talking about city design or an individual building design or even just design of a room. We always start from what is the personal experience that you are having of your interaction with this space now? How do you become more aware but how do you quiet your mind? How do you take away some of the distractions? And the - numbing aspects that we often put ourselves in the middle of. The coffee. The - smart phone. The earbuds you know playing music. The sunglasses - whatever it is that's cutting down our connection to the physical environment. I ask the students in the class to take off those blinders and see if they can get incredibly intimately, exquisitely connected to their physical environment. Whatever it is. So, a second piece of homework that we do is to have them journal about draw, write, do poetry, whatever it is - that is their method of expression of their home living environments. Places you spend the most time. The greatest individual self-expression that most people have is you get to decorate your room. You get to put in plants. You get to have a dog or a cat or paint your walls a particular color or close the blinds or open the blinds and you've picked that particular spot as a starting point for your journey. You can manipulate your physical space but the first thing that you do is you pick one that resonates with you. So, how do you pick something and then shape it once you've picked it? To support the highest possible quality of life for you. Are you aware that the paint that you just put into your room contains toxic off gassing elements - fumes? Or did you choose a really healthy paint. Same thing with your carpet. Did you use energy efficient light bulbs? These are all micro decisions. Individual small things that collectively once we multiple them times three hundred million people here in the United States add up to an enormous collective decision. Because every little thing that you do affects the market. When you buy something that is a healthier greener choice - the producers of those things notice. They are like oh wow people are buying LED lightbulbs even though they are more expensive than incandescent - why? Because people want to save money on electricity. Great. And they want to do something good for the environment. Ok. Now, the market starts to respond. And starts to provide the material goods that make sustainability technically possible. You, me, we don't have the ability to invent our own LED light, but we do have the ability to make decisions. Hundreds and hundreds of decisions in our daily life that shapes the market and when we then talk to other people and help disseminate and advocate that information about why we chose that - other people - especially in our friend circle tends to get on board and we start to create a movement collectively. Home Depot 24 years ago I think was the first company to have low VOC paint. And I don't think anybody would have suspected that a big international company like that would - would help today. And all they did was they said oh we're going to try it out. They put it on their shelves. It cost 3 times as much as conventional can of paint and I bet they suspected this is not going to go anywhere. Anyway, the pain flew off the shelves. They said oh - let's get some more of that. And they restocked it and then they put it in all their stores and when they did that - the economies of scale of production for that company that produced the low volador, organic compound, healthier indoor air quality paint - suddenly became more attractive and the price of production went down and as the price fell the market for it became more attractive. More people bought it and we're like oh well now itÕs only twice as expensive. I am willing to do that. I am willing to invest in that. And then the price fell even further and now itÕs the same price as conventional paint and why on earth would you get any paint other than one that is good for your - your personal health and your kids health? Same thing has happened with solar panels and LED lights and every component of what makes green building. We look at the fundamental question at the end of the day of what creates the highest possible quality of life for you personally. For your immediate circle - your cohort, your family, your friends and then for the largest community whether itÕs your neighborhood or the city or state that you live in or the - the planet as a whole. And it all starts from that point of personal awareness and connection to the environment. Physically how do you move around the space? What - a type of building does to you? Does it loom over you? Does it create an expansive warm supportive space? And then when you put all that together - how do you live with thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people? Collectively in a space in a way that creates a sustainable future for all of you and sustainable in my book really comes down to the long-term quality of life. When many people hear the term quality of life they may be thinking more about the standard of living. Do I have a car? Do I have a TV? Do I have a warm house? Do I have the ability to maintain what I have? The comfort? For me, quality of life goes far beyond that through the lens of sustainable design. Henry David Thoreau has a wonderful quote. He says, "whatÕs the purpose of a beautiful house if you don't have a suitable planet to put it on?" At the end of the day, that's what the question of sustainable design is for me. How do we create the highest possible enduring quality of life - sustainable quality of life for the most people? At the end of the day many of us will be driven largely by how things personally impact us. And, the exercises that we do particularly at the beginning seek to bring awareness to how sustainable design impacts you individually and then we start expanding that circle to see how it impacts your city, your town and the planet. So that we understand the collective impacts and the fact that there is no more away. 50 years ago, you threw things away. You send your landfill away. You got your energy from away. ItÕs over the hill. Not anymore. Our water, our land, our air, our energy, our waste, everything - there is no away. There is no place to send it to. There is no more frontier and we understand that everything that we do - from the products that we buy and put into our house or build our houses from to the collective impact of the land use patterns of how we get from point A to point B and where we get all the things that sustain our lives. That this is the collective sustainability that we co-create as a culture. And it all starts from our awareness of how our individual designs, which are the only ones that we can make - the ones that you have agency over directly and exclusively. How you get to choose. What kind of paint? What kind of LED light bulbs and where you live. Where you get your energy from and how you use it. So, that's where we start the green building class. Is by developing an extraordinary level of mindfulness and personal awareness about how you relate to the built environment. And I saw built environment specifically because while the natural environment is always there most of spend most of our time in the built environment. Americans actually spend about 90% of their days indoors. And even the additional 10% we spend outdoors - almost all of that is spent in proximity to manmade structures. The amount of time that we spend camping in the woods is for most people less than 1% of our total life span. And even then, we're usually at a campsite or we're in a tent both of which you know may be a light weight structure but it is a manmade structure. So, there is always a connect to the physical - the built environment. The world that we create. And this whole class is founded upon the idea of observing, becoming aware of and developing an ongoing awareness. After the class is all done for how we relate in every step that we take and every purchase that we make - that sounds like a song. Uh - of how we relate to that build environment over the rest of our lives. And then giving us the tools to make more conscious choices and better choices for a higher quality of life for all of us. [00:21:35.18] DAVID: Wow. That is so - so great. ItÕs really interesting to hear how intentional it is. How deep it goes before it even almost like before the planning starts. There is a plan before the plan. You're almost making me rethink a lot of the things that I think about and how I use or spend my time in the built world. Uh how much time I actually spend in the built world. ItÕs really interesting too because I am also thinking about the route I take to work. I walk to work every day. I am very fortunate to do this, but I take the same exact route every day. You know I got my coffee and my backpack and I am ready to go when I get to work. And I got my favorite song and - you know I am going to try something a little different and maybe walk to work with just a clear mind and just gazing what's around me a little bit more. So, thank you for inviting me to do that and itÕs just really interesting to hear how you see the world and then how you're utilizing that to - implement it in your company and your design and its really cool. [00:22:40.03] SCOTT: My pleasure. [00:22:41.07] DAVID: So, I have a couple questions that I wanted to ask you. [00:22:43.23] SCOTT: Sure. [00:22:44.11] DAVID: So, when I was first interested in green building design uh sustainability and all this fun stuff a couple years back, I started looking into some things and I came across the Venus Project. And also earth ship designs. So, Mike Reynolds and Jacque Fresca and also, I recently started getting into like Tesla and how he's building the solar panel wall mounts for your house. Do you relate with any of those? [00:23:11.08] SCOTT: Absolutely. So, we do talk about earth ships in class. And we talk about both high tech and low tech green building because they're very different sides. ItÕs almost like peanut and butter jelly of the sustained build design sandwich. High tech is where we're using our future technology. The Tesla example to improve the situation. Tesla is coming out with uh solar roof shingles right now. Last year they came out with solar or solar batteries. And those are two of the major parts of the equation of how we become more sustainable because its looking at where we get our energy from. And realizing that distributed energy meaning energy that doesn't come from a single power plant, but is actually scattered around is inherently more sustainable. One because you don't have transmission losses through uh power lines. Two, because when a natural disaster occurs - having distributed energy tends to make a city more resilient. When you have a hurricane. When the transmission lines from the power plant go down - everybody - a million people - something we just saw in this Florida - lose power simultaneously. ItÕs very difficult for the power company to get everybody back on line. If we're looking 20 years into the future and everybody in Florida has solar panels on the roof now and a battery in their house - yeah you may have lost power, but your neighbor probably didn't and you can go next door. It just makes the community more resilient as a whole. The second part, is it gives you more direct connection to your impact on the world. When I was talking before about there is no more away. For a long time, we have thought that our power comes from over there. Our waste goes over there and once it goes over the hill and we can't see it anymore. ItÕs not in our immediate field of awareness our interest in doing it right diminishes. But when we have direct awareness of and agency over - meaning the power over controlling how we produce energy - chances are well let me run this example. In the 1950s or so air conditioning became common for the first time. Cities that had never been habitable before like Phoenix, Arizona suddenly blossomed out of the desert because now you can live there because its 115 degrees and you run your air conditioner. Where do you get the electricity? The single greatest use of electricity in the city tends to be air conditioning. So, air conditioners are even though itÕs a tiny little individual thing as a topic - our enormous driver of energy use. We have gotten most of energy in the United States from coal fired power plants, which is an enormous carbon emitter. It creates visible pollution, asthma - all kinds of health impacts to the people that are there. There are waste permit - hazardous waste like fly ash that are produced from coal fired power plants. A whole host of problematic things. We're transitioning to natural gas which is a lot better. We're transitioning to solar and wind, which is much better. But by and large, there is still a lot of people - millions and millions of people in the US that get most of their energy, most of their electricity from coal fired power plants. But, because the coal fired power plant tended to be over the hill meaning away from your - my particular house - we didn't necessarily think about it. So, people used energy in rather unconscious ways. In the 50s, 60s, 70s and even the 80s we built houses with minimal and sometimes no insulation. We had - lights and air conditioners where the producers, the manufacturers of these did not think for a moment about the energy efficiency of their product. That was not one of the product features. Starting about 20 years ago - we realized that we are - because of the rate of population growth within the world running out of natural resources in many cases - and because of that we started to become mindful. Really for the first time in history of our collective impact on natural environment. Because we realized that oh wow within 20 years, 50 years we're going to run out of coal, oil, gas, fish. All of the places to put our waste. So, we started paying careful attention to those things. And consequently, just because I think when we put our mind to it we can get to the moon. We can create an LED light bulb in 10 years. We have the ability to advance sustainability very, very quickly. Once we realize the consequence of our action. So, when people put the power generation in their own home - it makes every individual responsible for the other end of the equation which is power use as well. Because it makes them aware of wow my smartphone is now telling me that we collected X watts of energy today. That means that's how much energy we have to use on our refrigerator and our computers and in our air conditioner. So, all of the sudden people will become more personally responsible for their energy use because they'll also be responsible for collecting it and - and saving it / storing it. Uh the other question you asked was about earth ships. Uh I am not familiar with the Venus Project but earth ships I have a lot of familiarity with. I built straw bale homes with my own hands. I've traveled down to uh Michael Reynolds uh Soar and Reach communities in New Mexico and taken tours and met him and seen the whole - the whole kitten caboodle. One of the things to know about sustainable design is nobody has come up with the perfect solution yet. And, we are constantly evolving earth ships. We're invented oh probably almost 30 years ago I'm guessing. They had a lot of wonderful ideas - particularly the concept that everything is contained in this one object. And that goes back to what I was saying about Tesla is Michael Reynolds the founder of earth ships looked at that right off the bat and he said what if -- you collected your own water? You digested your own waste? You generated your own power and heat and just asking that question was an incredible investigation and it came up with a solution that's pretty good. I say pretty good just because having been down there I know that - that earth ships have certain issues. And that the segment of society that they appeal to is fairly narrow. What - we do look at that and we investigate that and I let each student in the class pick their own areas of personal interest. So, if a student is interested in our ships and many of my students have been - I ask them to do a report on earth ships. But, for the most part I try to make sure that the class is aware that there are a multitude of solutions to the question of how to create the most sustainable design. It tends to be very specific to each individual site, each individual person. The region of the country that you're in. The micro climate of your particular area and how you plan to live in this house. Some people love opening and closing windows every day. And in that particular case a passive ventilated house might be the right solution. Other people don't want to be doing that and they want more of a high-tech solution where its more mechanically driven solution to sustainable design. How do you create the most energy efficient air conditioning system as opposed to opening the window? So, one of the questions that we ask every student is how do you want to live? How do you want to integrate or to - operate your particular house? School? Office? And that's the start of each solution making process. So, as we look at what would be the most appropriate sustainable design - we say how do you want to interact with your - your physical environment? [00:30:48.23] DAVID: Wow. So much to be said. Well, I really appreciate your passion and your knowledge and uh you just shedding some light on the process and everything that goes into the plan - itÕs really exciting to kind of hear it from an expert. Thank you for joining us today. So, we just heard from Scott Rodwin, Adjunct Faculty at Naropa University and that was the talk on the awareness to the built environment. Thank you. [00:31:16.01] SCOTT: My pleasure. [MUSIC] On behalf of the Naropa community thank you for listening to Mindful U. The official podcast of Naropa University. Check us out at www.naropa.edu or follow us on social media for more updates. [MUSIC]