Welcome graduates, friends and family, faculty and staff.

At the University Co-op Graduate Awards banquet on Wednesday evening, Law School Dean Lawrence Sager observed that we are "a University dedicated to ideas and constructed projects."

What a lovely thing for a law school dean to say.

While the ideas pursued by legal scholars differ from those we explore in the School of Architecture, we share the goal of advancing knowledge in our professions. The "constructed project" of a lawyer is certainly different than one designed by an architect, a landscape architect, or an interior designer. A planner's constructed project is more likely to be similar to that of a lawyer, as our graduates who have taken the planning law course are well aware.

Like our colleagues across campus, we are a school of both thinkers and doers.

How do ideas generated in our school influence how we shape the built environments? I will provide one example. We can trace the origins of the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, standards back to ideas generated in our school.

During the 1970s, we pioneered what is now called sustainable design through our innovative Design with Climate Program. Our faculty developed metrics for energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. These ideas and these metrics were incorporated into Austin's Green Building program. Several faculty and alumni designed and refined this program. When the USGBC began to create LEED in the late 1990s, the Austin program was a principal model.

Bachelor of Architecture graduate Elisabeth Keil.

But, ideas are messier than the story I just summarized, especially in academic settings. This green, let's say "hippie," wing of the school was not embraced by the whole faculty. For a while, the hippies were banished from Wooldridge Hall. (I still hear stories about what went on there in the 1970s.)

I want to stress that this debate was a good thing. The early green projects were unsophisticated from a formal design perspective. They also failed to address broader social concerns or economic realities. Our school has faculty who bring these other concerns to the fore. We also include historians and preservationists in our ranks, who can help place the unfolding green project in a broader cultural context.

As this debate ensued, we continued to graduate incredible students. As I consider our graduates from the 1970s and 1980s, when our hippies debated our Modernists, I find some of the leading architecture practitioners who integrate environmentalism with social concerns as they advance a regional modernism. Lake/Flato and Overland Partners from San Antonio, as well as Gary Cunningham and Dan Shipley in Dallas, provide a few examples to illustrate this point.

And, the ideas keep coming.

We are currently providing leadership on the Sustainable Sites Initiative with the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and others. This initiative will produce an equivalent of LEED for the outdoors. The U.S. Green Building Council is working with us to incorporate Sustainable Sites into LEED.

Many of our students graduate today LEED-accredited. In fact, the Interior Design Program prepares all its students to take the LEED examination before graduation. This may be the only program in the nation to make such a commitment.

As the ideas keep coming, so do the debates. The hippies have grown older and have shorter hair, but how and why we construct our projects continues to engage our attention. Ideas and debates continue about digital representation; the use of new, revolutionary materials; the relationship between design and planning, between building and landscape; and so on. This is truly an exciting place and today's outstanding graduates have contributed much to turning up the intellectual volume of this place.

Thank you, Class of 2008.

Dean Steiner, members of the faculty, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you today, and for the opportunity you gave me to help bring a scholarship into the School of Architecture and the Department of Community and Regional Planning. I have been very honored today, but this chance to speak amongst members of my profession might be the greatest privilege.

I want to thank Fritz Steiner and Kent Butler for thinking of me for the Outstanding Graduate Alumnus Award, and for, along with Bob Paterson, bringing me back as a lecturer in the school a few years ago. I have enjoyed the renewed association, which was heightened by the participation of architecture faculty and students in the Congress for the New Urbanism last month.

It was my pleasure to attend UT at the end of the Seventies, at a time of great ferment and change in architecture. Ecological design was in flower at the time, and I learned about coastal zone management and designing with nature under Kent Butler and about passive solar design with Michael Garrison and others in the architecture annex building. Dean Steiner spoke just now about the divide within the between the modernists and the hippies, and you might guess where my sympathies were!

2008 Community and Regional Planning graduates and faculty.

Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language and Colin Rowe's Collage City had challenged us to think beyond the object building and the tower in the park. I confess that I was always somewhat less interested in the details of mid-twentieth century planning, although I am eternally grateful to Terry Kahn for the grounding in statistics and the workings of the market, and I was grateful to attend a planning department within a school of architecture, for it led directly to the notion of planning as a design discipline, and not just a social science or a regulatory profession.

Students graduating today are entering architecture and planning at a similar time, with the imminent threat of global climate change, the explosive growth of mega-cities with vast slums, and domestically a meltdown in the housing market, the end of cheap oil and food, and perhaps a recognition that the long free party of consumption and sprawl wasn't free after all.

The 21st century will be the urban century - half of the world's people now live in cities and they will be joined by 2.1 billion more by 2030, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. And if all of those people chose to live in the same way we have in the U.S. and Western Europe, there will be a global catastrophe - but how can we in the Global North tell people in the Global South that now that we have had ours there is none left for them? We must find a way to break the link between improved quality of life and carbon emissions and increased per capita resource use.

What does this have to do with architecture and urbanism?

Sustainable Design graduates and faculty.

Plenty. As Ed Mazria of Architecture 2030 tells us, buildings can be seen as the biggest single source of carbon. And when we add transportation emissions - how we get around in our sprawling cities and suburbs - over 60 percent of carbon emissions come from our built environment. Building low carbon cities means building in what I call a location efficient manner - walkable, compact, mid-rise, mixed use, and mixed income neighborhoods connected by public transit to town and city centers. Such cities would feature renewable energy at the municipal and neighborhood scale, include sustainable drainage and water conservation systems, and include strategies for local materials, local food and farming, and other green infrastructure. Planning permission has just come through for an eco town called Sherford in Southwest England in the Plymouth metro area, which was master-planned by The Prince's Foundation and colleagues for a developer named Redtree.

Building low carbon buildings means rethinking much of what we have long accepted about building technology, and also many of the core precepts of modern architecture. No longer will we be able to throw cheap energy at inefficient buildings, and so the suburban house made of particle board and drywall or the curtain wall commercial building of steel and glass will have to go.

The Prince's Foundation has been working with colleagues in the UK to derive a set of architectural principles for the 21st century, and we and other groups have begun to adopt them as core design statements for our projects. If I may, I would like to present these principles briefly today.

Landscape Architecture graduates and faculty.

• First, sustainability means building for the long term - one hundred years, rather than twenty years. Sustainability, as the Brundtland Commission defined it, is about making choices today that preserve choices for future generations - and for me that is also about creating a link through from the past by understanding what tradition has to teach us, adapting it for present needs to make something that will be successful in a hundred years. As William Morris said, "The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make."


• Because of this need for long-term thinking, we must build in an adaptable, flexible, and resilient manner, reassessing and reusing existing buildings wherever possible and making new buildings and neighborhoods that can learn. In the words of Stewart Brand, "The immediate program is not the generator, as the building should be designed to evolve, changing use over time as the user and the city around it may require.


• Third, building in a manner that fits the place, in terms of materials used, proportion and layout, and climate, ecology and building practices. Instead of architecture as a global brand, we are calling for globalism from the bottom up, a design practice that enables local places to compete globally on the basis of distinctive character, local identity and place.


• Fourth, building beautifully, in a manner that builds upon tradition, evolving it in response to present challenges and utilizing the best and most appropriate new technologies and techniques. Beautiful buildings can be defined simply, as buildings that are loved, and because they are loved, they will be cared for, be renewed, and be sustainable as a result.


• Fifth, understanding the purpose of a building or group of buildings within the hierarchy of the buildings around it and responding with an appropriate building type and design. Doing this often implies composition of a harmonious whole, rather than the erection of singular objects of architectural or corporate will. In the city, most buildings are background buildings that stand as part of a composition, not singular objects, and could draw their character more from their neighbors than from the singular vision of the designer or client.


• And finally, understanding that the role of the designer in this world crisis is less an act of creation and more the craft of marrying your skills with local intelligence through community engagement, deep understanding of local identity and character, and the knowledge that most of the time, what is required are background buildings.

In England we are often asked to work in towns or cities that are 1000 or even 2000 years old, and this is a powerful reminder that designing should be an act of service and humility, and one approached with fear and trepidation. Most of the places that we have made over the past sixty years - excepting individual buildings and projects of great success - have made the towns and cities worse places to live in, and that is why so many people oppose new development.

I have watched this process unfold over the past thirty years here in the Texas hill country, despite the continuing efforts and struggles of many enlightened planners and architects who understood the special character of the place.

Front row: Master of Science in Urban Design graduate Jong Bum Kim and Associate Professor Dean Almy; back row: Dean Fritz Steiner, Associate Professor Richard Cleary, and Associate Dean Kevin Alter.

For the most part we have built places hard-wired for a world of cheap energy, limitless economic growth and abundant resources, where we can throw things away when we are done with them, whether they are soft drink containers, major appliances, shopping centers or entire neighborhoods. And I very much fear that most of these places are going to fail in the next twenty years, and that we will not be able to afford to rebuild in the same way. We must dedicate ourselves to doing better in the next fifty years.

It is difficult, when one graduates, to move immediately into work that responds to these issues. That is why I want to urge all of you to make a commitment as designers to some kind of community service, whether it is volunteering with Architecture for Humanity, Global Green or the Prince's Foundation, or with a community design resource center, a local homeless charity, or a nonprofit planning group like Austin's Liveable City or the network of 1000 Friends groups around the country. And, at the same time you can commit to a professional network that is dedicated to change and sustainability, whether it is the US Green Building Council, Architects and Planners for Social Responsibility, the Congress for the New Urbanism or Architecture 2030.

At the same time, you can work within your firms or local governments for change, advocating for a dialectic about design flourishes, one that sees it as an act of community service, and embraces the notions of mixed income communities, and of the environment as something that includes both humans and nature. A large architecture practice in the mid-Atlantic recently adopted a design statement identifying themselves as both an urbanist practice and a green practice, after an intensive process of enquiry, debate and redefinition of their methods. I asked the senior partners how they drove such a change through the practice? Their reply was illuminating. They said they didn't drive the change, it came about because the interns and recent graduates demanded it. Your skills and knowledge of technology will be in demand, and that gives you the power to influence.

When I graduated from the School of Architecture, I embarked on a career that has given me great joy and fulfillment. May you find the same joy and fulfillment in your own careers as designers working in the built environment. Congratulations and thank you for listening.