Questions

Questions we are asking

The habits of our industry that we are testing, with where we stand so far and what would change our mind.

?what should be

A question stays on this page until the evidence settles it. Each one says why we ask, where we stand today and what would change our mind. If you know something we don’t, we want to hear it.

Q01

Is the greenest new home the old house, kept?

Circular Net-ZeroWorking answer

Why we ask

When a city lot is worth more than the house on it, the house usually comes down. Seattle now lets most residential lots hold four homes, so the question comes up on almost every site we look at.

Where we stand

Keep the house and add homes around it wherever the house is sound. By our working estimate, keeping a 1,500 square foot house avoids roughly 28 to 45 tonnes of upfront carbon, four to six times what taking it apart by hand for reuse would save. Its parts never have to be removed, stored, refitted or approved a second time.

What would change our mind

A house that is unsafe or too far gone to repair. A lot where keeping the house means far fewer homes for people who need them. Or a careful life-cycle study of Seattle houses that gives a different number: ours is built from typical figures for new construction, not from measured local projects.

Read: The greenest new home may be the old house, kept

Q02

If taking a house apart costs more than wrecking it, who should pay the difference?

CircularOpen

Why we ask

By our estimate, taking a typical Seattle house apart by hand and selling the parts costs about $19,000 more than demolishing it. That is a large share of a demolition bid and a very small share of the project that replaces the house. Owners still say no, mostly over time, certainty and hassle.

Where we stand

Waiting for salvage to get cheap won’t work, because the cost is in the labor. Change the terms of the choice. Do the work while the permit is under review, so it costs no time. Sell the parts before the house comes down. Build some of the old house into the new one. And ask the city for a refundable deposit that is returned when reuse is proven.

What would change our mind

Proof that buyers will pay enough for reclaimed parts to cover the labor of saving them. We have not seen it yet. We would also change course if a deposit rule were shown to push demolition out of sight instead of improving it.

Read: The greenest new home may be the old house, kept

Q03

What is rooftop solar for, on one of the cleanest power grids in the country?

Net-ZeroWorking answer

Why we ask

Net-zero usually means solar panels. But the climate value of a panel depends on the power it replaces, and Seattle’s power is mostly hydroelectric, among the cleanest anywhere.

Where we stand

Counted over its whole life, a rooftop array in Seattle is probably not a carbon reduction. It may even be a small carbon cost. It can still earn its place for resilience in an outage, for certification and for what it teaches. The carbon is somewhere else: keeping the existing house, replacing gas heat with heat pumps, a good envelope and lower-carbon materials.

What would change our mind

Evidence that the power our panels displace is really gas-fired power elsewhere on the Western grid. If so, the math improves. We are still reading on this, and we would welcome a pointer to the best analysis.

Read: Solar panels are not the point. Not here, anyway.

Q04

Can beauty be a measure of sustainability?

BeautyLeaning yes

Why we ask

Rating systems count energy, water and carbon. None of them counts whether anyone will want to keep the building in fifty years. Yet the buildings that last are mostly the ones somebody loved.

Where we stand

Beauty multiplies the other measures instead of adding to them. A loved building is maintained, repaired, adapted and copied, so every other good thing in it lasts longer. We can’t price that per dollar, so we pursue beauty inside every project, never as a separate program.

What would change our mind

Evidence that plain, unloved buildings last just as long when they are cheap to maintain. That may be true of some building types, and it would mean durability matters more than delight.

Q05

Should a city lot try to feed the people who live on it?

Nature PeopleChanged our mind

Why we ask

We began with a belief in growing food on every site, all year, as a matter of food security. Then we read the evidence.

Where we stand

A lot can’t feed its residents, and trying to can cost carbon. A study of 73 urban farms and gardens found their food averaged about six times the carbon per serving of conventional farming, mostly from beds, sheds and paths that are rebuilt too often.¹ Yet a randomized trial in Denver found that people given a garden plot ate more fiber, moved more and felt less stress.² So, we plan a garden bed for every household and a weekly share from a regional farm. Not rooftop or indoor farms on small buildings.

What would change our mind

The same study found 17 of the 73 sites beat conventional farming. Long-lived beds built from reclaimed material, and crops that are usually flown in, change the math. We want to test both.

Sources and notes

Hawes and coauthors, Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture, Nature Cities, 2024. ↩
Litt and coauthors, community gardening trial, The Lancet Planetary Health, 2023. Summary from the University of Colorado. ↩

Read: A garden will not feed the block. Plant it anyway.

Q06

What do we miss when carbon is the only thing we count?

Net-Zero NatureOpen

Why we ask

Green building has become carbon accounting. But climate is one of nine planetary limits that scientists track, and the 2025 Planetary Health Check found seven of the nine already crossed.¹

Where we stand

We use the nine limits as a checklist of blind spots, not as a scorecard. The choice between wrecking a house and taking it apart, for example, matters most for lead dust, local air and old-growth forests, not for carbon. A rain garden in Seattle is first a device for keeping road runoff away from salmon.

What would change our mind

There is no agreed way to assign a share of a planetary limit to one building. If a sound method appears, we would start measuring. Until then, we will not publish a score we can’t defend.

Sources and notes

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Planetary Health Check 2025. ↩

Read: Solar panels are not the point. Not here, anyway.

Q07

What will the machines have read about building?

AEC InnovationOpen

Why we ask

AI tools now help draw, estimate and specify buildings. They learn from the written record, and that record is thick with conventional practice. It holds very little checked evidence about reuse, about designing for disassembly or about buildings made to last.

Where we stand

For a small firm, the biggest lever is not which software it buys. It is what the software will have read. We design, build, own and live with the same buildings, so we can supply evidence that few others hold. We plan to publish it openly, in forms that people and machines can both read, failures included.

What would change our mind

If, five years on, nobody has copied or used any of it, the effort was misplaced and we should have spent it on the buildings.

Read: Why a building firm would publish its doubts, What the machines will have read

Q08

What should a design firm give away?

AEC Innovation PeopleLeaning

Why we ask

Firms guard their methods. But better AI is making studies, tools and design libraries cheap to produce. Guarding something that is getting cheaper is a poor plan.

Where we stand

Give away what gets cheaper: studies, tools, libraries and methods. Earn a living from what doesn’t: accountability, craft in old houses, buildings we own and look after, and a name people trust. If others copy the free parts, that is the point.

What would change our mind

If giving the work away means it can’t pay for itself, and the buildings suffer for it. The open work must never compete with the buildings for attention or money.

Read: What the machines will have read

Q09

Why does so much get lost between the drawing and the building?

AEC InnovationOpen

Why we ask

A building passes from architect to engineer to builder to owner, usually under separate contracts. At each handoff, some of what was known is lost. The builder rarely learns why a detail was drawn that way. The architect rarely learns how it performed.

Where we stand

Keep the handoffs inside one team. We develop, design, build and operate, so the people who build share a room with the people who draw, and the people who maintain the building can tell both what went wrong.

What would change our mind

Separate firms check each other. An architect who also builds has nobody independent looking over the builder’s shoulder. If our projects show that we miss mistakes an outside party would have caught, we will need to bring that check back in another form.

Read: Why a building firm would publish its doubts

Q10

How much is enough?

Beauty CircularOpen

Why we ask

Most waste in building is decided before anything is built: in the size of the rooms, the number of finishes and the urge to add. Our vision statement says we mean to accomplish more with less. That needs a working sense of “enough.”

Where we stand

We borrow two words from Japan. Mottainai is regret at wasting what still has worth. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the worn, the modest and the imperfect. Together they give a conscience and an aesthetic: use less, keep what has aged well and stop sanding the history off things.

What would change our mind

People’s needs differ. If the homes we think are “enough” turn out to be hard to live in, we were mistaking our own taste for a principle.

Q11

What good work will never be photographed?

PeopleOpen

Why we ask

Architecture is judged by its pictures. Much of the good a building can do leaves nothing to photograph.

Where we stand

Yards made safe from lead for young children. Repairs that keep an older person from falling. Bracing that keeps a house standing in an earthquake. Each returns several dollars of good for every dollar spent, on strong evidence. We want them in every project, and we want to say so out loud, so the quiet work gets counted.

What would change our mind

If we find we are doing the quiet work at the cost of making places people love, we have the balance wrong. Both matter.