Creating Impactful Building Designs for the Future with Anthony Brower of Gensler

November 16, 2023

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As a global leader of Gensler’s Climate Action & Sustainability practice, Anthony Brower creates cascading design impacts by connecting patterns that scale from space planning to urban design. He is a climate architect that teaches passive design solutions to the next generation of architects as a professor at the University of Southern California.

John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a Rockstar Impact podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click, Be a Guest, to recommend someone today. This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and so honored to have with us today, Anthony Brower. He’s the Global Climate Action and Sustainability Practice Area Leader at Gensler. Welcome Anthony to the Impact Podcast.

Anthony Brower: Thank you so much for talking to me here, John. It’s amazing. Appreciate that you bringing me on.

John: Well, this is great. We’ve never had Gensler on, we’ve never had a big architecture forman before, so it’s so wonderful that you are representing this industry today and Gensler today. And we’re also going to be talking about all the important work you’re doing, also teaching at the iconic USC here in Southern California. But before we get into that, talk a little bit about your beginnings, where you grew up, Anthony, and how you, having got interested in art and architecture, and how you got on this fascinating and wonderful and important journey.

Anthony: Absolutely. I’ll take you through a shorter version of my little origin story. But I actually started, I got interested in Architecture by just taking a drafting class in high school.

John: Wow.

Anthony: And when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my career, I was at this crossroads. I wanted to go into education, I wanted to go into architecture, I wanted to kind of get into computer science which was kind of big back in those days. So I’m like if I go into Architecture knowing that drawings were moving from hand to computer, I’m like, you know what? I get to touch all three.

John: That’s right.

Anthony: And now, 30 years later, here, I’m now teaching at USC in addition. So I’m kind of bringing full circle kind of one of those, like that trial together. I started at Gensler about 20 years ago as a project docket architect, and then probably about a year into it, I kind of saw an opportunity for us to do better from a sustainability point of view. So I wound up in a very strange way, I built my own business within a massive organization that just pivoted the way we were thinking about sustainability, how we were delivering better for a project. I can’t take all the credit. There’s a ton of people who are kind of helping make it all small work, but, Gensler being such a great organization, they hired me for one job and I found a way to deliver a different value to our clients. I pivoted, nobody said no, nobody stopped me, and I just built my own business. And here I am now, I’m running a group of between 70 and a hundred people across the firm who were kind of full-time dedicated to making climate impact on projects.

John: That’s wonderful. And so you really, before this was a common practice, which it is now become much more of a common practice. You were sort of an in-house employee who became an intrapreneur who developed this practice, within Gensler.

Anthony: Yeah. I actually just had a conversation with Adam about students yesterday. The very subtle difference between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. It’s an interesting distinction.

John: It is. Here’s one thing I want you to share though, and frame up on a macro basis for our listeners and viewers who are not familiar with Gensler. What, who, how big Gensler is, what Gensler does as a core business, and just the size and scope, and magnitude of Gensler. And for our listeners and viewers to find Gensler and Anthony and his colleagues at Gensler, you could go to www.gensler, G-E-N-S-L-E-R, Gensler, G-E-N-S-L-E-R.com. Frame up what Gensler does and the macro mission of Gensler, Anthony.

Anthony: Gensler is a global architecture and design firm. We’ve got about 50 offices around the world. We’re about 6,000 people. We touch somewhere between one and a half and 2 billion square feet of work around the globe every single year. That’s how many active projects we have going on at any given point in time. Just to give a snapshot of our scale, we touch a lot of different project types. We do stadiums, we do office buildings. Frankly, the easiest way for me to describe what we do to you is to tell you what we don’t do. We don’t do single-family residential, and we don’t do jails. Everything else is the type of work [crosstalk] the type of work we do. Yeah.

John: On the table, yeah. That’s fascinating. And how did you, where did you get the epiphany, vision, a lot of things, the prescient thought process of merging sustainability with architecture?

Anthony: I’ve always kind of jumped in a utility player. I started off as an architect in a small design firm. We did residential and commercial. I left that firm and I went to join a construction manager, owner’s reps, DMS[?]. I actually oversaw the construction construction work. I’ve pretty much done everything except be an engineer. And frankly, several times I’ve been accused of being an engineer by a client in the middle of a kind of a pitch meeting. They’re like, you told me you weren’t bringing an engineer with me. I’m like, well, I’ll take that as a compliment. I just understand the engineer side of our work because of the focus I put on sustainability.

John: Hmm. Anthony, in 2023 as we all know now, we’re living through the hottest year in world’s recorded history. Talk a little bit about, there’s lots of solutions and you hear about all these trends of ESG, linear to circular economy, the alphabet soup of acronyms CSR, and, but talk a little bit about the importance of architecture and building more resilient buildings in response to the climate impact changes, and also to help push back on the climate crisis that we’re facing right now.

Anthony: Yeah. So, John, there’s an interesting kind of competing interest around that kind of thing. So we talk about sustainability and we talk about resilience. And when most people talk about resilience, the key theme is disaster preparedness. How am I putting in more infrastructure in order to insulate me, or my building against changes from client, not client from climate that sometimes actually requires more resources? When we talk about sustainability, it’s all about how do we do more with less. So, sometimes those things are a little at odds with each other, how am I going to provide more power so that if there’s a power outage, I can continue working?

John: Right.

Anthony: So it’s this interesting kind of back and forth around finding that common blend between the right thing. And sometimes when we provide more we’re actually making more negative impacts on the climate because now we’re using more energy to do, to build in operational resiliency, if that makes sense.

John: Yeah. We’re faced with more externalities, it seems like, than ever before. One thing came to mind, and of course, it’s burn. We’re not only living through the hottest period ever in world history, but as we know, Canada has the wildfires that are right now burning and polluting New York, and Chicago. We just watched the tragedies and the ongoing cleanup work in Maui. In Maui, they were showing pictures of the town that burned down Lahaina, and there was that one house with the red roof that stood standing. I don’t know if you’ve seen that in the news, but it’s fascinating there.

And they’ve had people start on the news, try to weigh into why the one house, was it an architecture issue or it has a red roof, so it sticks out. Or was it just a freak and a miracle? So, one day, I’d love to get your take on that at another time because we’re talking about resilience, and things of that such, why do some buildings make it through others. But what seemed to also have been taking off, and it seems to have merged perfectly with your vision and your career, is the Green Building Council and the sort of race among developers to build lead-certified platinum, lead-certified buildings, gold lead-certified buildings, silver-lead certified buildings. How has that affected Gensler’s practice and more particularly the division that you birthed and are now heading up at Gensler?

Anthony: It’s actually become a very common practice. There’s a lot of sustainability that the industry’s learned a lot from what USGBC has been doing over the last 20 years, now. Even local building codes have started taking regulations and ideas from within some of those programs, lead and others embedding them into codes as a standard of practice. It’s becoming the new standard of care. So there’s a lot of things that we are doing, and we’ve started it for a long time now, if it’s not going to cost our clients extra money if it’s not going to change the scope significantly, we’re actually just doing what we call basic practice. We’re integrating a lot of this stuff, day one, and I almost take a mountaineering approach to it as the years go by.

We’re essentially just base camping. The industry gets to a certain level. We base camp, we say, okay, here’s the new level, and then, okay, now this is the new baseline to build from. And then, I think we’re in like a 5th or 6th iteration of base camping because like I’ve had a conversation with somebody the other day, they’re talking about how do we start rewarding projects for using passive design solutions when that’s not a prescriptive thing that limps in any of those programs. And my response to that was, we’re at this new base camp moment. We’ve tackled and conquered so much that now we’re able to have this conversation to get even more sophisticated about how we look at our work, especially as it relates to some of those programs.

John: Anthony, I’ve never heard that terminology or vernacular before. Passive design solutions as a term of art, what does that mean in your industry?

Anthony: Well, it’s about solutions that are going to cost us energy. I don’t want to put in, I put in an occupancy sensor that’s going to turn the lights off, on and off for me, I’ve got energy that’s going to drive that system that’s going to make it more efficient. If I put shutters on the outside of the building, I’m going to stop the sun before it gets in, as opposed to trying to mitigate the heat load once it crosses the window. So everybody talks about how tech is going to save us with how are we decarbonizing, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. How we are going to use technology to do that? I think the best pack is low-tech. How are we providing sufficient shading? How are we doing everything we can to design asset manner?

John: Understood.

Anthony: So that what’s left is what we’re offsetting. We’re not starting over the decades, or even say, dare I say the century, we’ve become more and more reliant on mechanical systems and air conditioning as a starting point. We need to back up and rethink about that and how do we start off with passive design solutions first and then bring in the mechanical and support systems with what’s left, but not as a starting point.

John: So I come to you and I’m sitting down with you and your team in Los Angeles, and I’m a real estate developer in Chicago, and I have a reputation of building high-quality high-rise buildings when I come and sit down with my team and give you a wishlist, what are developers asking you the most for right now? Because they’re thinking about curb appeal aesthetics. They’re thinking about making their client base that they feel that they know quite well, happy and satisfied, and wanting their product. Is it heat resilience? Is it the focus now on health and wellness and good, bettering cleaner oxygen in the building? Less emissions from the paint, the carpets, and the built environment where is the focus? Or is it idiosyncratic as the developers themselves? And it seems to vary depending on who the developers are.

Anthony: Well, right now, the big focus is getting people back into the workplace. And the key there is how are we making the office a destination and not an obligation.

John: Ah.

Anthony: Which is a big piece of the story right now. And, one of the interesting things that I lean on, we talk about, I’m going to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole here for you.

John: Yeah.

Anthony: California has a white roof ordinance.

John: Right.

Anthony: We always think about a white roof. You’ve been on kind of that blacktop where the sun hits it and you feel that heat radiating off. And when you’re in a big parking lot, a white roof was intended to solve that problem. And while it’s good for the building, it’s bad, not bad, but it’s bad for the environment because what all, what’s happening is you’re double baking the air instantaneously and you’re not really noticing it. It comes back to that first law of thermodynamics. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just transfers from one state to the other. So where that intersects with this making the office a destination is we’re talking to a lot more clients about rooftop vegetation. So if we really want to mitigate rising temperatures in cities, we need to give the sun’s energy something to be absorbed and used.

So we’re transferring the sun’s energy, not just right back up in the atmosphere, but into that plant vegetation so that it grows. So how are we taking the vegetated ground plane and literally lifting that up and making that the roof plane of future buildings so that the sun’s energy is being absorbed and not just re-radiating back into the environment, causing temperature rise? The intersection with the whole destination is now I’ve got a brand new amenity, I’ve got a rooftop amenity, or I’ve got balcony amenities that are much more desirable. A lot of times we’re starting to play with solid and void where we’re carving space out of the building within the building envelope to bring some of those spaces into the building and creating outdoor spaces inside the building. And if you protect them right from sun and wind, they’re definitely outdoor. They’re definitely usable, especially here in LA. So it’s basically usable 85, 90% of the year [crosstalk].

John: [inaudible]

Anthony: What do we have? LA we have two seasons, John. We’ve got Spring and we’ve got Autumn. We’re at the tail end of Autumn right now.

John: You’re right. That’s funny. Is the health and wellness thing play a big factor into the important work you’re doing with regards to air quality? And like you said, a destination where people want to be almost reminds me of the Silicon Valley beginnings where I remember going to Google in 2002 and ’03 and pulling up and getting this experience that I’ve never saw before in an office structure where they had doctors and gyms and multiple restaurants, and it was almost like the Old Eagles album, Hotel California, you could check in, but never leave.

Anthony: Yeah.

John: Has that become what you’re trying to now create 2023 and beyond in terms of a destination?

Anthony: Yeah. And some of it is getting hyper-focused around air quality, especially in the wake of COVID-19 and everything that’s happening. But there’s also this interesting renaissance revisit of what I call design opportunities. We talk about exterior stairs. We’re seeing more projects where we’re pulling stairs outside the building.

John: Wow.

Anthony: And it gets interesting because when you talk to our clients, ESG, or my sustainability counterparts of our clients’ organizations when we talk about stairs outside the building, it’s more of a wellness conversation. How am I promoting activity for the users of the building to kind of get them away from moving around in the elevator? But there’s a bunch of other benefits. Like when I talk to designers at the designer opportunity, when I talk to a developer like, “Hey, we can increase leasable, square footage inside the building”.

So we’re kind of looking for those other opportunities where there’s kind of synergies or cascading impacts on some of those things. But back to your original question, I think the air quality, cleaner air inside the building, or creating more usable outdoor spaces is really a big focus in the wake of COVID-19. And we thought we were at the end of it. And now we’re seeing another resurgence just in the last couple of days in weeks.

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John: ESG has become one of those important acronyms. A little bit politicized, unfortunately. But regardless, it’s here to stay. And are developers coming to you and saying, “Hey, I am a publicly traded company. I need to answer to my institutional investors, analysts, and Wall Street, help me achieve my ESG goals”. And they lay it on the table and then let your creativity and let your team’s experience, help them achieve their ESG goals from their perspective. Is that part of the process now?

Anthony: Absolutely. And I was actually asked that question not long ago by one of our clients. They invited me down to a room because they wanted to talk about this. And I walked in and before I even put my butt in the chair, they’re like, we need you to give us an ESG-compliant building. And I’m like, it really doesn’t work that way. I said, but tell me what you’re being measured on, and let’s use those things that you’re trying to measure to influence good design decisions. I mean, there’s good and bad. You’re right. ESG is being politicized right now.

There’s some kind of naysayers, and proponents across the board. But the interesting thing is, a lot of it is how do we stop using back-casted metrics? How do we stop just measuring what we’ve done? Or maybe a better way to say this, how do we take what our clients have measured that they’ve already done and use that as a tool to create better decisions going forward? How are we using these as more of design influencers?

John: Interesting. About 30 years ago or so, I had the absolute honor and pleasure to work for Ira Yellen, and we were working with Brenda Levin back then who has become iconic in architecture in Los Angeles with regards to reuse projects. Talk a little bit about how you balance all these new trends that we’ve been talking about today at Gensler with regard to sustainability and climate and adaptive reuse projects, which I would call the Bradbury building and Grand Central Market, and all these great projects I got to work on. And new buildings that don’t have grandfathered-in clauses or any of the stuff that gets grandfathered in and they’re built new and they have up to have to be to the highest and the best standards. How does that juggling act look and what gets you out of bed and gets you the most excited when we’re talking about the compare and contrast of new buildings in sustainability and adaptive reuse projects?

Anthony: If you think about it, John, adaptive reuse is the ultimate form of recycling.

John: It’s real.

Anthony: We’re not just talking about recycling bottles in cans. We’re recycling entire structures.

John: Sure.

Anthony: The most sustainable building and the challenge with sustainability over the decades has been, it evolved the changes. Are you talking about energy efficiency? Are you talking about waste? We are always talking about how do we do more with less. And the most sustainable building can very likely be the building that already exists. How are we protecting and reusing what’s already done as opposed to kind of tearing it down and kind of building it up again? But it gets into a lot of interesting conversations. Our clients come to us and if they’re planning on building a new building, I have teams that come to me and say, “Hey Mike, adapting, we were doing an adaptive reuse”. And I’m like, whose idea was that? I sometimes challenge my own team members.

John: Right.

Anthony: It’s okay, that’s great. We’re doing an adaptive reuse. Whose idea was it? Did the client come to you and say, we’re building a new building and you turn them around, or they came to you and they have just an existing asset they want to reuse? And it’s really just a fun way of pushing back and saying, how are we engaging our clients to do more? But yeah, it’s how we are improving the stock that we have. It’s really one of the biggest opportunities that we really should not walk away from. But there are times when our client wants to adapt an existing building if they’re only going to use it for a short period of time.

John: Yes.

Anthony: Adaptation is the number one option. If they’re planning on living in it and using it for 80, 100, 150 years. Sometimes the long-term savings from higher performing systems of a more in-tuned and new-built out-of-the-ground building makes more sense. That you save more money in the long term. The aspects we deal with are cost-benefit or lifecycle analysis to see what makes, so there’s like long term in the short term or easy, it’s where you get in the middle where you really say, okay, what makes the most sense? Where are we going to get the biggest value from a sustainability perspective?

John: That’s fascinating. For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Anthony Brower with us. He’s the Global Climate Action and Sustainability practice leader at Gensler, find Anthony and his colleagues and all the great work they’re doing at Gensler in sustainability and climate action. Please go to www.gensler, G-E-N-S-L-E-R.com. gensler.com. So, Anthony, we’re talking a little bit here about sustainability and climate action and things of that such. Talk a little bit about one of your favorite projects you’re working on right now that you’re allowed to talk about. I don’t want you to give up any secrets or anything, but what are you working on right now? In what cities? Is it a world, is your division a worldwide division where you could have a building in LA but also a building in Dubai and a building in Mumbai right now that you’re working on concurrently?

Anthony: Most of my work, I’m overseeing this practice for the firm at a global scale with two of my partners. One’s in San Francisco and the other one is in London. Most of the work that I oversee happened in Europe, in my region, John here down in the Southwest.

John: Understood.

Anthony: One of the more interesting projects that I was working on recently was a medical office building out in Duarte, California. And it was one of those where the project really embraced those early design moves. They actually went to the stage to say, “Hey, where is their program that I can pull out of the building, like stairs? Why am I going to condition stairs when I’m just going to use them for vertical circulation? How do I create that, make it as a design element on the outside of the building? I can actually share some imagery from a project that’s actually City of Hope, one of our great client partners.

John: Wow.

Anthony: So, but yeah, I get excited by the project teams and the clients who want to make sustainability the very first five minutes of that napkin sketch, that very first iteration, because [crosstalk].

John: That’s right.

Anthony: Frankly, where you get the bigger impact?

John: The talk here is that COVID has changed the world forever. Whether that’s true or not, I guess is yet to be seen. But this whole hybrid working situation for sure has been challenging for employers across the world in terms of, it seems as though originally many of the firms said, you can work from home forever. And many of those firms have now reversed their thinking. What I hear when I talk to friends and colleagues and business associates across the world is that most firms have at least people coming in, in person 3 days a week, and allow them some flexibilities on Mondays or Fridays and things of that such. What are you seeing? And number 1, Anthony, what are you seeing with regards to this trend post-COVID? And also how are these buildings going to be recycled and reused, the ones that don’t get repopulated with the vast amount of employees that used to work, mainly from the office?

Anthony: John, we’ve lost what COVID has taken away from us. It’s taken away that in-person connection, people are starting to realize what they’ve lost and they’re highly motivated to find it and get it back. And that’s why I said before, we need to make offices.

John: It’s true.

Anthony: And retail and lifestyle spaces, we need to make them a destination and not an obligation. Because people who are out there are looking at it. Immersive experiences are expected. It’s not just a nice to have anymore. And that’s where the world has started to move, I think 3 years now of isolation. We need to get back together. I think we’re starting to see some of the impacts of that.

John: Yeah, I fully agree with you. I felt that the whole social media and rise of technology pre-COVID was already making us an isolationist society, and world. And COVID just accelerated that to a point where it crossed over to, it was a tipping point of badness. Where it’s really causing, as you said, I think a lot of bad results came out of that, or at least we’re starting to come out of that. And I agree it’s nothing better than working together with colleagues in person, in an office environment that’s joyful and a nice place to be.

I think that’s the best. Talk a little bit about Anthony Brower outside of Gensler. I know you do some very important and impactful work outside of Gensler as well with regards to the Gentleman’s Ride in November’s Annual Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride and to help raise awareness of suicide prevention. And for our listeners and viewers, there will be in the show notes, but 988 is the text message that people could use if you are having a mental health crisis. Talk a little bit about not only what you do, but why you do it.

Anthony: So John, it gets interesting. There are times when we’re all struggling. None of us knows what anybody else is carrying. And a lot of times for me, it’s about giving people permission like I had years ago, I’m going to use an older story but someone, I had passed one of my colleagues in the office and we did the little head nod as you walked by. And he just didn’t, it looked like something was bothering him, so I made it a point to go to his desk and say, “Hey, how are you doing?” He told me, everything was okay. But then a couple of days later, he came back to me and said, you know, I wasn’t feeling, I was having a hard day. Something was bothering me. And he’s like, thank you for noticing, thank you for saying something. We have to give each other permission to kind of open up and talk about this kind of issues. We always say, you hear somebody commit suicide, somebody takes their life.

If I would’ve known, I would’ve said something. We have to, we have to kind of get ahead of it. We have to give people permission to open up and talk and show them it’s a safe place. I’ve been participating, I’ve been working with the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride through November for the last almost 10 years now. So, I run, I’m part of the organizing group that runs the Los Angeles ride and that ride happens in about between 600 and 900 cities around the world every year. Just this last year we raised just over 700 sorry, $7 million for suicide prevention. Men’s and women’s mental health. It’s just a great program. It’s a great cause. And it’s just a good thing. And I bring it into my work. I’ve done a couple of blogs and write-ups for November, but I also talk about the impact of isolation and how do we bring people together in the office.

John: My mom was a social worker and she just retired recently. She’s 84 now. She just retired six months ago. And I’m so glad you do what you do. It’s so important. And bringing awareness to mental health. We’ve had on a lot of very well-known veterans from the US military talking about mental health and some of the new things that are being done with regard to psychedelics, with regards to mushrooms, and other opportunities. But mental health, just unfortunately, historically, has carried a stigma. And thankfully, it’s folks like you and also some of our iconic figures in the entertainment world, and influencers who’ve come out and said, “Hey, I’ve got a problem and I’m looking for help”. The athletes and entertainers are talking about it much more openly. I still think it’s a huge issue that gets swept under the rug from cultural issues of shame and other things. But it’s so important.

Anthony: And it’s just on the list of other things that kind of COVID exacerbated on us over the last couple of years. I mean, take someone who’s dealing with loneliness or mental health or challenged with some of those issues and now completely segregate them from society for an extended period of time like we were.

John: If you, as our listener or our viewer want to support the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride, we’re going to put the link to support this great organization and the great work they do around the world in our show notes. So you can look for it in our show notes. And Anthony, thank you for doing what you do with regard to that. Let’s switch hats now. Gensler the suicide prevention work you do now, and you also are a teacher, a professor at USC. My wife’s a Trojan. A lot of my business partners are Trojans. Talk a little bit about educating and training the next generation of sustainable architects out there, and how’s that been part of your life? When did you start it and how’s that journey been for you?

Anthony: I officially started teaching pro classes last year, so I’m now in my second year at USC. But I’ve been guest lecturing for a number of professors at a number of different universities over my career. It’s something I’ve always wanted to get into. Frankly, John, it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve done throughout my career. My point and my focus when I teach classes, because I’m actually teaching a mechanical systems class now at USC, but my priority is not to teach students how to use mechanical systems. It’s the passive side of this.

I want to teach students how not to use mechanical systems. I want to help them prioritize good decisions, good choices, and frankly, the students are hungry for it. They’re asking for it. They want to know how they can do better and everything. I’m very blessed with the work that I get to do in Ginsler because we see so much on the industry that we can actually see big-picture trends just within the work that we do to understand what the real triggers are that we need to do to make real influence and real impact. So talking to our students about that and imparting a lot of that knowledge and helping them make better decisions. Again, it’s been the most rewarding thing I’ve probably done in the last [crosstalk].

John: And again, you’re on new ground here. This didn’t exist. This kind of classes didn’t exist in architecture when you were in school, I take it.

Anthony: No. Not even a little bit.

John: Right. Talk a little bit about what’s forthcoming at Gensler. What’s next? What are you excited about? What’s next to come and your practice that you’re leading at Gensler, and what gets you out of bed besides making the world a better place on a regular basis, and making a living for yourself as we all need to make a living, but you get to make a difference every day. What’s forthcoming that you could actually talk about that you’re jazzed about?

Anthony: Well, John, the strange thing is, the thing I get jazzed about every single day is designing myself out of a job. I want to be, I want to get to the point where I’m not needed anymore.

John: That’s cool.

Anthony: Where every project is doing everything they can, every single day of the year. And we’re getting a lot, I think as an industry, we’re getting a lot closer to that. Additionally, I think the design industry is starting to get a lot better. They’re starting to get a lot more comfortable with transparency. How are we being transparent about how we’re doing on our work? Are we being authentic about how we’re doing a lot of those things? That’s just a couple of the little things that get me excited and keep me moving throughout the day.

John: I love it well. Anthony, this has been really special because we’ve been doing this show 16 years with over 2000 guests we’ve never had an architect on before. I’m embarrassed to tell you, or at least an architect that admits they’re an architect. They might’ve been an architect and become something else. But this has just been fascinating and wonderful. And obviously, most of us now understand the importance of architecture and the world around us through your eyes. For our listeners and viewers who want to find Anthony and his colleagues and all the work they’re doing in sustainability and climate action, global climate action at Gensler, please go to www.gensler.com. It’s G-E-N-S-L-E-R.com.

And if you’re a student at SC, go sit in on Anthony’s class at SC or take one of his classes if you’re an architecture student. And the work that you’re doing with the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride will be in our show notes, so you can support that as well. Anthony Brower, thank you for joining us on the Impact Podcast today. You’re always welcome back on this podcast, and I appreciate also all the work that you and Gensler, and your colleagues are doing to make the world a better place.

Anthony: Thank you so much, John, for having me. I am thrilled and honored to be your first and second architect on the show. So let me know when you’re ready.

John: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry with thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Engage is the go-to-spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com. This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused, hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

Anthony participates in Movember’s annual Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride to raise awareness and funds to advance programs for suicide prevention and mental health. https://us.movember.com/support-us/the-distinguished-gentlemans-ride