The International Living Future Institute has added Bob Berkebile to its team. Berkebile, an influential architect and green building pioneer, will serve as a senior strategic advisor to the Institute in general and with the Living Product Challenge and Living Community Challenge specifically.
In the past three months, ILFI has hired Dr. Gregory Norris, an internationally acclaimed Life Cycle Analysis and ‘handprinting’ expert, and Eric Corey Freed, a green design pioneer, best-selling author and international speaker and now Berkebile in a part-time capacity, to its team.
“Bob is one of the most trusted and beloved leaders in the entire green building industry. Adding him to our team positions us to more aggressively address issues like Climate Change, natural resources depletion and social injustice, which threaten to define our present and our future,” says Institute CEO Jason F. McLennan. “Bob will help execute mission-critical programs that will tackle these issues and transform the built environment. He will serve as a high-level representative of the Institute with major corporations and national organizations.”
Berkebile was the founder of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment and was instrumental in publishing the AIA Environmental Resource Guide, the first resource guide of its kind to focus on the upstream and downstream impacts of the material supply chain related to buildings. He has championed these issues ever since. Berkebile hosted the first national conversation in Washington, D.C. about forming the U.S. Green Building Council, and he and BNIM contributed to its formation and the LEED rating system.
Berkebile will continue to work in Kansas City, Mo., with BNIM, where he is a principal. BNIM, formerly an Institute partner, received AIA’s National Firm Award in 2011. Berkebile also will continue his work with Sustainable Development Partners, his development company focusing on “urban acupuncture” programs and regenerative redevelopment. He will devote time each month to the ILFI mission to transform materials, buildings and communities that scale across the nation and beyond.
In 2009, Berkebile received a Heinz Award from Theresa Heinz and the Heinz Family Foundation for his role in promoting green building design and for his commitment and action toward restoring social, economic and environmental vitality to U.S. communities through sustainable architecture and planning. He is the 2014 recipient of the Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainability. The Hanley Award is sponsored by The Hanley Foundation, EcoBuilding Review, BUILDER and Architect magazines and is dedicated to identifying and honoring individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary, lasting, and far-reaching contributions to sustainability, and who have greatly influenced policy and industry response to critical environmental challenges in the United States.
“Building upon decades of experience, in particular the past eight years of Living Building Challenge ™ work, the Institute is uniquely positioned to lead our fractured green building community beyond incremental improvements to true transformational change,” Berkebile says. “I am eager to work with this organization and share a role in creating a world in which communities, and the materials we use to construct them, are made for the benefit of all, regardless of economic level or location.”