Extended Interview: Home Green Home

Stephanie Horowitz: I’m an architect at ZeroEnergy Design. I manage a team of 10 people and lead our design practice. My firm specializes in green, residential architecture. We work on single-family homes and larger multifamily buildings, often affordable housing. We are committed to designing healthy places that are energy efficient, durable, beautiful, and delightful places to live.

SH: Energy is used to create a comfortable indoor environment. That could mean heating or cooling a home. It is also used to support living, like being able to cook using a stove or to turn on the lights. 

SH: To maximize efficiency, we focus on designing an enclosure for the home or building. It is usually well insulated and uses high-performance windows, reducing the amount of energy needed to heat and cool the building. Then we pair that with small and simple heating and cooling systems to help maintain a comfortable living environment. We apply this strategy to every project we work on, whether it's a single-family home or a 50-unit apartment building. 

SH: First we need to understand what the client is looking for, how they live, and what they think is beautiful. We also learn about the site we’re designing on. We process that information and start testing design ideas. We create multiple designs based on what we’ve heard from the client and what we have observed on the site. The client weighs in, and eventually we arrive at one design that we then develop.

SH: The work is always collaborative, but the scale of the collaboration varies by project. For a smaller, single-family home, for example, there's always collaboration with the client and there's internal collaboration that occurs between me and the project manager, project architect, and sometimes a more junior designer. On a larger project, our internal team is typically larger, and we'll have more design consultants like structural engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and civil engineers who collaborate with us. 

SH: The technical aspects inform the creative process and vice versa. Being able to conceptualize space in three dimensions is important. One aspect of the design process is to create something that is beautiful. And another facet is to design an experience. You can look at a building as an object, but buildings are lived in. So it’s important to be able to think about and be able to design the experience of being in the home or building.

SH: I think I initially had parallel interests in design and environmental issues. As I began to learn about the amount of energy that buildings use, there was a collision between these two parallel passions.

SH: I applied directly to an architecture program as an undergraduate. I focused on the study of architecture, and I was able to pair that with my interest in energy and environment through classes outside of the architecture school. 

SH: When I was in college, I had a great experience working on a design-build project. I collaborated with other students at the university to research, design, and build a solar-powered home. That’s how I met my future business partners. After graduating, I worked for another firm but in the process was starting my own company that was focused on this niche of sustainability, or green architecture. I left that first job after a year and have been doing this ever since.

SH: It was challenging to be a young professional starting a company. But I think it was helpful that I co-founded it with people who had aligned but different expertise from mine. For example, one of the co-founders had a background in business and finance. That allowed me to learn how to be an architect and not have to focus as much on starting a company. Having a multidisciplinary team was crucial to being successful and making it happen with very little professional experience.

SH: I love working with families and organizations to create beautiful, comfortable, healthy spaces for living. Whether our impact is on an individual family or a community, being able to shape and create that space for living is really at the core of what I love about my job.

SH: Make observations about the built environment in your sketchbook and think about how a space influences the people in it. How does a building contribute to—or detract from—the public space?