Episode 63: Arathi Gowda

Architect Arathi Gowda leads ZGF's East Coast Sustainability Practice and is a firmwide resource for the Project Performance Team. She is an advocate for collective climate action and is the current co-chair of US Architects Declare and a member of the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment Leadership Group. 

Arathi was at SOM for 20 years in Chicago before moving recently to her new role, and her move to DC was inspired in part by her notion of advocacy as part of architecture.

Arathi is a keen observer of the architecture profession and the real estate and financial worlds within which it functions. She cites signs of progress in recent years, and mentions that after the persistence of NIMBY-ism, “we are finally getting to a moment when there is no more Someone Else’s Backyard. Those of us who have some political power and institutional capacity need to do whatever we can to amplify that.” 

She points out that designers, as the optimists in the house, need to be rendering a post apocalyptic future that is beautiful and beneficial. “We need to show exactly how positive solutions for the collective good can be,” she says.