This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Better buildings for a sustainable future with Ben Shepherd.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Ben Shepherd: Because we spend, as people, 90% of our time in buildings, that healthier building role or healthier material role is really important. Just like the ingredients list that you look at when you buy a box of crackers at the grocery store, we should know what’s in our buildings and what they can mean or are doing to us. 

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

Ben Shepherd: As an environmental geek, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a lab scientist or an environmental attorney or a park ranger, I guess, could have been anything. 

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. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate vice chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus, and I’m joined today by Ben Shepherd, director and planning practice leader at Atelier Ten, an environmental design consulting firm based in New York City. Ben has extensive experience with urban ecology, renewable energy, and green development. He’s worked on plans including commercial, university, government and transportation projects, and has consulted on more than 100 high performance building projects. Ben also teaches environmental design courses at the Yale School of Architecture. Welcome, Ben. 

Ben Shepherd: Well, thanks for having me. Hello. 

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s great to have you. So I just hit on some high points out of your bio, but maybe you can tell us in your own words, what is it that you do? 

Ben Shepherd: Sure. I’m a director here in our New York office, Atelier Ten. We were founded in 1990 in London by some progressive engineers. We opened a New York office studio here in 2001 and have since opened New Haven and San Francisco. We’re a group of collaborative, interdisciplinary, innovative design consultants focused on delivering sustainability to the planned built environment. And we work on a wide variety of projects, as you were saying, everything from museums to transportation hubs, to large scale master planning, and so we get to play in a lot of sandbox. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Okay. So let’s back up and hit on some definitions, you mentioned the built environment, what does that entail? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah, sure. We would define it as anything that’s a building could be commercial office, residential, institutional, campus building, can also be train stations to airports and even infrastructure. Infrastructure is a key part of what we don’t often think about or see, so transit infrastructure, energy infrastructure. And there’s huge transitions going on in all of those aspects as we see each day in the paper, online, etc. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. So it’s a little bit of everything. It’s the pipes and the wires that get us the energy and the water and take away our trash, things like that. All of that is the infrastructure. And then there’s planning for blocks of cities that might be a master plan. You mentioned master planning, so that’s a larger scale plan of where buildings go, what types they are, how do you connect them, and then you do work at the building scale also. So really it’s all over, lots of different categories, lots of different scales. 

Ben Shepherd: That’s right. Yeah. And I think that’s a key part of sustainability is the reason we can work on so many variety of types of projects is that sustainability really is scalable. There’s a role that we can play in each type of those projects. There’s always a way that we can improve them, whereas designers, they could be designed or operate better, whether that’s from an energy intensity perspective, a carbon perspective, both operational and embodied, which is the materials that go into the project. There’s always some way we can improve it. I think that’s what keeps us interested and keeps us busy. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, absolutely. And what about you specifically, so do you work on all of those sectors and scales or do you have an area that is a specific focus? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah. I think unlike a lot of firms, we don’t necessarily have like sector, you only work in transportation or you only work in, say, laboratory buildings or campuses. We really like to interplay because there are elements of both aspects of types of projects that you can learn a lot from. So we don’t try to pigeonhole or bend people directly into one. Certainly we have individual expertise in certain areas, and we’d like to really share the knowledge too. The knowledge exchange piece is really strong because you are learning on every project and applying what you learn on one project to another too. And that really not only varies from project type, but location climate is a huge driver too. So we’re constantly trying to apply the lessons learned but also think very innovatively creatively about what we could do. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. So let’s take as an example, someone comes to Atelier Ten and says, “We are building a building. We need some help in making it more sustainable. We have some goals around that.” What does that look like then for you? How do you get involved in that project> what do you bring to the table? 

Ben Shepherd: Sure. Yeah. And oftentimes it’s gotten written into the RFPs, the request for proposals that go out these days. So oftentimes an architect or a planner or maybe a landscape architect will come to us and say, “Hey, we’ve got a great client. They’re looking to apply sustainability.” And when I started in this business over 20 years ago, it was maybe a lead goal or just saying it wanted to be green or sustainable. And now we see a lot more detail to that of even, “Here’s the level of energy consumption we think the project should use. Here’s the water. We want net-zero water or net-zero energy types of targets. Here’s what we think about with regards to the materials being involved.” So it’s gotten from one byline in a whole multi-page proposal to now very specific of what that is. And that’s great because that gives us a lot to talk with the other members of the design team, the architects, certainly the engineers too, about how we can help them not only win the project but deliver a much better project. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Why do you think that it’s gotten so much more specific and detailed? And I’m assuming also that more and more projects are actually requiring that there is some sustainability bent to it. Why do you think that trend is moving in that direction? 

Ben Shepherd: I think we just know a lot more now too. I mean, whereas we wouldn’t have even been talking about something like embodied carbon of what’s the material ingredients of what goes into a building, it’s really shifted over time. I mean, 20 years ago we might have talked about the healthy roll of those not off-gassing or VOCs, volatile organic compounds into a space where now we’re concerned with what is the environmental impact of that concrete or that steel or how can we reduce that in a new building or even in a renovation. It’s really continued to grow and I think in some respects that might seem daunting, but it’s also a great opportunity to reduce the overall impact. And I think we also just have much better analysis tools certainly, and just the thinking behind it, it’s much more holistic and our approach to things where before, we might have done something for energy if, say, it was in an area where energy was very expensive on the coasts in California or New York, but that would’ve been kind of it. 

Now it’s much more comprehensive of energy resource use water certainly out west where you are and the materiality too, and thinking about, “Because we spend, as people, 90% of our time in buildings, that healthier building role or healthier material role is really important.” Just like the ingredients list that you look at when you buy a box of crackers at the grocery store, we should know what’s in our buildings and what they can mean or doing to us. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, absolutely. So you hit on a couple of things in that answer that I want to come back to. So one is the idea of embodied carbon. You started to describe it, but maybe you can say a little bit more about that because I think we might think of, “Okay, we’re talking about a building, that building uses energy, that energy is generated, somehow we know that we can calculate a carbon footprint of that energy.” But what you’re talking about is the one time energy that goes into the construction of the building itself. Maybe you can say a little bit more about that and why it is that people are starting to include that in their calculations. 

Ben Shepherd: Sure. A few reasons why we’re starting to include it, but the importance of it is really that if we’re concerned about the climate crisis that we’re in now and we want to do the most we can to avoid the negative impacts that we’re already starting to see globally in the world, it’s really more important to focus on the material use of a building being constructed than it is the operational carbon which will take 10s and 20 and 50 years to really impact. So it’s not to say that operational use energy efficiency, which is from the ’70s on what we were all brought up in of turn off the lights and move to LEDs for light-emitting diodes, and all of those aspects, mechanical and architectural, that they’re not important. They are, but in the near term, the materials that are going from mining out of the ground to make your building, and the shipping and everything that goes with that too is a much more important part of the picture. And that shift has really only happened in the last, I would say, five or 10 years. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. So for example, what’s a climate culprit when it comes to the materials are going into a building and what are you thinking about replacing it with? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah, great question. And I think that’s what gets us excited as designers of, again, talking about how can it be better, how can it improve? There are low-carbon structural and cladding materials now that we look at, the use of wood, CLT for instance, cross-laminated timber is very popular right now for certain building types. We did one of the largest on the East Coast at UMass Amherst. This was opened about five or six years ago now utilizing timber. And it has concrete too to it, but it’s a lower embodied carbon concrete. So we look at putting in pozzolans or other types of supplementary cement materials they’re called that have a high recycled content or are regionally sourced, and we use those within the concrete mix. And it’s this kind of interesting win-win too, where because it’s often available regionally, which has a lower carbon impact, it can cost less. 

And as supply chains have been really wild over the past year or two, especially we’ve seen where some of the large wood CLT projects or other low-carbon concrete products have come in cheaper than the conventionally sourced concrete and steel materials. So it’s this win-win on both. It’s better for the environment and better for the ultimate budget of the project. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, thanks. That’s helpful. I think it’s helpful to dive into one specific example of how the work you’re doing is changing as we all focus more and more on these issues and there’s so much more attention on climate in particular these days than maybe when you started out. So you also mentioned net-zero water, so maybe you could talk a little bit about that and then I’d love to dive in a little bit more in kind of what’s a day in the life for you. But first, let’s talk a little bit about water. What are you guys focused on in that space right now? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah. No, I think maybe a few ideas about water. I mean, certainly what’s going on out west in our San Francisco office has been involved greatly in projects with like the Trans Bay Transit terminal in San Francisco, which has purple pipe. So basically capturing water on the roof, reusing that within the building, and then also connecting to a future system of purple pipe or greywater reuse within the downtown area. The water conversation always starts where it’s a resource the most scarce. And so we’ve seen that in projects out west for a while, but even it’s coming up now in the northeast where the thought was always, “Well, we would have plenty of water here.” We had a huge drought here where I’m based in New York City last summer. It was shocking. I mean, the reservoir was down and this is nothing new to folks out west again, but even here, and we’re seeing precipitation events that are happening at a much more drastic scale. 

So high intensity storms, dropping a lot of rainfall in a very short amount of time that sheets off all of the pavement and impervious surfaces. Building roofs for instance, and creates real issues where it overloads existing and probably outdated stormwater systems in cities especially. And then we have things like combined sewer overflows. And so what we are seeing in projects is, even here in Northeast where water is supposed to be plentiful, what can you do to detain water for the immediate during or aftermath of a storm to allow that rest of the city infrastructure and connection to catch up with the amount of water that’s fallen? And then that leads to conversations then about, “Well, how do you use this water? What could you do with it?” And it’s really interesting to be in meetings, these are oftentimes workshops or charettes called, where you are talking about, “Well, hey, we have this larger roof. We can capture this quantity, this amount of gallons per water on average throughout the year, or looking at it monthly, daily, even hourly depending on the data we can get.” 

And saying then, “Okay, well, what can we use that water for?” We need this size of cistern, we could put that towards cooling towers, which help reject heat and then generate cooling within the building. They are extremely thirsty. That can usually take all of the water that’s even possible to be captured. We can work with the landscape architecture team to use that non-potable water for irrigation. There’s a really interesting interplay when you see the landscape architect arguing politely with the mechanical engineer, the plumbing engineer, about, “Hey, I want that water. No, I want that water.” And this again, was a resource that otherwise just would’ve fallen on the roof or on the pavement and just gone down the drain. So I think we’re always looking for those nice synergies of where there’s a good interplay and not only resource savings, but then a cost savings. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So let’s talk a little bit about a day in the life for you. So we’ve talked on about some of the technical things you’re working on. How does that actually play out when you hit the office every morning? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah, great question. Today is probably a great example. An earlier meeting on a museum project in Washington DC, there was a call on a college master plan. So again, a real variety. I think it keeps us on our toes, again, sustainability being truly scalable. And it’s a lot of talking through the issues, figuring out where. For instance, in this museum project, I mean, they’re having issues with conditioning systems and flooding even. And you imagine as a museum conservator, that’s the worst thing that can happen, your collection could get damaged. So it’s not only how do we save energy and conserve resources in the long term, but how do we help your current problems and situation that you’re in. And increasingly that’s thinking about what’s happening today, i.e. the flooding or those issues that are occurring with a frequency and also tomorrow, what’s the climate going to be like in five, 10, 20 years? And what does that mean? Do you need more shading on your building? Do we need to think about ground source, heat pump, geo exchange system as your current mechanical system gets older and is needed to be replaced? 

Unfortunately we don’t treat our buildings very well, we just expect them to keep going forever. And for the most part, they do. When they don’t, it’s big news. And if we treated our cars the same way, if we’re not all in electric hybrid vehicles yet, the good old combustion engine, if we didn’t go in for the oil change and the tune-ups and all that stuff, our car would no longer be running or be running very well. Unfortunately, in the built environment, we don’t do a very good job of operations and maintenance or keeping things running well. Those that do are very good at it and see the benefits to that. A lot of the healthcare or campus clients we work with are good at that because they have number of buildings to take care of, and at the same time, they see the value over time of that investment. But too often we just forget and expect our buildings just to be continue on and not have to do anything about it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yes, we take it for granted. So let’s take an example there as well. So you are having a call with a potential client or an existing client who’s got a problem to solve. Who do you draw on within Atelier Ten or elsewhere to help solve that problem? I’m assuming you’ve got some folks who do specific kinds of analysis who are engineers or have certain areas of expertise. How do you pull all those pieces together? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah. Again, it’s a team approach. We have great staff who generally have an architecture engineering background or maybe environmental policy. More of those programs have grown in the past 10 to 20 years, which is fantastic for us to be able to draw on. I think oftentimes we’re trying to fit the right people to the team so it’s not just one person loan rangering it on the project all by themselves, but there’s a project manager, there’s a project principal, there’s some support staff depending on which scopes of work we’re doing. So it really kind of lends a sense of ownership, but also of team of problem solvers. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. Well, so I’m going to ask you a question that you may not be able to answer because it’s asking people about their favorite kid. But do you have a favorite project, either an existing one or one that you’ve worked on in the past? 

Ben Shepherd: Ooh. I mean, there’s lots of great stories from it all. Favorite project, it would be like a favorite kid. I mean right now, one of my favorites is, and I think if people don’t already know about it, definitely look it up you’ll hear more about it, I think here, especially shortly, it’s in Pittsburgh, the Mill 19 at Hazelwood Green. It’s a redevelopment of a historic turn of the century steel mill, and so it’s an old brownfield site, it was one of the last surviving structures of Pittsburgh’s industrial aged, and we’re on a great team. MSR architects out of Minneapolis originally brought us in 10 by 10 landscape architects. Were also involved in the project, and it’s for a group called RADC, and they specialize in the redevelopment of these old brownfield sites within Pittsburgh to help grow the economy. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I’m going to stop you there and ask you about what is a brownfield before you describe more of the project. 

Ben Shepherd: So a brownfield is a previously industrial site, likely contaminated and oftentimes limited in what you can build on it. And rather than just having it stay empty forever or just being maybe an open space. This is intended to be this project, Mill 19 and an economic incubator space. So they have Carnegie Mellons Robotics Lab, they have some other tech companies taking space within this building, inside a building almost. We kept a shell of the old steel mill, rehabbed it, and then it now features the largest sloped fold voltaic PV roof in the United States. 

And so it’s this interesting mix of old and new and servicing Pittsburgh’s part of their amazing turn in their economy of moving from industrial hellscape when you couldn’t even breathe the air or see through the smog of all of the mills there to what is a new job economic creator. And has some great open space, has a great landscape design that captures water, like we were talking about before, for reuse, both for the building mechanical systems as well as in some stormwater features. And I think it’s just a really great example of adaptive reuse, again, of taking something old and making it new again. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, I love those stories of restoration or adaptive reuse, the term you used where you take a building and renovate it for a different use than what it originally had. It’s not just a renovation or restoration, it’s a adapting it to have a different function. I love those stories and it is so inspirational to see how it can have an impact at the city scale because Pittsburgh is now widely acknowledged as very innovative and a beautiful city, and I always enjoy visiting myself. So that’s a great example. What might people find surprising about your day or some of the projects you’re working on? When they think, “Well, someone who’s thinking about green building and sustainability,” what might not fit into that mental image they’re conjuring up? 

Ben Shepherd: I would bet that most people think, “Oh, it’s all about some technological solution or some new fancy system,” or something like that. I think it really gets down to the first principles of just what is good design or what are the fundamental principles of physics, for instance, and conservation of matter and energy. But I think it’s really about the people too, it’s about having a good argument or good case to be made for why this building is going to be different for the people in it, whether that’s talking about a commercial office building to a developer who you might not expect to be the most innovative type of group, but if they hear, “Wow, this is going to really speed us to market and this is going to outcompete all of who they’re up against for potential tenants.” Same for residential, I mean the people, if you can make it about better indoor air quality, and I mean, geez, with COVID, if that taught us anything, I would hope that we need to create really good interior spaces that are well-ventilated and healthier. 

And I think those are the projects too that are going to out-compete kind of the old guard that’s out there still too. And we’ve seen this on university campuses, college campuses for a long time where there’s a lot of movement towards building for the new STEM program or whatever the hot research is in the moment. But ultimately, a lot of those projects are about daylight. Yes, they’re about conserving energy and being more efficient, but they’re about creating just great spaces. And I think when you walk in those spaces, you can almost tell it intuitively too. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, absolutely. I think I have turned the light on in my office maybe once since we moved in in part because we really focused on that daylight piece. And obviously it helps for energy conservation, but it’s also just a nicer place to be. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how teaching plays into the work you’re doing and how you fit it into what seems like an already busy schedule. 

Ben Shepherd: Yes, it is. Luckily, as an adjunct, you can do one class a week in the evenings, which certainly helps, and caffeine is a great helper as well. I think there’s a few reasons to do it. One is of course giving back and finding the next generation too, and also staff. We have staff that we have hired that we have taught before, those that ask great questions and showed up, and we’re very interested in the subject matter. I think to that point too, teaching really helps give you a mastery in the material you’re talking about because you will be called out on the mat, you will be asked questions that you hadn’t thought about before, and you really need to think about all aspects of the subject you’re teaching. So not to say that you can’t ever say, “Hey, I’ll get back to you on that,” that’s always possible too, but it really just helps you get comfortable with what you’re doing. 

Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. And what are you most inspired by when you’re teaching? I’m guessing having an opportunity to interact with people who are younger, and what are the questions they’re asking and/or how are they engaging with you that is giving you hope? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah. I think it’s just a whole new baseline. I mean, they don’t question anymore that there is a climate crisis or that we do need to recycle or we do need to build more efficiently. Their biggest questions are biggest gripes, rightfully so, we’re like, “Why aren’t we doing this already? Why aren’t we doing more of it? Why isn’t this happening already?” And so I think the timeline, when you’re young, nothing is happening as quick as you want it, everybody is holding you back and all of that energy. So I think when I’m teaching, I’m getting a lot of the energy that they’re giving off too, of how do we better, faster, quicker. 

Jocelyn Hittle: There is a lack of patience that is completely understandable and shared by a lot of us who are a little bit older as well, just understanding the urgency of all the things that we’re doing. So let’s talk a little bit about how you got to where you are. Maybe we can start with what was it you wanted to be when you grew up? 

Ben Shepherd: What was that? Yeah. Again, and looking back, you kind of all starts to make sense, but at the time, I was just as grasping for straws as anyone, I think. I was very interested in the environment from a young age, I think it was a part of growing up at summer camp first as a camper and later as a counselor there. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Where was that been? Where did you grow up? 

Ben Shepherd: This was Midwest suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. And so I think at a time I probably would’ve been very happy just being a out of camp for the rest of my life outside and canoeing and doing all of that fun stuff. I think too, growing up in the Midwest, seeing the sprawl of the burbs at the time too, I mean, a lot of quality farmland was being chewed up for just subdivision after subdivision. So that led me to an interest in planning at first. And then I worked an internship at a local planning agency and realized that, “Well, they weren’t really planning very well, they were just kind of regulating.” And I wanted to do something that was more innovative than that. And my lesson there that I would pass along is, it’s great to do internships before you go to two or three or more years of schooling in that profession because it gives you a chance to really test it out first and see, is this where I see myself? Is this what I want to be doing? 

So I kind of took a U-turn, and at the time I was doing some research and I found American Farmland Trust and Rocky Mountain Institute. And I was really interested in NGOs at the time, non-governmental organizations, non-profits on the environmental side, and worked an internship at RMI, Rocky Mountain Institute and loved it. And from there, made it a full-time job, worked with the likes of Bill Browning and Amory Lovins, and this was 2000, lead was just out on the street. So the US Green Building Council’s leadership and Energy and Environmental Design, Benchmarking, Green Housekeeping, Seal of Approval, and Green Building, we were out there being champions of it of saying again, “You could design things better.” 

Jocelyn Hittle: And so, that internship that you mentioned that really pointed you in a slightly different direction, that was after college, after university, is that right? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah, after college. I mean, I went to grade school again as an environmental geek. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a lab scientist or an environmental attorney or a park ranger, I guess, could have been anything. But up at a small school, Northland College up in Northern Wisconsin, the Northwood’s beautiful spot just on Lake Superior, the coldest winters I’ve ever experienced in my life, but- 

Jocelyn Hittle: I can imagine. 

Ben Shepherd: … it brings you together, great friends from my time there. And I’m lucky enough to stay involved with the college now as a member of the board of trustees there and continue to give back and stay connected to my second home up there. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. So you graduated, you moved to slightly warmer climates and tried out this internship and it pointed you in a different direction. What were some of the things that really struck your interest and helped you to make that turn and maybe some of the people that were part of that transformation for you? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah. Well, definitely at RMI, I mean, we made a set of case studies on green developments from across the world, and key to that was the three-week trip across Europe looking at European green buildings. So Europe was ahead of us, low energy, natural ventilation, in the UK and Germany in the Netherlands, going to some of the key buildings there and then getting to write about them. And I talked to actually the architects and engineers that worked on the projects too. So that was a great indoctrination for me. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So I do think that it is so important to see people who are doing things in the way that maybe might be inspirational. It’s not all, “Man, this is what’s wrong, this what’s wrong,” when you have a chance to see someone or a group of people or in a whole country depending who are really being proactive and solving the problem, it can really help keep you motivated. 

Ben Shepherd: Definitely. And I think everybody that I’ve ever come across in this field is fair giving of their time and wants to share, I mean, warts and all, the wins, the successes, but also, “Hey, here’s what we would do differently now if we could.” And that’s really important because that enables each project to step upon each other. And so I think a lot of times we’re all looking for what’s the big thing that’s going to transition the entire energy system, and it’s a lot of projects building on the backs of others, in my opinion, that do a lot of good in the end. So it’s the collaborative nature of it I always come back to. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, that’s great. It’s mission-oriented, so everyone really wants to make a difference in the built environment, not only on the one building that they happen to be working on at that moment. 

Ben Shepherd: Totally. And I want my competitors to succeed too, because that makes it that much easier for everyone else and to get that much further. Unfortunately, in some ways, this climate crisis is kind of a growth industry in ESG and all of the components of it continues to create a lot of work for folks like us in the profession, but it just means there’s a lot more we got to do. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. One of the things I think about is not only that we are in a climate crisis, but also how much building is happening with people moving to cities and population growth and demographic change around the world, that so much of the building stock that will exist by 2050 by the time we hit our 10 billion-ish population number hasn’t been built yet. So that can be scary on the one hand. And on the other hand, if we build it better, if we build it closer to net-zero, if we think about embodied carbon, if we think about healthy materials, it’s an opportunity to have a really large percentage of the buildings that we have by 2050 be high performance, I think is a word that you use and to be healthier for people. So is there anything else about how you got where you are that we should dive in a little bit more on any mentors or moments of inspiration that you think might be helpful for our listeners to understand why it is you ended up where you are? 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah. I mean, how I ended up, I guess, closing the circle to Atelier Ten was through Yale School Forestry & Environmental Studies, I’m still not sold on the new name, so come get me if you want. But I was really interested through my time at RMI led me to Professor Steve Kellert, who passed away a number of years ago now, but his research on biophilia, and again, I think the people side of thinking about how we connect to nature. Like you were saying earlier, something as simple as just daylight in your office space that leads to better health outcomes if you’re a patient in the hospital, that makes you happier as a staff working in an office building or wherever you’re at, all of those things, we have an innate human connection to the natural world, even in as urbanized as we are. 

And something as simple as taking a 10-minute walk out in a city park, doesn’t have to be Central Park could be around the corner and to see a few trees or to see the sunset can reduce stress levels, blood pressure, really help you out and put things in context, I think. And so I was really interested in how does design apply with that concept of biophilia and E.O. Wilson had done great work on that too, wrote the book. And so I got to FES at Yale and was really there and Atelier Ten was starting work on Kroon Hall, which is a net-zero carbon building that was done after I was a student there, but connected to that project through Steve and got to meet some of the great leaders here at the time Atelier Ten who are still with the firm in various locations and have been here ever since I graduated in 2006. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, that’s great. That’s quite some time to be in one place. That tells me that you’ve had an opportunity to grow as a professional within the organization. I just have a couple last questions for you. One is where can people find out more information, either about you or about Atelier Ten or both? 

Ben Shepherd: Atelierten.com and I’ll spell it out because it’s not maybe a normal word. 

Jocelyn Hittle: What does it mean? Well, you can spell it, but then also define it for us. 

Ben Shepherd: Sure. It is a French word for a design studio, really. And there was already an Atelier One who was a fantastic structural engineering firm. So 10 was the next number in binary, and also I think pushing the envelope of 10 and beyond was the reason for the name there. But it’s A-T-E-L-I-E-R-T-E-N.com 

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s the number 10, right? 

Ben Shepherd: Yes, spelled out, T-E-N. 

Jocelyn Hittle: T-E-N. Okay, thanks. Yeah, that’s a good clarification. So last question for you, it’s our Spur of the Moment question, do you cook and if so, do you have a specialty? 

Ben Shepherd: Ooh, cooking? Specialty? Probably like pasta, I think pizza too. I live in New York City, so I think I’m contractually obligated to say pizza. It’s a little tougher when you’re in New York apartment, so you don’t have a lot of outdoor space for a pizza oven. But I just saw there’s an all electric pizza oven now that Ooni has put out, I’m dying to try it. So anybody has any reviews of that… Yeah, it’s up like 850 degrees in 20 minutes, somehow it’s all electric. I don’t know if you’d need a way bigger outlet. I don’t know if I would down my whole building. 

Jocelyn Hittle: It doesn’t heat up your apartment, I guess, because that’s part of it. It doesn’t make your apartment really hot. 

Ben Shepherd: Yeah, we don’t tend to use our oven much in the summer. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I get it. Yep. That’s great. Well, Ben Shepherd, thank you so much for your time today. We’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest on Spur of the Moment, and we will link your website in the show notes. And thank you so much for your time. 

Ben Shepherd: My pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Thanks again for having me. 

Jocelyn Hittle: You bet. 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.