Matt Toddy, AIA, founder of Elevation Studio and 2022 AIA Columbus President, now serves on the AIA National Board of Directors. He was recently featured in AIA Architect discussing design freedom, climate risk, and advocacy. Here are some highlights
Amid several recent federal-level decisions that have the potential to impact architects’ work, we caught up with Toddy on what’s happening and what architects can do to get involved and make their voices heard.
The president issued an executive order setting official federal design preferences for federal buildings. What is design freedom and why is it important?Â
This is, obviously, a topic that’s very important to us as designers and as architects. Unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve dealt with this issue. We had a similar conversation during the first [Trump] administration.
Any sort of executive order that would limit design freedom is problematic because it stifles the very nature of what we do as architects. It limits innovation and limits material choices on projects, but most importantly, it limits the cultural impact of our civic spaces. So instead of having freedom to let the context or the culture take precedent, we have to put those things aside and [adhere] to a prescribed set of design criteria. It’s not good for the outcome, it’s not good for the community, and it’s not good for the long-term health of the spaces we’re designing. Public architecture should honor the identities and aspirations of the people it serves, and this is difficult to achieve when architects are required to achieve arbitrary design parameters.
What are AIA and the design community’s concerns with the proposed 90,000-square-foot White House expansion?
I would categorize the concerns into two main categories. One deals entirely with process. We have to confront the reality that the announcement of this expansion to the White House did not follow any conventional process—for example, qualification-based selection through the GSA.
The other category goes back to the design aspect: the nuance of what is being designed and how it’s being designed. My understanding of the project to date is that it has been prescriptive: Here’s an addition to a historic building that is protected from a design standpoint. There has not been any opportunity for various entities to weigh in or provide input on the design. That’s also problematic, because here, we have an example of a very small group of people making decisions that in almost any other setting would be subject to committee review, preservation review, public input—all these things. We’re not seeing that with this particular project.
AIA released a statement on Aug. 13 strongly opposing the EPA’s deregulation of greenhouse gas emissions. How might deregulation of greenhouse gases make architects’ work more difficult?Â
I really think this question comes down to risk. At the end of the day, a lot of our job, as architects, is to minimize risk. That can mean personally, in our own businesses, but when we talk about the health, safety, and welfare of the public, we’re talking about the risk to the communities that we are a part of. Rolling back greenhouse gas [regulations] will only make the work that we do harder. It’s going to reduce predictability, and it’s going to make our work riskier and more expensive.
I think in very broad terms, it’s apparent that the less that we are doing to control our emissions and our work to mitigate our carbon footprint in the environment, the harder we’re making it in the future to build the buildings that we need in a way that’s affordable and efficient.
It’s always easier to worry about the present time and not the future, but this is really a case of: The future is kind of staring us down. If we don’t act, or if we just let these things happen, our lives are going to become a lot more difficult in the future.
Katherine Flynn is Director, Digital Content at AIA.