This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Building better cities with Brian Dunbar.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Brian Dunbar: Our buildings and our cities would be better if we had more collaboration between the architects, and the builders, and the engineers, and the city planners, and the interior designers and all of those things. And so, that really was what prompted us to start the Institute for the Built Environment.

Jocelyn Hittle: Hello, and welcome to CSU Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado.

Brian Dunbar: It’s not just how do we design and build this building, but it’s how do we create a better world and a better place for all earths inhabitants.

Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health, and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. Today, I’m joined by Brian Dunbar, executive director of Colorado State University’s Institute for the Built Environment and professor emeritus at CSU. Brian has worked in sustainable design from the building scale to the community and city scale for almost 30 years at CSU. He has architecture degrees from the University of Michigan and various credentials in green and healthy buildings, among other things, we’ll explore further as part of our conversation. The organization that Brian directs, the Institute for the Built Environment does work both within CSU and for a variety of clients and partners. Their work sits at the intersection of various disciplines, but is particularly focused on sustainability in the built environment, meaning the places where we all live and work. Welcome, Brian.

Brian Dunbar: Well, thanks, Jocelyn. It’s great to be here with you.

Jocelyn Hittle: Can you tell us, Brian, a little bit about IBE, the Institute for the Built Environment and you have a team of folks that are working there, what does a day in the life look like for you? What does a week in the life look like? What’s the core of the work of IBE?

Brian Dunbar: Good question, Jocelyn. So let me start by saying, so our work is, and when I say “our” I think that’s a good place to start, it’s a faculty on campus on the Fort Collins campus and it’s students from different disciplines such as engineering, business, construction management, interior architecture, landscape architecture, sociology, all of those students and faculty from those different programs come together. And we have project managers within our institute, and then we work on real projects. And those real projects might be with a school district, might be at our university, it might be a commercial developer in the Denver area. It might be an affordable housing group that wants to do a new housing project somewhere in Colorado. So those are the various kinds of projects.

And I should say that the scale goes from maybe an addition to a building or a full building or a remodel of a building to a city or neighborhood scale project. So, for instance, we’re helping the city of Boulder right now understand from its citizens what they need in their utility. And their utility is not a local utility, it’s Xcel. And so, we’re helping Xcel in the city of Boulder and the citizen input all come together for the improvement of their utility. So, that’s an example of a larger scale project. And then, as I said, there’s many smaller scale building projects.

Jocelyn Hittle: So I think the utility example you just gave is a great of what the built environment can encompass so that you are the Institute for the Built Environment. So how did the focus on the built environment come to be for IBE?

Brian Dunbar: So in my teaching in the interior architecture and design program, I always have emphasized the importance of the design process. So if you can get really good teamwork, you end up with really good buildings. Okay, well that makes sense, but it doesn’t always happen. It’s a lot of times it’s the handoff thing, like where a developer says, design this, an architect designs it, gives it off to a landscape architect here, add some trees and plants to this, interior designer add some interiors and colors and things to this, builder go ahead and build this. But instead, if we all work together, we realize much better results, our buildings become high performing. And so, let’s emphasize that. So, that was really the origin of the kind of work we wanted to do, so then it was easy to pull together landscape architecture professors, construction management professors, interior architecture professors, business and development and engineering, and all of us then worked together to create the path for our institute’s projects.

Jocelyn Hittle: So the Institute for the Built Environment engages essentially as a consultant on a variety of projects in the built environment, whatever that means, small projects, medium sized, city scale, up to these utility projects that you mentioned. So you’re bringing the expertise of this multidisciplinary community that you’ve created to bear on these projects, and you also engage students and give them experience in these different kinds of consultancies. So can you say a little bit more about how the students engage?

Brian Dunbar: So we’re able to hire student interns, they might be undergraduate students, they might be graduate students, and they’re coming from all those different disciplines, and this gives them some real-life experience. We have students on every institute project, and it’s really easy to help them get engaged in the project and do meaningful work. They might come along if we’re doing a design workshop, the start project, and part of their role might be to capture the notes and all the ideas that people have. But soon enough, they’re helping by doing a presentation of another project that they’re familiar with, that they did research on that’s similar to this project. And we certainly invite them to provide their ideas as well as to record the ideas of others. So some real good involvement, and I got to say it leads to some great careers for these students that are part of our institute for a few years.

Jocelyn Hittle: We’ve talked a little bit about the kinds of projects that you do, do you have a favorite project over the years?

Brian Dunbar: Oh, I sure do. I have a couple of them, but let’s talk about the Children’s Discovery Center at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, so Cheyenne, Wyoming. So the architect for the project in Cheyenne heard the botanical gardens and the donor of this project, say that they wanted it to be all about the future and sustainability so that the students could discover what sustainability would be, and maybe even that would enliven them and help them propel their careers towards something about sustainability. So the architect hadn’t done a lot of sustainable design at the time, but heard about our institute. And so, Randy, the architect, contacted us. We actually brought it in as a student project to start with within a class. And then Randy said, “We’d like help along the way for this to become a project that is lead certified.” And so that could actually get the stamp of approval that it is highly sustainable.

So if anyone has a chance to drive up to Cheyenne, maybe take the kids along and go to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens and see the Children’s Discovery Center. There’s 30 different places within the Children’s Discovery Center where you can learn about and see sustainability. For instance, there’s a green roof on a doghouse in the Children’s Discovery Center. There’s a vertical access wind turbine. There’s solar panels for hot water. There’s solar panels for electricity. There’s sun coming into the old remodeled building that shows how the sun heats a building. And then there’s a lot of water that the children can play with so they can understand the importance of water. There’s a kepi so they can understand the history of this place. So all of those things were incorporated into this beautiful lead platinum project in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Jocelyn Hittle: That’s a great story. Not only did you bring a team together that was multidisciplinary, but the project itself then showcases all of those different disciplines. That’s fantastic.

Brian Dunbar: Right. Yeah. And students got involved in it in many different ways, our CSU students. And now it serves students from the Cheyenne area who come there for afterschool programs, weekend programs, summer programs, class visits, all of those things. One time I was there with a couple other architects that were visiting from another country, and they had heard about the project and wanted to see what was going on. While they were there learning and photographing the project, this older couple walked in with their dog. One of the visitors said, “Well, good morning. You bringing your dog here?” And they said, “Our dog likes to visit every day. And of course has to see the doghouse, but also likes to just tour around and see what’s going on with the water or the puppet area or how the plants are growing and how the wind is going and all of those things.” So it was built for children, but turns out older adults and even dogs really like that place.

Jocelyn Hittle: I love it. I have no comment on whether or not they were blaming their own interest in coming every day on their dog.

Brian Dunbar: That’s right.

Jocelyn Hittle: But I like to believe that the dog was communicating its interest in the doghouse to them directly. Who knows? So can you give us a snapshot of IBE projects over the years? You’ve mentioned schools and the botanic gardens, what other kinds of projects just in buckets have you all worked on?

Brian Dunbar: Yeah. Well, so we’ve done both residential projects. We helped a new four unit town home in downtown Fort Collins. And that set of buildings is creating more energy than it uses, it’s called L’Avenir, and to me, it’s the future. And we had three different students that helped on that project. So we’ve done residential projects, we’ve done commercial projects like bank projects and other kinds of development projects, office buildings, and we’ve done a number of schools and education facilities. We’ve done these higher education facilities, especially at CSU, but also for the University of Wyoming. And we’ve done now this larger scale neighborhood set of projects for Northern Colorado, we’ve done them in Boulder, we’ve done them in Colorado Springs, and we’ve done them in a few other states and countries.

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s a wide variety of project types. You mentioned when you were talking about the residential projects that you think this idea of net positive energy, creating more energy than it uses is the future. What are some of the other things you’re thinking about when it comes to the future of the built environment? What do you see coming? What do you hope for as well?

Brian Dunbar: Well, that’s really a great question, Jocelyn, because we do think about the future with all of our projects. We’re not just designing for today, we’re designing for future generations of all creatures. And so, we think about the wildlife and we think about pets, and we think about humans that are here today and those are yet unborn. And we’re trying to say that our built environment really has an important contribution to our natural environment. And in that way, we really focus in on health, so healthy environments, again, for the occupants of a building as well as for all creatures in a natural habitat. And we think about our climate and the importance of mitigating climate change and helping people and all other creatures be as comfortable and healthy in all different kinds of environments.

So that’s a focus of our work, and that leads us to maybe innovations. If we’re trying to help all the teams that work on these projects, work together for the future, then we like to pose those kinds of challenges right up front in a project. It’s not just how do we design and build this building, but it’s how do we create a better world and a better place for all earths inhabitants, and how can this project contribute to better climate and better health.

Jocelyn Hittle: Wonderful. One of the things that I find both a little bit scary and also really inspiring is this, it’s not an idea, it’s a fact that most of the buildings that will exist in 2050 haven’t been built yet. So what you’re describing, globally, I don’t mean necessarily here in Colorado, that there’s so much growth and so much building happening that we have this opportunity. If we think about building these projects for the future in the way that you just described to change half of the built environment. What do you think the implications of that are? The fact that around the world, there’s so much building and so much new construction happening.

Brian Dunbar: What you’re asking is really the morsel of the work that we’re driven to do. It’s the realization that what we have today and the buildings that exist today, they actually need to improve and be high performing and healthy and not impact our climate in a negative way, as well as all the future places that are yet to be built. So the implication there is that our buildings aren’t just shelter, but they actually can help us perform better and they can have positive impacts to our natural environment and to all future and habitants of the earth.

Jocelyn Hittle: So one of the things that is important within the built environment within this sector is how to measure what you’re describing, the impact of a building, whether it’s energy, water, waste, materials, air quality, all of these various things that you can measure about a building. Can we talk a little bit about the measurement and the rating systems that exist? A lot of people are familiar with LEED or leadership for energy and environmental design. A lot of folks look for those plaques on buildings, whether a building is LEED silver, gold, platinum. There’s also WELL Building, which is another area of your expertise. There’s also the LENSES Framework that IBE has come up with. Can you talk a little bit about this measurement and the rating system and how that factors in?

Brian Dunbar: Well, Jocelyn, that’s another good question. So I think some people call them rating systems. I’d like to call them guidance systems because while we do want to work toward this higher performance and achieve certain levels of certification or rating, I like to use the various systems to help guide our projects. So for instance, back on that Cheyenne Botanic Gardens project, we were all in a workshop, we call them design charrettes, where we were working together and there were children, there were local citizens, the architects, the engineers, the builders, the building owners, and our institute and our students were all there working together.

And while we all started brainstorming ideas and what could work for this place, soon enough, we talked about the lead rating system and all the different parts of that rating system, and that spurred many ideas that came out during the day. And along the way during the day, it was things that were in the LEED system, like the water efficiency, indoor and out, the energy efficiency, the lighting, the heating and cooling and ventilation, the indoor air quality, the materials that could be used or reused materials, all of those things came out and our ideas were guided by that LEED system.

So I just wanted to mention that we think of Meridian Systems, but they can be really good guidance systems for teams and for project owners and communities that would like to use them. So to more specifically address your question, I think LEED has been a great guidance and rating system that has actually transformed our built environment in so many different ways. And you mentioned WELL, WELL is a newer building guidance system all about healthy buildings. And really when we think about a certified healthy building, there’s a lot of overlaps with a certified green building and a certified healthy building. So LEED and WELL go together in many cases.

So now there’s all kinds of rating systems and guidance systems at different scales. So, for instance, there’s LEED for cities and communities, there’s other city scale guidance systems and monitoring or measuring systems. And then go on a very small scale, products can be certified as healthy or sustainable products. And that when I say products, it could be paints and coatings, and it could be furniture, and it could be other products that go into or onto a building. So all of these different rating systems and guidance systems become good resources for a homeowner or a building owner to use to guide them toward these high performing places.

Jocelyn Hittle: Thanks for that description. It strikes me that as you talk about all of those rating systems and as you talk about your projects and as you talk about your teams, there’s a wide variety of work that is happening to create new or to modify existing spaces in the built environment in our communities, in our cities.

Brian Dunbar: Absolutely.

Jocelyn Hittle: That means also that there’s a wide variety of careers, yes. And can you talk a little bit about the diversity of careers and maybe where there are some gaps where we need more people to be stepping into careers in these spaces?

Brian Dunbar: Yeah. Actually you said, could I talk a little bit, I think I could talk a lot bit about this because there are so many different careers that go into improving our places. And so, I’m using the word places sometimes instead of built environment because people understand that, and that’s really what we’re doing. When we are improving our built environment, what we’re really doing is trying to improve the places that we inhabit, be it a park, an airport, a city or a home or a school or anything. So if we think of it that way, there are so many careers that are impacted from the people that do the finish work, the painting and the cleaning and the installation of furniture to the creation of the walls of a building, to building the roof, to installing the electrical equipment and the energy equipment to then the people that plan the buildings, and those are engineers and architects, the landscape architects, the landscape installers, the city planners, and the government officials that approve the building codes and the plans.

So if you think about it that way, I just probably listed off 15 to 20 different careers and there’s a lot more that I could get into. But just to show you the vast impact of various careers that are part of creating better places. Boy, there’s so many opportunities. And the other part of your question, Jocelyn, was, and where do we need more people going into those careers? Well, I don’t think we’re ever going to have enough builders or subcontractors for all the work that will always need to be done on those buildings to be improved and/or to be built in the future. We’re in a time right now where we talk about supply chain issues that are so slow, and sometimes those are about the products, but sometimes it’s about the people that have to install the products. So often, today there’s delays in construction and I don’t see that changing anytime soon, so we need more people to go into construction management or into the trades that help create better buildings.

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Thanks. And a wide variety of careers even within the building space, so lots of opportunity there.

Brian Dunbar: Oh, true. One other thing I’ll mention, Jocelyn, is that I would say a newer career has emerged in the last 20 years and that is a sustainability professional. And certainly, we need people that are leading team efforts toward more sustainability. An architect or a builder that is working on buildings that are trying to be LEED certified or sustainable in some way, they need experts that are either in their firm or someone that they can bring in as a consultant to help make sure that they’re doing as much as they can to make their places sustainable. And I’ll give an example of one of our interns and we call them sustainability associates in our institute. We hire these students from all across campus and we call them sustainability associates. One of them who graduated over 10 years ago is now a sustainability manager at New Belgium Brewing.

And Dana was hired because a place like New Belgium Brewing, they need to always be thinking about the performance of their buildings and their grounds and the people that supply the material to make the beers, to all the people that work for the company, to all the people that visit the brewery. And so, Dana is plenty busy doing sustainability efforts, be it education or into the supply chain or into how the buildings can perform better. So sustainability professional is a new career that schools are hiring school distant districts, universities are hiring and businesses are hiring.

Jocelyn Hittle: Yes. Great point. Thank you for describing a little bit this new career, I think there are a variety of new careers that are coming up. But let’s change gears. If we can talk a little bit about your career, how did you get interested in sustainability work? How did you end up where you are?

Brian Dunbar: So way back when I was in high school, the energy crisis happened. I remember I first started to work on getting my driver’s license and gas was like $0.32 a gallon. And then within a year, it was over $1 and it was because of the oil embargo and the energy crisis that was happening around the world. So right then I said, “Oh, our future is going to be different.” I don’t know if we’re going to run out of oil, but it’s going to become really expensive so we need new ways. Because my dad and my grandpa were architects, I knew that the built environment was part of my future and I really enjoyed the drafting and visiting buildings, and I was probably five years old where we went on vacations and I’m visiting buildings under construction because my dad wanted to see that building. So I enjoyed learning that way.

So that took me into this career related to architecture and the built environment. And it was this high school experience that led into my college experience of saying, “Our buildings need to respond better to the growing issues about our environment, we need more renewable resources, we need less pollution.” And then now, we realize and we’re impacting our climate, so we need to do a better job of how we’re impacting our natural world with our built world. So it’s all those things that led me to the place that I’m in and led to the work that our institute gets to work on.

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s quite a story. I do think there are frequently kind of pivotal moments in people’s lives where they have a realization about a path that they want to be on, and sometimes those are more obvious moments and sometimes they’re surprising. What else over the course of your career would you say has been surprising about the work that you do?

Brian Dunbar: I would say that when I first was in architecture school, I started to realize that something you said earlier today is we have all of these existing buildings and then we’re going to have all these new buildings. And so it was a realization that our existing buildings need to be better and more responsive, as well as we need a new kind of architecture for the future. And it was hard to imagine back when I was in a university what that might look like. And so, I think that was an initial surprise. And then to see what is possible has become an evolving set of surprises. And I mentioned earlier the L’Avenir project in Fort Collins, this residential four unit town home. And I have to say the fact that it is creating more energy than it uses for four different homeowners, I didn’t know that was possible. So, that’s a huge surprise. And so, doesn’t that make you think that there’s more to be invented and more to be created and it also leads you to, there’s always more to learn?

Jocelyn Hittle: Oh, I love that. There is always more to learn. And I also love that this building is creating more energy than it uses. I also grew up in a built environment household, my dad was an engineer, I believe you worked with him a little bit.

Brian Dunbar: I did.

Jocelyn Hittle: He worked a lot on solar energy and on net zero buildings and passive solar and all of these things. So these have all been a part of my kitchen table conversations as well. So can you tell us a little bit more about where our listeners can find information about the Institute for the Built Environment or about you? Are there website, social media, that sort of thing?

Brian Dunbar: Yeah. I’d say first of all, just remember that we say IBE because a lot of our resources kind of like ibe.colostate.edu. So that’s our website, ibe.colostate.edu. And then we are also on Facebook, the Institute for the Built Environment is on Facebook. We’re in LinkedIn, we have a Twitter account, so ibe@csu is our Twitter handle. And maybe the best place is on our website under resources because we like to write about the projects that we do and the research that we’re involved in.

Jocelyn Hittle: Excellent. Thank you. And we will link to your resources also in the show notes. So for my very last question for you, this is our spur of the moment question. So you have traveled a good bid and seen a lot of buildings and had a lot of conversations around the built environment, is there either a city or a specific building that you have not visited that you’re dying to go see?

Brian Dunbar: Oh, that I haven’t visited.

Jocelyn Hittle: Whether it’s a new building, a sustainable building or something old, could be anything as an architect.

Brian Dunbar: I didn’t think you could stump me. So there’s so many places that I have visited, I could talk about all those great buildings. Oh, okay. There’s a school on the island of Borneo that people tell me is the greenest school. And I’ve been trying to help some other schools, there’s a school on the big island that I just visited a couple weeks ago called Hawaii Preparatory Academy and we’ve helped that school because they want to be the greenest school in the world. Well, there’s a school on Borneo that I understand is the greennest. So somehow I guess I need to get over there now that you’ve asked that question. I didn’t have it high on my list, but why not?

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, you’re welcome. I am inspiring a trip to Indonesia. That is not what I expected us to wrap up with either, but going to see the greenest school I think is a worthwhile endeavor, definitely.

Brian Dunbar: Well, and I think the reason I want to emphasize green schools is because that is about future generations, that’s why we do what we do. And as I said earlier, future generations of all creatures, and I know that Spur Campus is thinking in a similar way. I just visited there last week and it was great to see the way that we can tour all of those buildings when I say “we”, especially school children or families on the weekends can go to Spur and see the future, but also see how we’re really trying to educate and train and inspire today’s generations to help future generations.

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. Thank you for saying that. I am always particularly inspired when I am walking around the Spur Campus and see one of our professionals or one of our scientists interacting with those young people so they can see themselves in those careers in the future. So very much appreciate that and appreciate everything that IBE did throughout the course, the nine years now of the work that has gone into designing Spur to be as sustainable as we could make it. So appreciate all the efforts that you and your team have put into making Spur what it is and what it will be. Thank you so much, Brian, for being here with us as a guest on Spur of the Moment. We really appreciate your time and appreciate all of your insights into the work in making and changing the places where we live.

Brian Dunbar: So happy to do it and to be able to have this conversation with you, Jocelyn.

Jocelyn Hittle: The CSU Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson and our theme music is by Ketsa. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.