New Year’s Day 2050
Sixty years ago, I first imagined a beautiful future of communities hand-built of wood, straw, earthen plaster and thatch, of light-filled rooms warmed by the sun, of solar panels and rainwater collection and damaged ecosystems restored to glorious biodiversity. Building this future would be joyful, meaningful work. Everyone would be needed, their contributions valued. For two decades, I did my part to lead by example. But the rush to drain wetlands and throw up big-box stores continued unabated. Oil and gas drilling expanded, as did the wanton waste of energy, materials and people, hoarded wealth and refugee camps, and the callous disregard for the suffering of others. It was all too much.
When climate denial finally fizzled, the national mood sped right past hope and crash-landed in despair, taking me with it. Overnight, Climate change isn’t real became It’s too late to do anything.
Not so, said my young, idealistic architecture students. We can do better. And they went on to prove it.
Jemimah designed a community center on the riverfront of an under-resourced community to serve everyone, babies to elders. There were places to swim, play, garden, cook, learn, climb, feed the ducks, listen to music, meet friends, bike, walk, rest, and watch the sunset. For a while, people accessed the waterfront from their historic neighborhood on a graceful, wide green bridge over a noxious eight-lane highway from the same era as the Berlin Wall. But within the decade, buoyed by their rich experiences along the river, the residents banded together to remove the highway and install light rail, bike lanes, and miles of solar panels in its place.
Excited by their talent and vision, I assured my students that design-thinking is their superpower. When we align our actions with nature’s design wisdom, we tap into her 3.4-billion-year history of ingenious solutions that create and nurture life. Every being on earth is part of networks within networks, from the smallest cell to the largest organism, from a tiny niche ecosystem to a vast continent, from backyard weather to the earth’s climate. I encouraged my students to see that their individual talents and responsibilities are part of these nesting networks that form a miraculous breathing whole. My students belong here. We all belong here. Together, we found the courage to look into the future with hope.
Hope is not wishful thinking or empty optimism. Hope is a renewable resource, best tended in community. Hope is a necessary ingredient for effective action.
Armed with the certainty that We can do better, my students refused to follow the status quo of architectural practice in firms held hostage by late-stage Capitalism. Instead, they gave their imaginations free reign to roam over degraded waterfronts, impoverished inner cities, concrete barriers, and toxic waste dumps. They bravely confronted the interlinked crises of climate change and social injustice, and they answered with beauty. Drawing from deep wells of empathy, they raised their voices and sang out hopeful solutions.
Leah cleverly repurposed shipping pallets as temporary emergency homes, gardens and gathering places to occupy vacant lots and house the unhoused. City officials, inspired by her simple statement that housing is a human right, enacted policies to guarantee every one of their citizens a place to live. Other cities took note and followed suit.
Not once did these young people go to a place and say, This is what I want and this is what I expect from you. Instead, they asked, What do you need? And they listened to the answers and set about designing housing, community centers, schools, libraries, and heritage trails to reveal erased histories. They tore down barriers and built places of love and connection and healing.
At that time, we didn’t realize that each of us was acting like a single white blood cell in earth’s immune system response to the assaults and damage of centuries. It was a fertile time of unraveling and reweaving. It was all such a jumble; nobody could be certain of the outcome. Especially since all of us were still mired in and complicit with the very systems we so desperately wanted to change. Refusing to succumb to doubt or despair, parents and grandparents followed their hearts. They held rocking-chair sit-ins and chained closed the doors of fossil-fuel-funding banks. Other marched, voted, ran for office, started businesses, planted gardens.
Looking back, there was no one thing that pushed the world onto a better path. Much as we might have wished for it, there was no one answer, no magic formula. Other than this: people stopped saying It’s too late. Instead, their collective cry was We can do better, together.
When my students weren’t marching against pipelines and demanding justice, they spent long hours in the design studio, giving birth to their visions. I knew that if more people could see their work, it would inspire and create ripple effects of hope in action. Together with my students, we produced a podcast called Building Hope to feature their projects and to talk about their experiences designing them.
One episode featured Christian, who collaborated with the residents of the small town in Guatemala where his grandmother still lived, to design and 3-D print houses, schools, shops and community centers. Everyone there was already living a good life, they just needed better places in which to thrive. Following the exposure from the podcast, this way of working spread to other communities in his native country, and beyond.
Melonee helped a Baltimore neighborhood to rise from the ashes of decades of racist zoning and divisive infrastructure, by building a beautiful school set in a landscape of native plant gardens and a pond. A welcoming place for people of all ages to come together, visit, learn, grow, and celebrate. It was so successful, other neighborhoods followed their model. Eventually, Baltimore became as much garden as city.
I encouraged my students to, no matter what, follow their heart’s calling. They understood that no individual project was going to solve everything. Even if not in a visible way in their lifetime, they trusted that the stones they cast would create ripples to catalyze change. They knew they were a small part of a vast system.
Ava, guided by her last name meaning “hopeful” in Persian, designed a climate-resilient building for artists and small businesses that could be moved to higher ground when the waters rose. After the great flood of 2043, her building performed flawlessly and became a model for other coastal cities.
Juhi worked with a large team to build a mixed-use high-rise tower of mass timber on a prominent waterfront site in Boston to demonstrate eco-design in action, because, as she observed way back in 2018, “Climate change is now, it’s happening, and we can do better.” Her building sequesters more carbon than went into its construction, which is now the standard for all architecture in the U.S.
Jazmin turned the tide of soulless apartment buildings in a historic neighborhood with her proposal for a community of houses, a history heritage trail, a permaculture farm, and an arts center, on a site that had been a vibrant Freedman’s farming village after the Civil War. Residents were so inspired by learning their long-buried history that they organized into a cooperative to purchase the site from developers and build out her vision. Today, it’s a thriving showcase housing thousands of residents and supplying food for the entire community.
Each season of the podcast, Building Hope, inspired architecture students to give their own imaginations free reign. They followed their hearts, cast their own stones into the pond, making their own ripples. Other students shared the podcast with their friends around the country, and those students shared it with their friends around the world. Their beautiful proof that We can do better was guided by nature’s wisdom—that one small act of restoration connects to another and another. That together, we are the earth’s immune response. That healing is possible when we listen to our hearts and to each other.