Green Week 2025: A Renewed Call to Action

Every year, Ayers Saint Gross celebrates Earth Day with a celebration known as Green Week. A series of continuing education and social engagement efforts, Green Week helps us share our individual expertise and experiences related to sustainability.  It also inspires us to advance our work in creating more resilient and decarbonized designs.  

This year’s Green Week took place the week of April 21-25 and included a mix of external and internal presentations, as well as an in-office plant and sustainability swap for our Baltimore office. In the days leading up to Green Week, our Design Documentary Club met on Zoom to watch The Scale of Hope, a film about climate, climbing and systemic change. Colleagues in our Arizona office also participated in a community tree-planting event, installing over 15 trees with the City of Phoenix Forestry Team. 

The week formally kicked off on Monday with a panel discussion about mass timber and how wood can be integrated into hybrid structural systems. Katie McRury provided historical context about mass timber while designers Matt Pearson, Daniel Yontz, Jenny Oreamuno, Jon Catania, Jason Castillo, and Amber Wendland discussed how timber has played a role in recent Ayers Saint Gross projects, including student housing at Bryant University and Georgia Tech and Washington College’s Semans-Griswold Environmental Hall.  

On Tuesday, we celebrated Earth Day with a presentation from Sarah Gudeman of BranchPattern, who discussed all things air quality, including common pollutants, air flow challenges, and monitoring technology. The following day, we had an interesting discussion about the intersection of sustainability and public health, thanks to Dr. Gurumurthy Ramachandran, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. During his presentation, he shared various exposure assessment techniques that can be used to estimate occupant safety in different environmental scenarios. 

Thursday’s presentation featured Sustainability Director Allison Wilson, AIA, LEED AP, WELL AP, who provided an update on the firm’s sustainability efforts and encouraged those within the firm to act as advocates for sustainable design wherever possible. She shared important performance data from our most recent report to the AIA2030 Commitment and the AIA Materials Pledge as well as ways our firm continues to evolve its metrics for sustainability, particularly in our landscape architecture practice. Looking at our 2024 portfolio, we’d like to highlight: 

This year also marks an important milestone as 50% of the firm’s technical staff now holds sustainability credentials. What’s most exciting is that these credentials reflect the broad range of ways sustainability manifests in our projects – not only do we have LEED GA, LEED AP BD+C, and LEED AP ID+C practitioners, but we also have we have professionals with Living Future Accreditations, WELL APs, SITES APs, Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (WEDG) Associates, Certified Passive House Consultants (CPHC), and Social Equity Assessment Method (SEAM) APs. This breadth of talents means that whatever a client’s sustainability priority issue might be, we have the knowledge to support advancing a solution for it. 

Green Week concluded on Friday with the “Sustainability Snack Plate,” a collection of five-minute sustainability presentations by employee-owners throughout the firm. Each speaker presented a topic of their choosing, reflecting a broad range of sustainability topics:  

• Slade Shaeffer spoke about National Bike to Work Day and resources to promote car-free commuting. 

• Chris Hazel discussed the energy usage behind various AI programs. 

• Cynthia Bubb spoke about the history of water use and innovation in the American southwest. 

• Jacqueline Kow shared her experiences designing an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) for an AIA Phoenix Metro design competition. 

• Jonah Rosen talked about the growing energy crisis in Cuba. 

• Karen Bastidas talked about the AIA materials pledge and how the firm is working to incorporate materials that support social health and equity. 

• Amina Mohamed spoke about the climate action resources provided by the American Society of Landscape Architecture. 

• President Joel Fidler spoke about his experience on an ecotourism trip to Costa Rica. 

Overall, Green Week 2025 was a week filled with knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and calls to action. More than half the firm’s employee-owners attended sessions, earning over 200 hours of continuing education over the course of the week. With our 2030 deadline for achieving carbon neutrality only a few years away, we remain committed to advancing our sustainability goals. 

If you are interested in working with our team or learning more about how your organization can implement sustainable design, please reach out to our Sustainability Director Allison Wilson.