Committee on the Environment

Based out of San Antonio, Texas, Helena Zambrano, AIA, is an architect who has a wealth of experience in sustainable design. Working at design consultancy Dept. of Sustainability, her days are focused on firm-wide sustainability visioning, research, and project performance simulation for some of the country's leading architecture firms. By night, her contributions to COTE initiatives like the Toolkit (now accessible within the AIA Framework for Design Excellence) have streamlined the Top Ten Awards, and have ignited her curiosity into a series of topics that she plans to continue to build upon as the newest Advisory Group member.  

Her introduction to COTE began at the Technical Review Committee, where a detailed evaluation of the award metrics revealed inaccuracies in baseline calculations—and also a great deal of confusion among participating firms. In response, the group developed a ‘super-spreadsheet’ with resources that aimed to both explain and simplify the metrics. To help the jury, the numbers were linked to a simplified graphic so that they could compare submissions with ease. This ultimately helped the speed and accuracy of evaluation and gave performance metrics an appropriate weight against photographs and drawings in the project award submissions.     

While the Super Spreadsheet (now downloadable from a tile on the AIA Sustainability page) was an important step forward, according to Zambrano this is just the beginning. “Right now, it’s an excel spreadsheet that some still find overwhelming,” she says, “The next step would be to make it more user-friendly as an interactive web tool.”  

Beyond the submission process itself, Zambrano is “also interested in aligning performance metrics with desired outcomes.” One such example is predicted EUI—while once considered an indicator of performance, she claims must be replaced with measured energy consumption. “For two reasons:  First, energy modeling is only accessible to some firms, while energy bills are accessible to all firms. Second and most importantly, our desired outcome is to reduce our carbon emissions in the real world, so let’s evaluate our progress based on the real world!” Post occupancy evaluations are currently not the norm, but obtaining the water and electricity bills of a building is a more attainable goal. She also believes that we need to assess both embodied and operational carbon more seriously, as carbon is a better performance indicator.  

Zambrano is fueled by a passion for climate action and sees it as one of the most pressing threats to humanity that all too often gets sidelined among other political topics, despite its urgency. “If we don’t have a planet” she says, “nothing else will matter, which is why we need to come together and address it as quickly as possible.” And akin to the topic is that of equity: “As a minority female and immigrant within the architectural profession, I think that we need to reframe questions around climate justice and assess the discussion around equity,” which she believes is intrinsically linked. “Inclusion is great, but equity is so much deeper. My goal is to work on recapturing its full meaning—how can we build environments that change human behavior to promote equity?”