Lily Livingston (llivings)

I am currently a Sustainable Design project manager for HDR Architecture’s Sustainable Design Solutions team out of our San Francisco office.  I have over 14 years of architectural
experience, and over 8 years managing sustainable design projects.  The range of my green
building work has included residential, retail, commercial, and urban development, including
one LEED Gold certified building that also won a 2007 AIA SF Design Award in the Energy + Sustainability category. I bring sustainable design, client-interface, team-building,
communication, and management skills to my projects. Over the past 8 years as I started to
focus on more environmental architectural solutions, I was slowly drawn into various
sustainable conferences and groups where I was introduced to Biomimicry. I first saw Janine
Benyus speak in 2004 at the Bioneers conference in San Rafael, California and immediately
bought the Biomimicry book.   Besides learning from the incredible millenia of R&D nature
provides us, I also believe that sustainability is truly about remembering; remembering the
process of architecture design before the advent of the industrial revolution and air
conditioning. We can learn from centuries of vernacular building design solutions, where
buildings responded to the natural world and climate around them because they had to. I also
believe that innovative architectural solutions to minimize the buildings impact on the
environment can be both pragmatic and within a project's budget; that it is people, not just technologies, that truly manifest successful green building projects. 

I am a member of the United States Green Building Council and was recently named “Advocate
of the Year” by the Northern California Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, where I
served as chair of the Advocacy Committee from 2007 to mid-2008.  I have participated in the
AIA California Council Committee on the Environment (AIA CC COTE) and I am also affiliated
with Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and Bioneers.  I am a 
licensed architect, and graduated cum laude with a Bachelors of Architecture from Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo.