At Tim Barber Architects (TBA), our team of 25 is dedicated to designing beautiful, lasting residences across the United States. Over the past 30 years, we’ve worked beyond the residential realm, as well, including restaurants, condominiums, and private clubs — always striving for environmentally sound, socially respectful, and economically viable design.

And yet, as we face the accelerating climate crisis, we must also acknowledge a hard truth: We can do better. We need to set higher sustainability goals and achieve them faster. We can only do so with the full support of our homeowners and collaborators.

We have long worked to preserve architectural integrity, built structures to last, and supported communities. Our homes have conserved water, saved energy, and used regenerative materials. But in hindsight, our efforts to reduce environmental harm did not go far enough, and in some cases, contributed to the problem.

• We have demolished many existing buildings, sending most of the material to landfills, releasing embodied carbon, methane, and nitrogen oxide.
• We have designed new work that uses high-carbon concrete and steel.
• We have caused mature trees to be removed from our sites and impervious hardscape to be installed.
• We have released hydrofluorocarbons from air conditioning, mercury from fluorescent lighting, styrene from carpet, and PVC from plastics in our projects.

In honor of Earth Day, I’m sharing lessons from the adaptive reuse classes I’m teaching at NYU. Nearly everyone has experienced a symptom of our climate crisis (extreme weather, wildfires, mud slides, drought, rising sea levels… and much more). Knowing the specific impacts architecture has on our environment will help us all to be effective as we change our habits.

Construction is not the only contributor to climate change… but it’s the largest.

As of 2022, creating and operating buildings accounts for over 40% of global CO₂ emissions and 78% of electricity usage. Yet there is more: air and water pollution from hauling and shipping, recycling construction waste and packaging, and treating wastewater pushes the real carbon share of our work even higher.

The US generated 600 million tons of demolition and construction debris in 2018, with demolition waste representing more than 90% of the total debris.

Shipping contributes almost 3% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and produces more than 18% of global nitrogen oxide pollution.

In 2020, packaging construction goods during transit contributed over 82 million tons of packaging waste. Most of that waste is hauled via truck producing air pollution to landfills that often occupy land formerly used for farming and forestry; some of it is dropped into our oceans.

Construction is a major source of water pollution due to VOCs, paints, glues, diesel, oils, toxic chemicals, cement, and silt, which can infiltrate both surface and groundwater sources and drain into creeks and storm sewers and then into the ocean.

Construction uses some 50 billion tons of sand and gravel – which tend to be found together – every year. Most of the sand harvested is used to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Ocean dredging for sand has damaged coral reefs in Kenya, the Persian Gulf, and Florida. It has torn up coastal wetlands, annihilated habitats for fish and shorebirds, and increased water pollution. In 2023, 100 million tons of sand were extracted from the Mekong Delta.

How does building design contribute?

• A building designed in 1750 was designed to last 200 or more years. A building designed today? 50 years.
• We designed most post-war buildings when energy was available and cheap. They require mechanical ventilation – and many don’t have operable windows or shading.
• Each year, we demolish approximately one billion square feet of buildings in the United States (about the area of Manhattan) and replace them with new construction.
• To bulldoze and replace a one-story, wood-framed, 2,500 square-foot house in Los Angeles releases more than 50 tons of CO₂. For perspective, one ton of carbon is the equivalent of driving a gas car 5,000 miles.
• The average size of a new single-family home ballooned from 909 square feet in 1949 to 2,480 square feet in 2021.
• Design and construction make other contributions: Suburban sprawl requires transit, roads, and services. Patio heaters and home entertainment require increased power. Swimming pools and lawn sprinklers evaporate potable water… and much more.

We already know better:

1. We have sustainably farmed timber in the US since 1866.
2. We have made low-carbon concrete for 25 years.
3. We know how to use passive design, with operable windows and shading to take advantage of natural light and ventilation.
4. We know how to use geothermal heat pumps and chimney-venting (badgir) methods to reduce mechanical ventilation.
5. We know how to remove salt from our soaps and to reuse laundry and shower water directly for irrigation.
6. We know how to turn toilet water into drinking water.

We already have standards:

EPA; USGBC LEED and LEED-EB; BREEAM & BREEAM In-Use; DGNB; LBC – Living Building Challenge; PASSIVE HOUSE CERTIFICATION; and CALGreen. But the most effective standard we know is LONGEVITY. What if we demolished less and built less new architecture? What if more of our work was adapting older buildings to new uses?

The United States has a rapidly growing inventory of empty post offices, office buildings, schools, libraries, factories, shopping malls, and churches begging for reuse. Many of these buildings are deteriorating and destroying communities that were once walkable nerve centers of commerce and culture. Can we give these buildings a vital second life?

1. We can address both our housing crisis and traffic crisis by integrating homes with walkable services like daycare, schools, healthcare, and markets in office buildings.
2. We can transform shopping malls, post offices, and factories into online shopping processing centers that require convenient locations and substantial parking.
3. We can use school, church, and library buildings as hot desk and co-working centers.
4. Parking lots can do double-duty as solar farms and shaded parking.
5. Revitalizing sites near public transportation can reduce commuting and auto pollution and increase safety.
6. These adaptations can reduce construction waste and landfill inputs, reducing water pollution and sediment.
7. And much more…

What if more of our work was adapting older buildings to new technologies?

1. We can stop burning fossil fuels to build and operate our existing buildings and generate solar electricity to heat and cool them, our water, and our food.
2. We can renovate and expand existing buildings without burning fossil fuels using energy-efficient materials, low-carbon concrete, recycled steel, and cross-laminated timber (CLT).
3. We can use regenerative materials in the new work (farmed timber, bamboo, hemp, cotton).
4. We can use motion-activated lighting sensors in restrooms, humidistats in damp rooms, and daylight sensors in workspaces.
5. We can use biomass as fuel – including construction waste, forestry leftovers, waste from crops, municipal organic waste, animal waste, waste from food processing, aquatic plants, and algae.
6. We can require all buildings to have an approved Cradle-to-Cradle dismantle-and-reuse plan.
7. And much more…

All this sounds expensive – and disruptive. For the short term, this can be true. Adapting a building can often be as expensive as building anew. Changing our habits can be frustratingly difficult. Yet sustainable development is defined as: “Fulfilling the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations, balanced between community well-being, economic vitality, and environmental care.” Adaptive reuse addresses sustainability in all three elements by carefully choosing neighborhoods, buildings, and their alterations to be regenerative, profitable, and humane for the long term.

We are advocating to address these elements in our work – with our homeowners, our collaborators, and our builders, with curiosity, diplomacy and kindness. We can do better, and we need your help.

“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”
-Robert Swan

References

National Centers for Environmental Information, “Assessing the Global Climate in March 2025”

EPA, “Global Greenhouse Gas Overview”

National Trust for Historic Preservation, “How to Support Adaptive Reuse of Historic Buildings”

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, “Assessing the Energy Conservation Benefits of Historic Preservation: Methods and Examples” (1979)

Sherban Cantacuzino, New Uses for Old Buildings (1975)

Geoffrey Hammond and Craig I. Jones, “Embodied Energy and Carbon in Construction Materials”, Proceedings of the Ice Energy (January 2008)

Edward Mazria, “It’s the Architecture, Stupid!” (May/June 2003)

Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy (2010)

Simon Sturgis, “Summary of Proof of Evidence, on Behalf of SAVE Britain’s Heritage” (September 27, 2022)