100 Visions

Du monde entier

Vivian Loftness

University Professor,
Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, United States

The workplace of tomorrow will regenerate each one of us, our families and our communities, sharing access to precious resources and to the sustaining qualities of nature.

The Regenerative Workplace for Tomorrow

The workplace of tomorrow will regenerate each one of us, our families and our communities, sharing access to precious resources and to the sustaining qualities of nature.

We will live and work and play in a walkable, whole life community filled with diversity – diversity of culture, profession, and skills.

We will be linked to other communities by high speed rail and by teleconference windows that let us take a walk with our colleagues and eat with our colleagues, without losing family time and community time in traffic, airports, and hotels.

Our work life will be integral with the natural landscape, from walking to work, to views from our desks, to walking conversations and outdoor workplaces.

The merging of built and natural landscapes will each be unique to our own climate and culture, creating views, managing sun and shade, regenerating our water resources, and making each visit a delight for others.

Our future workplace will be filled with “biophilic” richness for health, productivity, and all of the natural energies that offer an abundance of light, heat, air, and coolth!

Look what our actions can do to support environmental surfing! Embracing nature region by region (animation); recognizing the importance of regionalism for culture and for zero energy.

In fact, our future workplace will allow us to environmental surf using our iPad and iPhone to gather our climate’s unique offerings of sun and daylight, wind, nighttime coolth, turning off all “useless energies,” one by one.

So we can hear, see, feel… the sensory richness around us.

Our future workplace will be an active one, where walking is fun, stairs make music, sports are collaborative, and work-life balance is real.

We will use a range of communication tools and inventive media “windows of collaboration” to inspire our collective creativity with colleagues from different disciplines helping us to create truly sustainable materials, to create technologies that mimic nature, and regenerate without waste.

To ensure 100 years of shared access to revitalized natural settings, healthy lifestyles, mobility, community, and sustainable energy, water and material resources, while we create a sustainable future to share, our future workplace will regenerate our spirits and our bodies.

Celebrating the time of day, the seasons, and the culture that is unique to our climate, community and creative energies.

Vivian Loftness Bio:

Vivian Loftness, FAIA, LEEDAP, is an internationally renowned researcher, author and educator in environmental design and sustainability, the integration of advanced building systems, climate and regionalism in architecture, as well as design for health and productivity. Supported by a university-industry partnership, the Advanced Building Systems Integration Consortium, she is a key contributor to the development of the Intelligent Workplace - a living laboratory of commercial building innovations for performance, along with authoring a range of publications on international advances in the workplace.

She has served on eight National Academy of Science panels as well as being a member of the Academy’s Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, and given three Congressional testimonies on sustainable design. Her work has influenced national policy and building projects, including the Adaptable Workplace Lab at the U.S. General Services Administration and the Laboratory for Cognition at Electricity de France.

Vivian Loftness received the 2002 National Educator Honor Award from the American Institute of Architecture Students and a 2003 “Sacred Tree” Award from the U.S. Green Building Council. Vivian Loftness has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Architecture from MIT and is on the National Boards of the USGBC and AIA Communities by Design.