A couple of weeks ago we received news that Lance Hosey, a former director with William McDonough + Partners and author of a new book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press), had been named chief sustainability officer at RTKL, the global architecture, planning, and design firm. We wondered: what is a chief sustainability officer? So we reached out to Hosey, who was travelling in Asia, and asked him about his new job, the future of sustainable architecture, and his first impressions of China.

Martin C. Pedersen: You were just named chief sustainability officer for RTKL. What does that mean exactly?

Lance Hosey: I’m RTKL’s first CSO, a position we defined to signal the strategic importance of sustainability. Last year, market watcher Ellen Weinreb put out a study on the emergence of this role in a variety of industries (“CSO Back Story”). The first CSO appointed to a publically traded company was at DuPont just eight years ago, and there still are fewer than 30. So this is a nascent position in business, and there is little consistency in how it’s defined, but it demonstrates the evolution of sustainability from an ad hoc practice adopted informally among project managers to a more strategic policy among senior management. I believe I’m just the second CSO in a large architecture firm, and my role at RTKL is to help develop ways to stimulate more innovation in all of our work.

MCP: What did you find attractive about the position?

LH: With a thousand people in a dozen offices on three continents and millions of square feet under construction every year, RTKL represents enormous leverage on the marketplace and a powerful platform to promote change. With even modest improvements in the performance of our projects, we can have a significant positive impact on the built environment. We plan to take full advantage of this position by martialing RTKL’s considerable talent, opportunities, and resources in new directions. Architects don’t necessarily think of size as an advantage, but with hundreds of people exploring new ideas, the potential rate of innovation can be astounding.

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Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were the beneficiaries of the generosity of an amazing community of creative people—but it’s clear that there is much more to discuss on the topic. We came away with an understanding that there are some sensibilities typically categorized as “female” by contemporary culture that tend to be effective in advancing sustainability goals. I’m reminded of this as I recall a recent conversation at Portland’s Living Future conference where I asked six people to engage in a dialogue with me about these sensibilities and how we can all find ways to cultivate and apply them.

Architect Bill Reed, of The Regenisis Group, whom I like to refer to as the uber-unpacker, talked about the need for us to start personal. He’s not talking about recycling at home before you try to start a business in the green space. He’s talking about a deep and personal knowing of yourself/life/place as a precursor for engagement with others.

Stacy Glass who works with the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, talked about the importance of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. She used her experience of founding CaraGreen, a sustainable materials company in North Carolina, which eventually transitioned away from her original plans for it, as a demonstration of learning from failure.

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If we love it, will it last? This is a question at the heart of architect Lance Hosey’s new book, Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press, 2012). Because the book is just out I want to offer you a quick peek, as Hosey starts talking about it; his first talk since the book launched this week was at SPUR in San Francisco. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must also point out that Lance, who is CEO of the nonprofit GreenBlue, an organization dedicated to making products more sustainable, is also a friend. He and I co-authored Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design five years ago.

There’s an ongoing disconnect between what is perceived as “good design” (like the Vanity Fair “A-list” published in 2010) and “green design,” as Hosey points out; he documented this when he polled for the readers of his Architect blog in response to the Vanity Fair survey of architects. The disconnect, to him, is more than something to lament; it’s actually something to mine. He writes:

“Following the principles of ecology to their logical conclusion could result in revolutions of form as well as content in every industry at every scale, from the hand to the land. Reversing the devastation of nature requires reversing the devastation of culture, for the problem of the planet is first and foremost a human problem. We create the crisis, but we can correct it—by appealing to both morality and sensuality, to both sense and spirit, together. Designers can promote sustainability by embracing what they have already cared about most: the basic shape of things.”

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