According to a host of female leaders in Seattle’s green building industry, the answer to the question “is one sex greener?” is categorically “no.”

It’s not a question of a greener gender, panelists at the ReGeneration Conference said yesterday. Instead it’s a question of balancing the male and female parts of your brain, self and work to create a better designed building.

Now take a breath those of you who are skeptical, this is rooted in experience, not self-help books.

Basically, panelists said the black and white, concrete, don’t fail way of living and designing isn’t working and especially won’t work with green building as sustainable design requires an integrative approach. Lucia Athens of the Seattle Green Building Team said, “I don’t feel that there is a greener gender but we do live in a time where things have gotten out of balance.”

For a fun diversion, see how male or female your brain is by clicking here.

Speakers did call out the differences between men and women. Anne Schopf of Mahlum in Seattle said, “As women, we may design more in experiences and places and I see the men designing more objects and thinking more about the technologies.”

Right, wrong? What do you think about Schopf’s observation? Another thing Schopf said struck me: as she progressed up the architecture career ladder, she had many great mentors but none of them were women.

Ladies, was this your experience also? Did you only have male mentors or were you mentored by woman? Are you mentoring young architects now? And are there any men out there that were mentored by women? What was your experience, either here in the Pacific Northwest or elsewhere?

If women do design more for experience, Judith Heerwagen, an environmental psychologist, said that’s a strength in sustainability because buildings should be designed for experience rather than functionality.

She spoke about a courthouse project she worked on where she interviewed crime victims and their families, and many cried because their experience in the old courthouse building had been traumatic and painful. Her point was that someone’s experience of a building can be long lasting so the better the building, the better the experience.

Heerwagen said one way to encourage this is in effect to “make the feminine macho” by encouraging use of more integrative design.

And then there’s the idea of acting like a man at work and considering traditional male qualities as bonus points (for more on possible differences between how men and women look at a problem, check out Friday’s post on the topic here). Both Schopf and Amanda Sturgeon of Perkins + Will said as they moved up the architecture ladder, they realized they were suddenly the only women in the room and their perspectives were in the minority. Anne Whitacre, a reader of yesterday’s blog said this was her experience too (to read her comment, press here). Is this a universal problem and what can be done to curb it? Does it need to be curbed? 

Sturgeon said becoming a mother helped rebalance the male and female way of looking at a problem for her. Schopf said she’s still “tip toeing” out into being comfortable speaking femininely.

Audience participation at this forum was also fascinating. Three men in the room piped up to share their viewpoints. One said gender doesn’t matter so much as does putting all of your creativity, grace and self into your work. Another said we need to get beyond the stereotypes of men and women. Another said men who honor the feminine side aren’t often respected. “It seems to me that we have to attack this value based issue of men honoring men who honor women and that whole honoring and respect of feminine values has everything to do with that… I see it as also as a values change.”

I told you things could get interesting at this conversation.

And then, there’s the issue of laughing a little bit at the end of the day. Lucia Athens said in closing, “We tend to take all this so very seriously. I think we need to lighten up a bit.”

 What do you think?

Tags: Green buildings, Men, Women

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Men, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.