Ep. 126: Sustainability Thought Leader Joel Towers
Architect & Professor of Sustainable Design Joel Towers grew up in the suburbs with steady access to New York City. His father taught him to build and repair things, which helped carve his problem-solving neural pathways from a young age. Aware of the tension between humans and nature, a pivotal trip to Alaska set him on a dedicated path to striving for alignment and harmony. An educator at Parsons, he’s outspoken and optimistic about a future that is circular, decolonized, decarbonized, just, and feminist.
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Joel Towers: The power of this moment is understanding the things that are broken, naming them, being really clear about it and that’s part of what’s happening right now.
AD: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Joel Towers. Joel Towers is a professor of architecture and sustainable design at Parsons School of Design where he also recently completed serving two terms as executive dean. Under his leadership Parsons completed major curricular reforms, launched several new graduate and undergraduate programs, constructed and integrated a 27,000 square foot cross disciplinary facility and raised millions of dollars in scholarship research and capital funds.
Today the school is one of the most internationally diverse anywhere in the US. Joel is also the director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center which fosters the integration of bold design, policy and social justice approaches to environmental issues, to advance just and sustainable outcomes in collaboration with communities. Let’s talk to Joel.
JT: My name is Joel Towers, I live in New York City and I’m an architect and an educator. I’m a Professor of Architecture in Sustainable Design at Parsons School of Design, at the new school and I teach, I research on climate change; occasionally I practice architecture, though less these days. And I do what I do, in large part, because I think we live in one of the most extraordinary moments in history, of tremendous opportunity and tremendous change. And largely that has to do with climate, which we’re gonna talk about today.
AD: Ooh, that was a beautiful setup and now I’m so excited to get into it but I do always like to get a sense of the person I’m talking to and how you got to be you. I like to go back to the beginning. Will you tell me about where you grew up, what your childhood was like, your family and how you got interested in architecture?
JT: I grew up just north of New York City, my parents were from Brooklyn, they’re first generation, born in the US and they made the big move out of the city up to first New Haven and then to Westchester about a half hour north of the city, which is where I was born. And so I lived in the suburbs of New York, so my experience was one of kind of combination of the privilege that is the suburbs and a connection to the city.
I was born in 1965, so New York City in the early 70s was a place of; let’s say some questionable repute (laughter). It was a challenging time, but my parents, my father worked in the city and my parents were very committed to it and so we grew up neighboring it and engaging with it and it was always a place of great draw for me. But suburban life is also a kind of protection and distance from that. I sort of grew up in between these two worlds.
My father who was in marketing and communications said to me once, if he could have done it over again he would have been an architect. He was a very big influence on me. He died as a relatively young man at 56 years old but he had a very big influence on the way I viewed the world and how I sort of was or am in it. And a big piece of that had to do with teaching me to work with my hands, to be a builder.
I would go on to apprentice as a carpenter before I studied architecture and kind of take it to another level but he was my first teacher in building and really connecting to materials and making. A belief that you could essentially repair anything (laughs). He didn’t buy a lot of new stuff, but he did believe you could fix anything and he taught me to do that. It’s really always, I think, influenced how I look at problem solving. That’s how I’ve come to understand it.
AD: Yeah, this is amazing. Do you think in part, I’m imagining you had space to do this in the suburbs, so in some way the suburban life sort of afforded that kind of material exploration in your youth?
JT: It wasn’t a big shock. My dad was not like; he didn’t have one of those home shops with all the big standing equipment and that kind of stuff. There were some neighbors who did. I learned to turn wood on a lathe at one of our neighbors' houses. He was more hand tools, very kind of low tech, but he, and I used to mess with his tools. I used to like to take his wood chisels out in the back and start chiselling away on stone.
AD: Oh god (laughter).
JT: I learned the hard way on those. I learned a respect for materials and tools in particular, by pissing my father off to no end (laughter). It wasn’t quite the kind of leave it to beaver home, it was definitely not that. It was a sort of Brooklyn kid in the suburbs, but it was really interesting, it was a kind of hybrid. But yes, the suburbs have a kind of space, a sort of lack of constraint that is connected to them in a certain way. I think there are all sorts of constraints in the suburbs. My parents were born in the early 30s -
AD: Sure [cross talking].
JT: Yeah (laughs) we don’t have to sort of go to 1950s culture in the suburbs to know what those constraints were. But it also afforded a kind of space, I think you’re right about that, to be able to sort of test things out and it would really inform my commitment to urbanism and the city ultimately.
AD: I’m seeing how fascinating this would be to go between those two worlds. To have the best of both worlds in many ways because frequently people who grew up in the suburbs or in small towns felt trapped and needed and extra sense of the world and culture and all of the richness that a really urban environment like New York City provides, but you had that. You had that at your disposal.
You were close to it and then you also could maybe enjoy some of the space that the suburbs provided in terms of your material exploration and being able to just have a backyard and wood chisels (laughter), a garage maybe and neighbors with a shop, without feeling trapped. I can see how those would really inform you. And there’s something really beautiful about learning to think with your hands while your brain is still developing. You said it became the mechanism for which you thought about solving problems.
JT: Yeah, it’s funny. When people ask, what do you do, I think of myself as a builder and in lots of ways, literally, physically making things. But also sort of building, nurturing, growing in that sense as well. So it definitely is core to who I am. And just to go back to the point about the best of both worlds. I think in the particular moment we’re in right now, amidst the rising chorus of calls for justice and dismantling of systems of structural racism, the incredible privilege that best of both worlds represents is not lost on me.
There’s a way in which coming from that kind of opportunity sets one up for success which is deeply structural. It hasn’t, I hope, ever been lost on me, but to come to realize it and particularly to see it through the moment that we’re living in, through the kind of teaching and work I’ve tried to do, it’s very real that we live in a country with many, many different kinds of privilege and opportunity that are afforded to some and not to others.
AD: I agree with that and I think it’s healthy that we recognize it, talk about it and engage in conversations about how to wield it in meaningful and artful ways towards more justice.
JT: Yes, thank you, you said that better than I did!
AD: Having this sort of foundation of building and your father’s leanings towards building and architecture, did that continue into your adolescence, how did your curiosity and your creativity start to manifest in adolescence.
JT: It was definitely a part of it, but I said my parents were from Brooklyn and my dad in particular was not somebody who was a big lover of nature, like there were no plants in the house, plants belonged outside, that kind of thing. And (laughs) yet I somehow, and I don’t know again whether that’s the conditions of my growing up, but I had, and really equally strong me is a kind of deep and abiding connection to the natural world, to the world beyond humans.
When I was 16 I had the opportunity to spend a month in Wyoming doing a back country learning, like a class with a group called NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School, it’s still around. And we were in Wyoming for a month. A friend of mine went along also for that trip and it was the kind of experience that changes your life, in my opinion. Because this very sort of protected cultivated view of nature that you get when you live in the suburbs is very different when you’re in the mountain range in Wyoming.
And you learn very quickly both the respect and the knowledge necessary to be safe in the back country but also the role, if you will, or the position of humans in that context, very differently than when you’re living 30 minutes north of New York City. And so that NOLS course really opened my eyes to how incredible it felt and how fragile it felt and also how motivating it was to be a part of a larger, what I would say today, a part of a larger system. I don’t think I thought of it that way when I was 16, but certainly some sense that there is way more than just the small world around me.
My adolescence really was a combination of those two things. Of this sense of being a builder and a maker and this deep and abiding commitment to something bigger than myself in terms of the natural environment. The tension sometimes between those two and seeking to find an alignment between them really was the focus of what would become my college studies at Michigan and then later Columbia, but also really the foundation of my professional career.
AD: Yes! And researching you I see that, trying to find alignment between the built world and natural world is -
JT: Yes.
AD: First of all, it’s what we have to do to survive and find balance.
JT: I would say that it’s, what you just said seems so self-evident today but that’s a relatively recent observation to be self-evident. I think a lot of people would agree with you but it’s relatively recent that people, we have to do this to survive.
AD: Yeah, no I’m with you because I was born in ’71, so I’m only a few years younger and I grew up at a time when it was a bit more industrial, it was about volume and it was not about alignment. It’s only in my adult life that I’ve been able to understand the tension between the two and feel really uncomfortable about that tension and also try to seek alignment. It is new, but the fact that you were studying this back in, late 80s at U of M?
JT: Yeah it was ’83 I started at University of Michigan.
AD: You would have been ahead of the curve and probably finding a lot more resistance in the (laughs) regular mainstream society right?
JT: One of my architecture professors from Michigan, Ian Tabner is his name and he said to me, he’s from Canada, he said, but there’s this expression he used to use, he’d say, ‘in America if brute force engineering isn’t working, you’re not using enough.’ (Laughter) And that really was the ethos of it, that through design, through architecture, through engineering, through industrial society, you could control anything.
And that there would be better living through chemistry. The idea was that the systems were knowable and controllable in a way that, I think what we’ve realized is that there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge necessary, certainly to engage in the complexity that is the environment and climate in which we live. But there’s also a kind of humility and respect that is essential and that resources aren’t limitless and figuring out how to live a really, really good life with that kind of tension.
Ezio Manzini, the designer and thinker from Italy, his definition of sustainability is learning to live better with less. He combines the two, right, that it’s not about an impoverished life, but it is about understanding how to live better within the constraints and the balance that we seek between a natural world and humans who are a part of that world.
AD: I like how you paint this because it helps me understand. It used to be really about trying to dominate and control nature so that we could control for uncertainty and maximize, I don’t know, profits and systems in that way and I really think that the idea of humility and synergy and harmony are more useful in terms of the natural world, which will always be able to dominate humans.
JT: That shift in thinking really comes from the emergence of a feminist critique of environmental thinking. So there’s a long tradition of that work that really emerges in alignment with larger feminist critiques of power structures and systems and so forth.
AD: You studied architecture at U of M and Columbia, as you said, and that was the focus of your collegiate career, was aligning the built world and the natural world. Is there anything else that you should tell us about your college years? What about you personally? Did you find a kind of agency or rebellion or anything that sort of informed your adult ways?
JT: Both Ann Arbor and Columbia were sights of, of course, historical and critical rebellion in the 60s. And when you went to school there, in the 80s, I think there was a little bit of a sort of wishfulness for those times when the campuses were the center of a cultural production (laughs) in the United States. And it had long since left both of them, they were actually far more conservative, not in the way we would talk about that today, but they were not as radical, by the 80s as they were in perhaps in the heyday of their critical position.
Although I do remember that when I got to Ann Arbor, Ronald Reagan was just about to be re-elected in a landslide (laughs) and Ann Arbor was the one county that he lost in Michigan. So we felt good about that! (Laughter) I wouldn’t call it a kind of radical exposure, although at Columbia it was a very, very interesting time in the sense that architecture, the end of the 80s there was a kind of mini recession, by today’s standards.
In fact the year that I graduated in 1990, something like 20% of the architectural profession had decided that it was no longer suitable to their employment (laughs) calls. And there was a mass exodus from architecture. It was the early days of what I’d call ‘paper architecture,’ Bernard Tschumi, Hani Rashid, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, before she was actually building things.
A lot of that work was out of necessity because nothing was being built at that time. And so there was already a sense that the field was in something of a crisis. It was very early days in the, in the computer and particularly computer aided design revolution. Columbia, which would eventually become one of the centers of really using digital design as a design tool, at the time that I was there, it didn’t have any computers in the studios.
In fact I ran the wood shop when I was a student there, a graduate student and we built the first computer lab that would eventually teach something called the Graduate School Design Language, GSDL, which was a kind of internal coding language for 3D modelling. It was really, really early days.
And so I would say people were starting to wake up to the idea that you could enter the field of architecture as a way of organizing knowledge and building in ways that were not limited to physical structures. And Bernard had a lot to do with introducing that kind of criticality to the work and he was a pretty transformative dean at the school.
And so I was definitely exposed to all of that, but I was the kid with the long hair and ponytail who was a tree hugger back then. In fact when I graduated from Columbia I went on my second NOLS trip, I went to Alaska and really needed to kind of decompress and thought very seriously about staying in Alaska and teaching with the school there, doing the instructors course and staying on and teaching, which they asked me to do.
It was a really critical moment in decision making in my life. Do I leave the city, do I kind of reject all of this moment of crisis in the field and kind of retreat to this incredible wilderness. Denali National Park is where a lot of their courses are and where we were climbing, it’s just one of the most beautiful places on earth. And I could have stayed there and taught young people to understand how to respect nature and figure out how to be safe and enjoy back country and all those things.
And my father had just passed away that year, so it was also very kind of like, what am I looking for now. And that was really when I decided to commit to finding that alignment. It was a very conscious decision on my part that I would return to New York and I would seek to bring these two strains of thought together and I ended up working for Bill McDonough pretty soon after that, first for Michael Sorkin, who very sadly just passed away from COVID-19, brilliant architect and urbanist and I worked for Michael for a while.
And then got a job working with Bill McDonough and ultimately directed a project, I was the lead architect for a competition that we won in Frankfurt and Germany. And at the time Bill got hired to write the design guidelines for the World’s Fair from a sustainability perspective that would be in Hanover, Germany at the turn of the century, the year 2000. So this was 1991 and Hanover was awarded the World’s Fair for 2000 and they hired Bill to write these guidelines for all of the buildings and the site that would be transformed into the World’s Fair. And to do so within a sustainability overlay, which was a totally new concept, right?
AD: Yes.
JT: It’s literally four years after the Brundtland Commission report comes out from the UN that first establishes sustainable development as a term And it’s really nowhere in the field other than a couple of practices, Bill, Randy Croxton, and a few others, who were really doing this work. I got the chance to direct this project, to write the Hanover Principles, Design for Sustainability, which really codified a lot of Bill’s thinking at the time.
And I worked with an environmental philosopher, David Rothenberg, who did a lot of the sort of background work. And as an architecture office we framed what it meant to take sustainability into account when thinking about the building of this World’s Fair grounds and used that as a jumping off point to speak more broadly to design around this issue. So it was really heady days to be doing that work.
AD: Wow! That’s like the first cookbook on the subject.
JT: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s great, that’s absolutely right. It felt very much like it, at least in this period. When you start looking historically, of course there have been cookbooks for hundreds of years on sustainability and climate change and climate science, but in this modern period and I think in particular in this moment when the crisis of sustainability and ultimately climate become existential, this was the first cookbook in that context.
AD: Were you aware at the time, did you feel the weight of its meaning and gravity?
JT: I was 25, I’m not sure that I could feel the weight and gravity at (laughter) [**]. But it felt like we were doing something important. Bill would be invited to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 where he introduced the work. That meeting of the UN was really the first meeting to establish the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It sets up all of these future meetings that are called the Cop, the Cop25 is the Paris Climate Accords, these are the conference of the parties, the signatories to the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
And that’s 1992, that’s the Earth Summit that starts that work. It’s what Kyoto Protocols come out of, it’s all of this, is really the beginning. And so for me as a professional, it felt very natural to say, look, you’re in the field of building, you’re essentially using the constraints of the world around you as a set of guidelines for guide posts for what can be built and should be built.
And we need to understand this question of long term sustainability in relationship to that because so much, and this goes to that 50s mentality we spoke about earlier, so much was planned obsolescence. So much was, use it now, live in the moment. If you buy a house and you get a mortgage, it’s a 20 year or 30 year commitment at the end of which the bank has already amortized it down to zero, so it has no value anymore, even though it’s environmental cost is just even beginning to be paid off.
And so there’s a way in which we’re talking about totally changing what I sometimes call the criteria for success. How are we measuring what we do and what are we measuring it against? It’s not just the commercial success of any particular product or a building or an enterprise. It’s what’s its impact on this broader system? And is it part of helping to build a kind of balance that is viable over the long term?
AD: And this was, you say ’92, how much has changed? That’s a big question, but in terms of the codifying this kind of thinking, is it still relatively aligned?
JT: Well, first of all I think so much has changed. The reality is that this is sometimes frustrating work. It’s like you see the house is on fire, think of any speech that Greta Thurnberg has given, right, where she’s like, our house is on fire, right? And she is giving voice to a level of frustration that her generation feels deeply because if we’ve known the house is on fire and we’re just sitting around twiddling our thumbs, well [** 0.31.26], the question is, what the hell are we doing right?
AD: Right.
JT: This work can be frustrating and it can be you know, when politicians lie or they intentionally distort the science or create their own false science or false controversies or false equivalencies, this stuff can be super frustrating.
AD: Oh, that would drive me… I mean it does, it drives me crazy -
JT: Yeah, well crazy and also like this, our lives depend on this.
AD: Right.
JT: Not only are you taking, for whatever reasons are you preserving your power or just trying to win in whatever short term win that means, but you’re screwing around with our lives. And so the work can be very frustrating. But to suggest that things haven’t changed, which I think sometimes gets sort of wrapped into that, it’s the same, it’s always been the same, I don’t agree with that at all.
I think there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge and in fact really good case studies of what a future might look like when we rebalance and we will ultimately do so, rebalance human nature relations. And this is a kind of awkward way of saying when we recognize that the time in which we’re living, demands of us to live different. And the ‘us’ in that sentence could be the seven plus billion people who live on the planet or it could be a lot less of us if we really don’t take heed.
James Lovelock was once asked what he thought the global population would be in 2100, I think, and he said, very drily, well, about a billion people. The interviewer nearly fell off his chair because that would be a die-off of six or seven billion people. And it was a statement about what he thought the carrying capacity of the planet was, given the ways in which we’re approaching our lives.
I don’t see it that way. I think we’re smarter than that. I think we live in a moment in which a lot of the sort of pushback and the stuff that makes me so pissed off and frustrated is actually a kind of harbinger of the change. We’re in the sort of death throes of an old system that no longer works and it’s trying to maintain its relevance while a new system emerges. And that’s always a very disruptive moment. I think my reaction to the pandemic is that it’s a kind of, it’s a warm-up to the big change that will be coming our way.
AD: I don’t disagree. I think that, I think there’s a lot of change that needs to happen that is going to happen and it’s not gonna happen necessarily easily or cleanly.
JT: No, well we’re seeing that right now. That’s the point of what you said so eloquently before, that we live in a country that needs to be moving towards racial justice and my god, how long have we been saying that?
AD: Well, it’s built on oppression, the system is not broke, the system was designed to work like this.
JT: If you look at some of those other talks that I’ve given (laughs) that you mentioned earlier, I say that the world was designed to be the way it is. It was just designed poorly.
AD: Yes!
JT: But the optimistic part of that means it doesn’t have to be designed this way.
AD: Right! I remember watching your video when you said that I got goosebumps because it doesn’t have to be designed this way and some of it was unintentional, but a lot of it was intentional and that means it can be designed better.
JT: That’s right, that’s the power of this moment.
AD: Yes!
JT: The power of this moment is understanding the things that are broken, naming them, being really clear about it and that’s part of what’s happening right now. We’re naming systems of injustice, we’re naming systems that are linear and don’t have resilience. We’re naming systems that serve the few and not the many and by naming them we identify what we can and must change about them.
The reason this is such an exciting time to do this work and back to where we started in the beginning is that everything has to change. There’s never been a better time to be a designer and I don’t mean that just like an architect, a designer, I mean the kind of person who is a problem solver, in whatever field you are working in.
If you bring that kind of perspective around design being an approach to solving problems, to sort of identifying and seeing where you can redirect, where the revolutionary moment is not a radical break but a kind of shifting, it’s not an a-historical moment, but also one that says we cannot continue to have systems of oppression and make of our species a kind of destroyer of the world.
That would be the great tragedy and I don’t think we will do that. I think humans are really, really wickedly smart and creative when they want be and it’s a time for that.
AD: Absolutely and this all sounds like it’s some of the reasoning that drew you to becoming an educator.
JT: Yes.
AD: We’ll be right back after this quick break. This episode of Clever is supported by the new season of Wireframe, a podcast all about how UX, that’s user experience, can help technology fit into our lives. Hosted by Khoi Vinh, senior director of design at Adobe, Wireframe is a show for designers and the design curious, leaning into how design intersects with current events and life changers. For example, how has the pandemic changed our habits and lives? How are designers trying to make voting easier? And how user experience can actually help people manage stress better.
Hear from designers and leaders who have built UX and UI experiences for companies like Headspace, Patreon, Kickstarter, [Withings 0.33.38] and more. I got a preview listen of Wireframe’s upcoming season and it’s sort of like an anecdotal exploded view of how design decisions impact our lives and culture. It’s both fascinating and entertaining. Just search ‘Wireframe’ in your favorite podcast app, like the one you’re using right now. And visit this episodes show notes for a link to subscribe.
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I can see how your impact would be able to be multiplied over all the students and everyone in the academic community that you come into contact with. As well as feeling this incredible sense of alliance with the next generation who is gonna be solving these problems and wanting to working alongside them.
JT: I’m such a big believer in the next generation, but I also want to speak for the 55 year olds among us (laughter), 50 year olds among us, because we cannot shift this responsibility to the younger generations. We have our own responsibilities to continue to put our shoulder to the wheel as well. The difference is the generation that is now in their 20s, roughly, is the last generation, the change has to occur now. And so they are big, big part of the change, they know that.
I think they get frustrated with our, the older generations' inaction or ineptitude or unwillingness to really challenge the power structures that need to be challenged in order to make change. So I do think there’s a kind of generational clash built into that. But education, your sense of why it was, why the alignment and the appeal of education, to me personally, was such a draw, it really was about scale.
At a certain point the architectural work that I was doing was only able to have so much influence and impact. And I loved that work, I still love that work, but I wanted to scale that impact up. I felt that the best use of my skills and my energy was to sort of broaden the number of people who were thinking about creative solutions to this problem from a range of different disciplines. And so this last decade and a half has really been incredibly rewarding in that regard.
AD: I’m with you and I share your desire to scale, but I also share your feeling of responsibility. But I don’t want to make it sound like I was insinuating that you were handing off the responsibility to the next generation. But I do think there is power in numbers. And as a 55 year old going up against the status quo, if you also have the power of energetic 20 year olds, along with you, you kind of have a little bit more of a wind, more force to become the battering ram, don’t you think?
JT: I do and I guess my friendly amendment to that picture is that in many cases we’ll be following them. What I would say there is, I want lend my energy, put my shoulder to the wheel, I mean a lot of the green new deal emerges from people a lot younger than I am, although Senator Markey is there as well, so like you know (laughs), it’s not just AOC -
AD: Yeah (laughter).
JT: There’s a multigenerational effort there. She tends to be the face of it, but there’s a lot of people who are engaged. But my point is only that it’s not about who is leading and who is following, but that we are all engaged in a paradigm change and there will be moments where different people need to lead and different groups need to follow. I don’t think we’re in a kind of classically modernist hierarchical great man of history moment. I think that’s gotten us precisely into the shithole that we’re in.
AD: Yes thank you (laughter), yes, don’t follow that path anymore, it leads you deeper into the shithole (laughs). So, where are you now in terms of your career? You spent a decade as the executive dean of Parsons. I know you’re still a university professor and you’re still really active on this front. What does your career and your research look like and how are you angling it, towards what?
JT: Being a builder I’ve realized, I think in projects, and only in retrospect can I sort of look back on the period of time that I, for example, co-founded an architecture office with a good friend of mine, Karla Rothstein, who is sill, she and her husband continued to practice in that. My wife is also an architect and we continued, in fact the four of us collaborated on some projects over the years, but there was a period of time where I was an architect, period. (Laughs)
And it wasn’t the project of a particular house or office project or whatever that I was defining that by, but the project of being an architect. And it occupied a good 15-18 years, it overlapped a little bit with my time more actively joining Parsons. I was teaching at Columbia and City College before that. But when I joined Parsons I entered into a kind of academic project, if you will.
And when I think about this last decade, that project has really been the reshaping of design education. Parsons, I think, now sounding terribly immodest, has taken the lead in doing a lot of that work. And has really formulated a set of curricula that incorporate a lot of what we are talking about here and a kind of hybridization or transdisciplinarity about design that I feel is really part of the future and puts design as a knowledge set on the table, at the table, in decision making, as a critical component.
That project, I think, is well under way and so I’m now thinking about what is the next project. I’m not sure that I can define that entirely yet. Some of this will emerge through the work but it is clearly about the scaling up of the, what sometimes gets called a ‘just transition.’ The scaling up of the work to see societies around the world move fully into a period of time which often gets referred to as the anthropocene in which the human species comes to fully accept and reconcile the fact that we are the dominant force changing the planet.
That we’ve created a new geological age as a result of our actions. And that either is a kind of end of times statement or the beginning of a pretty radical shift in human nature relations. And so being the optimist, I choose the latter. And it requires us almost a kind of, the construction of philosophies of the anthropocene to know how to live in this time. To know how to take what we were talking about before, the feminist critique of so much and turn this into a period that is really about a mutuality of knowing, a caring culture, a kind of deconstruction of traditional hierarchical systems of power -
AD: Anthropocene is female!
JT: It sure as hell better be (laughter) because if it’s not we’re really screwed! So what does that look like? How does that not become something that people are terrified of, but rather something that people see as the opportunity of this moment? You know, Marx sort of paraphrased, Karl Marx said something like nobody gets to choose the time in which they live, only how you react to it. We were all born into the anthropocene, so here is where I would say -
AD: Can you break that concept down for us, so we make sure we’re understanding you?
JT: My version of it, right, because there are scientists who spend their entire career kind of trying to define this stuff. But in general the planet that we live on, that we call home, has gone through many geological ages and the one that most people are familiar with would be the Jurassic, because they remember Jurassic Park. The age of the dinosaurs, all of these different geological timeframes and something happens and a new geological time frame begins and they could be, you know, the disruptions from the meteor impact that ends the age of the dinosaurs, for example.
Humans, and mostly human civilization, so not humans as a species, but human civilization as we know it, the last say 12,000 years of culture and civilization that have really defined the rise of agriculture, ultimately the great leap forward of knowledge and industrial production, all of that happens in around a 12,000 year period that coincides with a very stable geological epic called the holocene. The last Ice Age is over, humans have figured out some things (laughs) in our years of evolution and we have this incredible flourishing of culture and technology and we go from a very, very small species up until about the mid, early 1800s when there’s still not quite a billion people on the planet.
And then in the last 100 years, 150 years we grow to seven billion plus. All of that happens during this stable geological period. If you think about it, the holocene, in my language, is the background, meaning it was so stable and so predictable that you could count on the seasons. You could get to sort of understand the rhythms of nature, a lot of that was frightening to people. Nature was fear inducing and brutal. But over time we came to understand it as something that had occasional episodic convulsions of volcano, like Mount Vesuvius goes off, right?
But they happen in this way that is on a hundred or 200 or 500 year time cycle. As an architect, for example, when you design a building, you look at a hundred year storm and you say, what’s the most amount of snow that you might expect, or the most amount of rain that you might expect in a hundred year storm and you’re structuring your building to account for that kind of risk.
Well, what’s happened in the most recent period of time is that hundred year storms are happening every couple of years and they’re happening at that quickening pace precisely because of global climate change. The environment has become less predictable, that’s why climate change or climate variability is the language you sometimes hear scientists talk about.
Global warming was never a very good phrase to describe it because you might have a really cold period of time and people, like James Inhofe would say, there is no climate change because it snowed in February in Washington and he brings a snowball into the US senate to make his point, right? The anthropocene is a marking of the end of the holocene and the beginning of a new geological epic. And it is named for the age of the new human, that’s what the anthropocene is.
What it means is that the forces shaping the background, the context, have changed. It’s no longer stable; you can’t count on its stability anymore. We have introduced variability through the burning of fossil fuels, and all sorts of other activities like the pollution of ground water and other incredibly important aspects of our life support systems. Human action is now defining the context in which we live.
And so the background has become the foreground. Everything that we think about now has to be related to this variable climate, to our impact on its variability. If we burn more fossil fuel it will become even more difficult to be able to understand what are the likely implications of going above two degrees Celsius warming on a global average. And so variability and change define the anthropocene and humans are the force behind it. That’s just sort of the way it is. Now the question is, what do you do about that?
AD: And that’s your central question right, is in framing this philosophy of what the criteria for success is.
JT: Yes.
AD: Okay, yeah.
JT: Exactly, yeah because –
AD: You’re fascinating, I love this!
JT: Well because like if you say look, are you successful and usually the question to that, the answer to that is, yes if what you have to offer is desirable (laughter), let’s just put it that way. Is Mark Zuckerberg successful? Sure, people want what he has to offer, until they don’t. Was Steve Jobs successful? Sure. Is fast food desirable? Well, it’s been really successful in the sense that people desire it. It used to be that the commercial success; it still is in many ways, that the commercial success is the measure that we go by to say, yes -
AD: Frequently it was kind of the only measure.
JT: Absolutely the only measure and so now what we are layering into this are a set of criteria that are not easily measurable in the kind of limited economic terms by which we have measured success in the past. It does not mean that desirability goes out the window, far from it. It means that we have to layer into that issues of equity, of environmental justice in that sense, but I mean that both broadly as it relates to issues of structural racism, but also as it relates to intergenerational environmental justice. What it means to be offering future generations a world that is not impoverished.
We have to be layering into this the environmental cost of the things we make. If we had to account for the human and environmental cost of our cellphones, the raw materials, the incredible human cost and strife and war that goes along with the mining of the materials for the cellphone batteries, the labor implications of the global supply chain for cellphones, right, would we still consider them to be a success because so many of us have them in our hands and find them indispensible.
And I would argue, if something is part of destroying the future, if something is part of perpetuating systems of abuse and exploitation. If something is part of polluting the river in both literal and metaphorical terms, how can it be beautiful, how can it be successful? Nobody wants to do those things, but the choices that are put in front of them don’t fully account for those costs.
And some of that is regulatory, a word that will alienate probably, I don’t know who, the audience here, but it will certainly alienate a number of people to say that regulation is actually a good thing. But I would say as a designer, the hardest thing you can do for a designer is to not give them any constraints.
AD: That’s what I was gonna say, regulatory, that’s a parameter, that’s just a parameter to work within.
JT: Exactly.
AD: Yeah.
JT: Yeah, but to take the politics of the moment, I mean one of the things President Trump is most proud of is the number of regulations he’s gotten rid of right? As if regulation is in and of itself bad. Part of this going to have to require a level of willingness to put certain constraints in the regulatory environment, in places that have done that, where you see higher regulatory constraint, have often found solutions that are far more equitable and environmentally resilient and sustainable. They tend to be societies that share wealth more evenly. They tend to rate very high on the happiness meter -
AD: Tell me where this is, I’m moving!
JT: Yeah well, I mean much of Scandinavia would fall into that category, there’s a lot of places that have figured out how to begin to take the steps towards real justice and I mean that for people and for the planet.
AD: The redefining of success coupled with the design constraints that help you sort of manage your creative solutions within and toward, that redefined success is what propels us there.
JT: Oh yeah, I mean people wanna be successful.
AD: If I had an option to buy a different smart phone or to opt out of smart phone living, you can’t thought, we’re all too dependent on them now, so -
JT: That’s the same argument that people make about their cars and living in suburbia.
AD: Oh true, good point, yeah.
JT: And I think slowly at first, and I think ultimately rapidly we will see a shift in at least what propels those cars to begin with. So the moving from a fossil fuel to either an electric or a hydrogen base or some combination of the two. And overnight it will seem like why did we ever use internal combustion engines and gasoline to power our cars. It will seem like something quaint that people did in the past.
AD: Yeah, like using leeches to heal people (laughs).
JT: Exactly! I do think there are these sea change moments and I think we are very connected, not to our cellphones, but we are connected to the service that they provide us. As other technologies emerge that liberate us from the literal object, as my former boss, Bill McDonough used to like to describe this in relationship to washing machines. He’d say nobody really wants to own a washing machine, they want their clothes clean. You don’t want that big hunking machine in your basement and you certainly don’t want to have invested in it in a planned obsolescent way, meaning that in 10 years you’ve got to buy a new one because the washing machine company has built that into it.
What you really want is the washing machine company to own the washing machine and you just get the service in your home. And then they’re going to design it to last for 50 years, not 10 years because they’re invested in its long life and they’ll design it to be repairable and interoperable and they’ll figure out how pieces of it can be reused because it changes the dynamics of ownership. And that’s what the sharing economy is about right now too.
Again, it’s early days because so far the sharing economy has resulted in more car trips, not less. But ultimately ownership versus service is a critical distinction in moving past the kind of planned obsolescence. That’s one of those big shifts, I think, that we’re gonna see coming.
AD: Fascinating! Can you elaborate a little bit more on the social justice relationship to climate change?
JT: I think like everybody we find ourselves in endless text chats these days because we’re all socially distanced. I’ve got these long-long threads of conversations with people that, and I’m in Brooklyn, so sort of one of the epicenters of the national movement at this point, but Brooklyn has certainly played a role in a lot of protest marches of late. And I was saying to somebody recently where I was getting on my soapbox about change (laughter) and some of that soapbox that you’ve seen me standing on today.
And I was saying, look, this is just the beginning, what you’re seeing when you see the challenges ahead of us for transition in relationship to climate change, my great fear is that the resistance to change that manifests itself in the disproportionate use of force, in this case, by police, will be only what we’re seeing today, will just scratch the surface of the kind of resistance to change when you’re talking about decarbonizing the economy.
So that was the conversation and the question came back to me, basically what you just asked, how is this about, what is the link between the protests in the streets today and climate change? And they inexorably linked. First of all there’s a tremendous imbalance in terms of who pays the price for the sort of profligate lifestyle that produces climate change.
AD: Right.
JT: It’s typically people who have less mobility, less access to the production of wealth, are living in often communities of color. In many cases are living in countries that have had very limited economic development and they’re suffering the biggest consequences of climate change. And so whether it’s through drought, through increased heat and morbidity as a result of increased temperatures, whether it’s as a result of the sort of collapsing of water and fresh water resources, all of these things, the disproportionate impact on people of color, in frontline communities, on labor is extreme.
And so the two are inexorably linked in terms of who is being impacted. But I think even more so, if you think about these power imbalances that we were talking about earlier and the kind of, the anthropocene is feminist is that the very same way that that critique reveals how systemically connected systems of oppression are to their representation and power and economic and political control.
Climate change is the result of that. It doesn’t come from nowhere, as we said, it was designed to be this way and it was designed to provide privilege to the few at the cost of the many. And one of the really most beautiful, I think, thoughts about what the future can look like, is if you reverse that around. You turn that upside down, so what we’re thinking about is the benefit of the many and designing systems of sharing and resource protection and caring, the term ‘resource’ is even problematic in that regard.
But that the communities of nature and humanity are seen as resilient and mutually reinforcing. First of all, it’s a Job’s program (laughter), I mean like it’s really, it’s about the distribution of the kinds of wellbeing that can come from not hoarding and having hyper inequality and it doesn’t have to come at the political cost of democracy. It actually comes with a level of the growth and maturity of a democracy. I think these things are all very connected and the climate is really, it’s, as I said, it’s the background becoming foreground.
Therefore it’s the screen against which we are projecting precisely the life that we have designed and therefore when we look at that, we think, we have to design that differently.
AD: One image that keeps replaying in my head, it’s sort of a metaphor for everything that’s going on right now, is a few years ago there was a viral video about Yellowstone National Park and how the park, its geographic typography was changed over time by the reintroduction of wolves. Do you know the video I’m talking about?
JT: Yeah.
AD: Yeah, so it starts off, it’s sort of barren, there are too many deer, deer are dominating things, it’s out of balance and the reintroduction of wolves beats back the deer population but all this other amazing stuff starts happening. The birds come back, the beavers start building dams, the river banks are reinforced and the whole landscape just blooms back into life in vivid flourishing beautiful detail. That’s kind of how I look at our world right now. It’s just out of balance and it’s not working and when we get it back into balance it’s gonna flourish and it’s gonna be great for everyone.
It’s not like the deer are suffering (laughs) in this new model, everything works better for everyone and there are roles to play. I mean insects, beavers, birds, it’s not just wolves and deers, it’s not two camps.
JT: Yes and…What I would say because I think the future is not a kind of, in my opinion at least, it’s not a return to a pre-industrial natural landscape. Because I think one of the things about the anthropocene is humanity really owning the responsibility for our technological capacity.
AD: Yes, so I guess why I’m thinking of that as a metaphor is I’m seeing humans in all these different roles. There’s some humans with wolf energy, those are the ones that are the agitators, the activists, the ones who maybe run towards change and make it happen. There are the birds who sort of form these flocks and are able to reinforce change in that way. I feel like I’m kind of a beaver, like I’m over here building something that’s gonna reinforce a healthy structure.
And when I look at it like that and I see the role that everyone has to play in the anthropocene, I also am connected back to what you said in the beginning is that there’s an investment you feel when you’re a maker, when you’re a builder. When you are given the opportunity to build something of meaning and you’re invested in it and you feel the pride of ownership and the pride of your workmanship, it means a lot more.
JT: No look, I agree with you fully and I’m not naïve about it. I think things could go wildly wrong, many of them will (laughs). But I think that if we, and I keep using the word ‘we’ and I’m aware that that (laughs) in my academic world people would be saying, who are you referring to there in the ‘we’ sense. When I think about humanities potential to do things differently and to structure systems of equality and ecological resilience and opportunity that take advantage of our technological capacity as well as our philosophical, our ability to frame the world in ethical and philosophical terms, I just think we sit at a point of really significant transition.
And that getting to work on that and really calling out the ways in which we distract ourselves from that work. The whole political discord that we’re living through in this country today is an enormous distraction from the work that we have to get done.
AD: Hear! Hear!
JT: And sometimes, maybe often, certain politicians use that distraction to advance other objectives and keep people busy following their short messages on a particular social media platform while other activities are going on (laughter). I mean you know, we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the stupidity and the pettiness that goes on in what falls for national politics right now. We must find ways of bringing people together to actually make positive change.
The voices of reason for that have been so few and far between and a willingness to kind of engage in tearing things down. I mean the Trump administration has undone more environmental policy in the last three years than has been written in the last 30. It is just outrageously irresponsible that it isn’t every night on the news the impact of what is going on. Because everybody is gonna get fucked by that. And it doesn’t matter what political party you’re from.
AD: Yeah.
JT: I find that we are getting caught up in these ideological battles and not focusing on the systemic change that is the, that is what our time is about.
AD: All of this could see tremendous greasing of skids with the new administration.
JT: Absolutely, it certainly couldn’t be worse!
AD: And the fact that all of this stuff has been written, means it can be reinstated perhaps as easily as it was rolled back?
JT: It will take quite a bit of work to bring it back and I am in no way, let me 100% clear, I am not making an argument for a curse on both your houses (laughs), I’m not saying that at all. This is not a kind of false equivalence between administrations; the Trump administration is uniquely bad in this work. Yes, but things can be put back, for example we will rejoin the Paris Accords, I feel confident of that. We will do a lot of the things that have been undone, have delayed us for four years from doing work that needs to occur. But if there is real lasting damage as well in the lack of continuity.
AD: We could be making progress this whole time.
JT: Yes, and we cannot afford to continue to be distracted from making progress. You can’t have, when Jimmy Carter was president, the US was one of the leading countries in solar energy research and technology. He had solar panels installed on the White House. One of the things that Ronald Reagan did when he won election in 1980 was to have those solar panels removed because he felt it was sending a signal to the oil industry that things were back to normal.
We’ve been playing these kinds of games for a very long time. And of course we no longer lead the world in solar energy technology. And so we’ve lost out in all sorts of markets as a result. We’ve got work to do and we’ve got work to do across different political administrations. We must have continuity, at least of objective, even if they’re going to be the twists and turns of the reality of different political leadership. We don’t have political leadership right now, let’s just be honest about it, but anyway.
AD: Well, I hear you, right now is a crazy time, but no matter who is in office in the coming years, continuity is key. I wonder if you, I’m really struck by something you said before about not reverting to a pre-industrialized version of the planet. But I think a lot of us have trouble imagining what the anthropocene could look like in full technological industrial harmony in that rebalancing of man and nature. Can you just put some concrete graphic details to that, paint a picture of what you imagine that could look like so we can wrap our hopes and dreams into it?
JT: I think you’re hitting on a really important role for design, which is what sometimes gets called the ‘cultural imaginary.’ That we have the ability to, as designers to paint a picture of something that is not yet, but could be and that therefore moving towards that vision, even if it’s not realized in the sort of static pure form of a master plan, is a very important part of what design is about.
And so what, to me, that looks like is the term ‘resilience’ gets used quite frequently now. I would say it’s about 15 years now that resilience has really been the language of what used to be called sustainability. And what’s meant by resilience is the capacity for systems to absorb change without suffering a system collapse.
So there are always changes that are going to occur, there are always events that will disrupt and disturb a system that is functioning, and resilience is about the capacity to absorb that change without the system collapsing. The first thing that the future looks like is circular and not linear and I don’t mean that in design terms (laughs). I mean that in system terms. So if we create very brittle linear systems, whether those are supply chains or those are the planting of monocultures in agriculture.
So only planting one species or cutting down diverse mature forests and planting just one tree for harvesting, these kinds of linear systems are susceptible to system disruption and collapse. You all of a sudden you get some invasive beetle or something that wipes out the entire forest. Or you have a supply chain that is so brittle that because all of the parts for some component of the product or system are coming from one location and then an event occurs in that location and the supply chain is broken. And so the future, I think, looks a lot more like hybrids, redundancies, localized production, shorter supply chains, interoperability.
It does not mean that we are less global. In fact I think we’re more global. So one of the kind of ironies of this moment is that the sort of anti-globalization movements which come from the political left and the political right are actually creating, I think, a less resilient landscape because the climate doesn’t care where the national border is. In many cases I think the future looks more circular in that sense. So circular economies, localized supply chains, you can find yourself really seeing local production, local food production, so that’s part of what makes the future, which is really pretty exciting, I think.
AD: Yeah, I’m with you, I’m feeling it (laughter)!
JT: I also think that the product lifecycles, whether those are buildings or industrial products, will be seen more in the service economy way that we spoke about previously. So you’ll see the design for disassembly, the design for interoperability, the design for replacement, that we will start to account for the embodied energy and the ecological cost of the products and systems that make up society. So there’ll be new accountings, new economies, economists will always find themselves at the forefront of something.
And so there will be a new economics, both as a social science, but also as a kind of economic reality that will emerge that will allow us to find measurable good in doing the right thing. So if all of a sudden you’re starting to account for CO2, one of the great ironies is that carbon dioxide is a free pollutant, for the most part, in the world today. There are these attempts to create markets and cap in trade systems and so forth, but for the most part we don’t account for the waste that we produce. It is dumped into the comments, it’s in economic terms, it’s ‘externalized.’
I think what you will see are new economies will emerge that internalize those activities and therefore drive a whole series of changes that allow us to have the reduction of pollution be seen as a net positive economic good as well. And so the more that you start to think in systems that are circular, that take into account all these other benefits or criteria for success, the more you start to change the underlying linearity and determinacy of the system.
So I can’t draw you a picture that says it looks like this, but I can tell you that these are the systems that will define it and then humanity in its incredible and diverse creativity will come with answers to each of the challenges that we face in relationship to those new constraints that all of a sudden become ethical and foundational to our societies.
AD: Yeah, I’m following you. I think it’s really interesting the point you brought up about being both localized and globalized at the same time. The image that came to my mind is a weaving of sorts, like the long fibres that weave in and out are strengthened, but there’s still a lot of activity happening locally, but the whole structure is reinforced by the rest of it.
JT: You have yet again said it more beautifully than I did (laughs).
AD: Well, listen, we’ve got to decolonize, decarbonize, the future is circular, and the anthropocene is feminist (laughs).
JT: It all sounds good to me, how do we get people to sign up (laughter)?
AD: We’re trying man, I think these conversations help, or at least I have to believe that
JT: Look, communication is at the very core of this.
AD: Well, I feel so enlightened by this conversation. I’ve learned so much and I was a little worried that I would just feel the weight of the years of frustration and the impending doom, but you’ve really infected me with your optimism and I appreciate that so much. And part of that, I think, is because now I can see the way forward and I can see all the work that’s been happening. I can also see all the work that still needs to be done, but I can see the tools you know -
JT: Yeah.
AD: And I can take those tools into my own hands and make something with them.
JT: Beautiful, well, I’m with you.
AD: Well yay, thank you so much this has been really amazing. Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you would like to add before we wrap it up?
JT: We just need more justice, I don’t know, I don’t have the words to express the urgency of this moment and the urgency of the moments that are going to be coming. We need a kind of commitment to our fellow humanity and an understanding and an empathy that is just lacking so much in public discourse. I’m incredibly inspired by the people that are out on the streets raising their voices and I’m hopeful about this change, but I think we’re also in for some real challenges.
It may just be the way it has to be, but I would really hope that in the process we find our humanity, our shared humanity because it is what really differentiates us as a species and that’s where my optimism comes from.
AD: That was beautiful! I wish for the same thing, thank you so much.
JT: Thank you Amy, it was great to talk to you.
AD: Thanks for listening. To see images of Joe’s work and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter.
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