Looking back on Edward Mazria’s 35 years of remarkable leadership in environmental design and energy consciousness, we can be grateful that fate lit his path so well, and that he chose to follow it so passionately. But Mazria’s journey has been anything but a straight course, from his serendipitous entry into architecture and solar design; through his prolific years as a pioneering passive solar researcher, architect, author, and professor; to becoming one of the leading voices in a revolutionary battle against climate change.

At every crossroad, Mazria faced choices that could have led him in very different directions, but his instinctive timing, creative restlessness, persistent curiosity, and ever-deepening architectural conscience and vision conspired along the way to transform his career choice into his life’s work. The twists and turns of this journey add richness to Mazria’s story and depth to his contributions, all of which have led to his selection as the first recipient of The Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Housing—the industry’s premier award for extraordinary, lasting, and far-reaching contributions to the advancement of sustainable housing in the U.S.

“Edward Mazria has had a powerful impact on sustainable design,” says Michael J. Hanley, founder of The Hanley Foundation and creator of the award. “He has influenced innovative advances in design and technology through his creative architecture, energetic teaching, and groundbreaking writing. And Ed’s current mission with his non-profit Architecture 2030 brings his vision and leadership to a new level. We’re thrilled to name him as our first recipient.”

The Hanley Award is sponsored by The Hanley Foundation, EcoHome, and EcoHome’s parent company, Hanley Wood, and will be presented to Mazria along with its $50,000 grant Nov. 12 during the USGBC’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Phoenix.

If The Hanley Award were simply an honor for creating an influential body of architectural work or for contributions to technical research and innovation in buildings, Mazria’s accomplishments in these areas alone would shine. But the award and Mazria’s significant impact go well beyond his buildings. His early research and architectural work in the 1970s form the basis of understanding for concepts that are unmistakable in the details and principles applied in today’s high-performance homes. Design concepts promoted by today’s sustainability leaders are rooted in Mazria’s 1979 milestone The Passive Solar Energy Book, which translated complex solar and building performance engineering data into an understandable vocabulary.

Mazria’s early insights into vernacular architecture and historical use of local materials, and the relationship between architecture and the natural world, are deeply embedded in today’s definition of sustainability. And his belief that buildings could escape the bonds of energy-intensive mechanical systems and fossil fuels was an early wake-up call to an industry that 35 years later includes production builders promoting “zero-energy” homes.

With a clear vision comes a strong voice, and over the years he’s never lost sight of his mission to improve the environmental performance of buildings through increased environmental awareness and innovations in design and construction. These crucial concerns motivated Mazria in 2002 to create Architecture 2030, a non-profit environmental research and education organization based in Santa Fe, N.M., to which he now devotes full-time attention. The organization gets its name from its goal—leading the building sector to reach net-zero carbon emissions by the year 2030—and it is through this outlet that Mazria has placed the building sector at the center of the global warming dialogue.

Turning points

Some career choices are a slam dunk. In Mazria’s case, his entry into architecture was made possible by one after the basketball coach for Pratt Institute in New York City watched the high school stand-out take control of an all-city showcase game and offered him a scholarship on the spot. The institute’s renowned and progressive School of Architecture became Mazria’s launchpad into the world of design and the place he earned his architecture degree. It was also where he honed his basketball skills and attracted the attention of the NBA’s New York Knicks, who drafted Mazria in 1962, a year before graduation. But when another draft notice—from the U.S. Army—arrived after graduation, it diverted his professional sports career. Mazria arranged to complete alternative service in the Peace Corps and was off to Peru for two years where he practiced architecture, inoculated children against polio, and helped the city basketball team as a player-coach.

After the Peace Corps, Mazria’s path led him back to New York, where he practiced architecture for a number of firms. From there he moved on to Albuquerque and taught architecture as a visiting lecturer at the University of New Mexico.

But it was his subsequent appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Oregon that would prove most fateful, when his first assignment was to teach a course in solar energy. “There was a small group of very bright students there who had caught the solar fever and were building and testing some passive and active models at the university,” Mazria recalls. “They wanted a professor who could lead the effort, and they figured that since I had come from New Mexico I already knew the subject.”

Actually, at that point in 1976, there were only a few architects who had any solar knowledge or experience. So, in the months leading up to his start at Oregon, Mazria returned to New Mexico and immersed himself in solar studies and research with Ray Harrigan, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. Mazria credits Harrigan with helping him distill and decipher volumes of technical data and translate it into a more understandable language so that he and his students at Oregon could apply it to their studies. This set the stage for further research that would enlighten his practice and his profession for years to come; it also was the period when Mazria’s social awareness, architectural direction, and environmental consciousness began to coalesce.

Patterns

If there’s one trait that ties the beginnings of Mazria’s career through to his current mission, it’s his ability to look at complex data and recognize patterns. Mazria arrived in Oregon with a suitcase stuffed with computer punch-cards programmed to model the energy performance of a single direct-gain passive solar room. Working with his research and teaching assistant Steve Baker and their students, Mazria began two years of research using this basic computer program to model passive solar design elements for buildings, modifying it to simulate different climate and solar energy conditions and latitudes.

“Steve was a computer whiz, and every night he would take another batch of punch cards to the computer center and run the program for a different set of conditions,” says Mazria. “And every day we’d take the print-outs and tape them to the wall. It wasn’t long before the walls were completely covered, and we could start to see the performance patterns emerge.” Those patterns became the language of passive solar design and resulted in widely accepted and easy-to-apply recommendations for building orientation, glazed wall areas, shading, and thermal mass design still used today.

Mazria presented the results at the 2nd National Passive Solar Conference in 1978 and was, at first, met with skepticism by the audience. In attendance was pioneering solar research scientist Douglas Balcomb, Ph.D., from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “I remember following Doug onto the stage to present our passive solar design principles,” says Mazria. “At the time research was still being conducted using test boxes with thermal sensors, so people were somewhat skeptical that we could have come so far so fast. But by the end of the presentation everyone including Balcomb realized that we really did know what we were talking about.”

This was still very early in the solar energy movement of the ’70s, so the timing of Mazria’s research couldn’t have been better. After returning to Albuquerque in 1978, Mazria published The Passive Solar Energy Book (Rodale Press, 1979), which thrust him into the national spotlight. “This was the first book that put solar building design information into a language people could use,” says Mazria, “and it was the first time since Christopher Alexander published A Pattern Language that the pattern language format was put to use in this way.”

It was time for Mazria to practice what he had been preaching.

The Practice

Mazria established his architectural practice in Albuquerque in 1978 and began work on his Master of Architecture degree at the University of New Mexico, and in 1985 he joined the vibrant solar energy community in Santa Fe, where he still lives and works. His architectural work combined the elements of his design philosophies with the science of his technical research. As his practice evolved, attracting increasingly interesting and challenging projects, so did his research. His buildings reflected strong ties to New Mexico’s climate and landscape; respect for its traditional architectural forms, styles, and materials; and enlightened integration of technical solutions based on the simple elegance of passive solar design elements.

The more he learned from his buildings, the more he applied the knowledge to his practice and spread the word among others so that the growing circle of solar designers could compare notes and advance their efforts as a whole. It was an intense period of design, research, analysis, writing, and cross-pollination at conferences and workshops across the country where Mazria was always a featured speaker.

In addition to his practice, Mazria collaborated with Doug Balcomb and pioneer solar developers Wayne and Susan Nichols to form Passive Solar Associates, a sort of solar super-group that toured nationally training thousands of architects, builders, and public officials in two-day design and technical workshops.

Back in the studio, each project presented its own challenges and solutions—and yielded its own lessons. There were passive solar homes, museums, schools, community centers, and botanical gardens. And there were some noteworthy firsts, such as the Mt. Airy Public Library in North Carolina, which he designed in 1983 and is widely known due to its achieving an 80% reduction in energy demand through its daylighting and passive design features. “This was the first institutional building designed for almost 100% daylighting,” Mazria says. “All of its energy savings were achieved just through design.”

In 1982 Mazria and the Nicholses designed the first passive solar townhouse development, in Santa Fe’s historic district. The 27-unit La Vereda Compound combined passive solar orientation and glazing elements with traditional New Mexican forms and materials in small blocks that cascade down the sloping site creating south-facing terraces and balconies for each residence.

One of Mazria’s most challenging projects was two glass conservatories for the Rio Grande Botanic Garden in Albuquerque in 1998. “The city asked us to create two distinct environments in these all-glass pavilions,” Mazria says, “one Sonoran Desert, one Mediterranean.” The resulting research, which would lead to each glass pavilion operating with minimal outside energy for heating or cooling, was revolutionary. “Working with Bob Jones, who was part of the original solar group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we identified how, by changing the properties of the glass placed on different sides of the buildings, we could tune the design so that it matched the temperature profiles of each of the two environments.” This technique has evolved into a widely recommended approach to window specification and placement according to their orientation and glazing properties.

Rediscovering “The Limits”

For younger architects working in Mazria’s busy Santa Fe office, every project would bring a series of “desk crits,” when Mazria would stop by, look at their progress, suggest changes, and move on. The seeds of Architecture 2030 were planted in 2002 when they asked him to give an in-house seminar so they could better understand the underlying factors driving sustainable design and why he would suggest certain changes. “They wanted me to share the work I did back in the solar days,” Mazria explains. “I wanted to present it in a larger context, so I reread the books that influenced me back then to brush up on some of the most important background information.”

That’s when he rediscovered “The Limits To Growth,” the 1972 landmark report to The Club of Rome that stands alongside Silent Spring and A Sand County Almanac as the first calls to environmental concern. “Limits” presented the first alarming projections of the effects population would have on food, resources, and the environment, eerily predicting conditions and challenges we would face by 2000.

Seeing this data again, and the accuracy of some of its graphs, triggered in Mazria a renewed level of concern and activism that inspired him to found Architecture 2030, devoted to fighting climate change and convincing the building industry that it holds the key to slowing and reversing global warming—with the year 2030 as its urgent goal.

Like the rest of Mazria’s work, Architecture 2030’s mission is based on research. Taking a new look at the generally accepted data on energy use in the U.S., Mazria saw the traditional division of consumption: industry (35%), transportation (27%), residential buildings (21%), and commercial buildings (17%). Analysts have always targeted industry and transportation as the main culprits and prescribed reduction goals primarily in these two areas; but when Mazria combined commercial and residential data, added elements of building operation energy consumption from the industry sector, and calculated an embodied energy factor for the materials used in construction, he found that this single “building sector” consumes 50.1% of the energy consumed in the U.S. and contributes just below 50% of the greenhouse gas emissions. This revelation, combined with the fact that 93% of building sector activity is private, has become a cornerstone of Mazria’s message, the focus of his push to redirect federal stimulus package funds into the private building sector, and the basis of Architecture 2030’s timeline for increased energy efficiency as laid out in its 2030 Challenge.

“The road to energy independence, economic recovery, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions runs through the building sector,” says Mazria. “The 2030 Challenge asks that any new building project, development, or renovation reduce its energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 50% of the regional average for that building type, and that at a minimum you renovate the same amount of building area that you build new, to perform at 50% the regional average for that type of building.”

The Challenge then lays out further thresholds and dates: 60% reductions in 2010, 70% in 2015, 80% in 2020, 90% in 2025, and carbon- and emission-neutral in 2030. The list of industry organizations, private companies, and government agencies—including the U.S. Conference of Mayors—that have adopted the 2030 Challenge is impressive and growing. Targets within the 2030 Challenge can now be found in codes and legislation stretching from California to Washington, D.C., and within the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 now before Congress, including new performance-based codes that Mazria advocates.

Architecture 2030 has other ambitious initiatives under way, including a campaign to end the use of coal for U.S. energy generation based on Architecture 2030’s projected reduced demand due to building performance improvements; an educational and design program centered on the effects of climate change, energy consumption, and sea level rise; and a critical effort to convince architectural educators to include sustainability and energy efficiency in their curricula.

This initiative experienced a historic launch in 2007 when Architecture 2030 and AmericaSpeaks held the 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In, a live Webcast that drew 250,000 professionals, architecture educators, and students from around the world to learn about climate change, energy efficiency, and sustainability. “If we can get educators to add just one sentence to the projects they assign their students, we can completely change design education,” Mazria says. That sentence: “Design your project to engage the environment in a way that dramatically reduces or eliminates the need for fossil fuel.”

Most recently, Architecture 2030 has embarked on “The One-Year, 4.5 Million Jobs Investment Plan,” which Mazria, 2030 director Kristina Kershner, and their team are convinced will finally leverage the interconnection between environment, energy, and economy. The plan starts with a $30 billion government investment in the private building sector to provide a “housing mortgage interest rate buy-down for homes that meet or exceed the reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge.” According to Architecture 2030, the energy improvements, mostly to existing homes, would generate 4.5 million jobs and $296 billion in spending, and open up a new $47.6 billion renovation market that could grow to more than $1 trillion by 2030. The tax base from new job creation and from sales related to the new homes and renovations would pay back double the initial investment to the government. “The best thing about this plan is that it creates a new tax base from the jobs it creates, saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and pays for itself.”

Only an optimist could generate the variety of creative solutions and work so hard for so long to bring them into view. And it is with this optimism that Mazria sees opportunity in the midst of crisis: “By 2039 three-quarters of our built environment will be either new or renovated buildings. There’s a tremendous opportunity for the building sector to slow down and reverse the destructive trend of global warming.”

Does he see progress? “We’re getting through,” he says. “We’re so close. Green building is going to explode.”

Rick Schwolsky is Editor in Chief of EcoHome.