Anne Schopf Joins AIA COTE Advisory Group
by Kira Gould
Each year, there are new appointments to the AIA Committee on the Environment’s national Advisory Group, known as “the AG” (learn more about the AG application/selection process here). This year, the new members are Anne Schopf, FAIA, partner at Mahlum Architects (Seattle), profiled below; Marsha Maytum, FAIA, founding partner of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects (San Francisco), profiled in March/April; and Varun Kholi, AIA, Sustainable Design Leader at HOK (New York), profiled in next month’s newsletter.
Anne Schopf, FAIA, has been active for many years with AIA Seattle and national, especially through the Committee on Design, which led to her engagement with the AIA Committee on the Environment. Schopf is Design Partner at Mahlum Architects, a 78-year-old architectural firm with offices in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon, which has won national AIA recognition, through two COTE Top Ten awards as well as regional and national AIA design awards. Mahlum is respected for its thoughtful, community-oriented work serving educational, healthcare, and housing clients.
The full integration of design and sustainability is actually happening now. This is an important moment for the profession and for firms.
It seems that this is an ideal time for Schopf’s engagement: she sees this as a moment of “full integration” of design and sustainability. For her, design has been the mission, and she has been leading her own firm’s reassessment and recommitment to a vision for the next decade that emphasizes leadership in sustainable environments. “Deep green is a component of our vision. It’s not enough to be leaders in educational design; we are doubling down on sustainability.”
 Part of that, for Schopf, is an imperative for her to be personally connected with the movement. That motivation is powerful for COTE and AIA at a time when unifying design and sustainability is occurring more broadly. Schopf’s leadership at Committee on Design is a critical element to the potential for her COTE involvement.
Schopf also cites advocacy as a driver to the “why now, and why COTE” question for her. “We were getting complacent,” she says. “But we are not complacent now. I see a shift around advocacy. I practice in Seattle, and have worked with the great Seattle chapter, led by Lisa Richmond, so I feel prepared to take some of our efforts to the national level. What’s going on at the federal level is a real call to arms.”
Schopf notes that her brother is a retired climate scientist and a voice in her ear about key issues such as the safety of the data on which architects depend. She says that COTE is positioned to help the profession find the best ways to assert architecture’s leadership. “We can preserve progress and define the advancement of sustainability in the built environment. This is the moment to engage, advocate and up our game,” she says. “This is our professional responsibility.”
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