DLR Group: Transformation Underway
September 2010 | 2030 Challenge
DLR Group, an international and interdisciplinary design firm providing architecture, engineering, planning, and interior design from offices coast-to-coast and in China, is working hard to demonstrate its full support of the initiatives and goals of the 2030 Challenge.
This year, DLR Group’s leadership traveled to its offices nationwide to discuss the firm’s plans to meet the 2030 Challenge and AIA’s 2030 Commitment. The Kansas City Business Journal interviewed Steven McKay, a senior principal of DLR Group in Seattle, who pointed out that the key is returning to an earlier approach to planning buildings, before architects came to rely on HVAC systems and extensive electric lighting to solve their designs’ shortcomings.
“All the things you’ve forgotten when you got into the real world because ‘Here’s your budget, here’s your schedule, and oh, my God, I’ve got a great idea for a 50-story glass skyscraper in Dubai,’” McKay told the designers. “We’ve forgotten about it. But these principles exist, and we are asking that we insert that rigor back into our practice.” Read more: Groups take challenge to leave no footprint – Kansas City Business Journal
This effort continued when DLR Group designers joined founder and CEO of Architecture 2030, Edward Mazria and Vincent Martinez, Architecture 2030’s Research and Production Coordinator, on IslandWood in Puget Sound in early August for DLR University 2010. Together, they examined and collaborated to activate DLR Group’s 2030 action plan. DLRU 2010 welcomed sixty participants, who were themselves knowledgeable about sustainable design, and who, as Metropolis Mag.com points out in its article below, are now hoped to become, “catalysts at their 22 home offices; that each local team will be able to push the envelope further in the direction of the firm’s 2030 commitments and, ideally, to win both colleagues and clients to their side in the process.” Read more: Ed Mazria’s Master Class- Metropolis Mag.com
