Date Posted: 10.02.2025
Join us at the Greenbuild 2025 Conference and Expo in Los Angeles! Mithun is proud to participate with a series of panel discussions and a project tour. We look forward to connecting with you there.
UCLA’s Sustainable Housing and Resilient Campus Design Tour
Join us for UCLA’s Sustainable Housing and Resilient Campus Design Tour to explore a leading campus in sustainability and innovative student housing in a dense urban environment. This tour highlights strategies used to achieve LEED Gold certification while designing flexible housing like UCLA’s Olympic and Centennial Residence Halls that will also accommodate 2028 Olympic Games participants. Attendees will explore high-performance housing systems, smart grid technologies, decarbonization efforts, renewable energy integration, and ecological landscape design featuring native plants and climate-resilient biodiversity. The tour will examine campus-wide sustainability initiatives in dining, transportation and waste reduction; including Certified Green Restaurants, low-flow fixtures, drought-tolerant landscaping, composting and electric vehicle infrastructure.
With applied research, student engagement and cross-departmental collaboration, UCLA’s comprehensive approach fosters a culture where sustainability is embedded across campus operations. Attendees will gain insight into how one of the nation’s leading universities integrates resilience, flexibility, and climate action into long-term campus planning.
The tour will be led by UCLA sustainability leaders and Capital Programs green building experts, and the Mithun design team (Simone Barth, Brendan Connolly, Tim House and Nick Wai-Poi).
Date & Time: Monday, November 3 at 1:00pm
Conceptual Foundations: The Built Environment and Public Health
The built environment profoundly shapes health outcomes across multiple scales — from individual occupants to neighboring communities and global supply chains. The public health impacts of the built environment are not uniform across populations, with climate change and toxic chemical exposures creating disproportionate burdens on marginalized communities.
Join Mithun partner Erin Christensen Ishizaki for “Conceptual Foundations: The Built Environment and Public Health,” the Greenbuild Summit opening session that will establish how building performance intersects with public health and climate challenges, setting the stage for the Summit’s exploration of actionable strategies throughout the project delivery cycle. The panel will explore the concept of “healthy spaces for all,” examining how real estate, design, engineering and construction decisions impact health and well-being. Panelists will discuss how building performance ripples outward, from the project boundaries to impacts on local community health as well as across the full project lifecycle and supply chain. The panel will close with an interactive workshop allowing participants to apply these concepts and connect with fellow attendees. This hands-on exercise demonstrates how to utilize an integrative process that leverages tools from both LEED and WELL to assess a project’s environmental and public health context, engage key stakeholders, establish explicit health goals, implement targeted strategies and plan for ongoing impact monitoring.
Date & Time: Tuesday, November 4 at 9:00am
Universal Design and Low Carbon: A Symbiotic Relationship
When school feels like an institution, students feel institutionalized. This underscores the importance of providing biophilia-rich environments that reduce stress, improve well-being, and foster student community and belonging in schools designed for universal access. Two recently completed case studies illustrate universal design that is amplified by low carbon, high-performance building strategies. The Creekside Center renovation at the University of California, Berkeley, transformed a modest, wood framed building into a new home for the University’s Disabled Students’ Program. Washington School for the Deaf, Divine Academic and Hunter Gymnasium leverages mass timber to center the Deaf experience in a fully accessible K-12 learning environment, engaging the whole student through heightened sensory experience – responsively tuned to each program, pedagogy and purpose.
Join Mithun partner JoAnn Hindmarsh Wilcox for “Universal Design and Low Carbon: A Symbiotic Relationship,” a panel presentation that will demonstrate how aligning universal design and low carbon strategies can lead to high performing buildings for communities historically marginalized from the design of the built environment. Panelists will share examples of how carefully curated accessibility features can be seamlessly integrated into a building’s architecture, and how low carbon strategies support universal design goals. Attendees will learn how inclusive design and technical research complement each other, creating welcoming and safe buildings for students and staff with disabilities.
JoAnn’s co-presenters are Hansel Bauman architecture + planning founding principal Hansel Bauman, Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects associate Cecily Ng and University of California, San Francisco Real Estate senior program manager for ADA Ben Perez
Date & Time: Thursday, November 6 at 1:15pm
Don’t Sweat It: Designing for Extreme Heat and Resilience
Over the past decade, we have witnessed an alarming rise in extreme heat, wildfires, wildfire smoke, drought, and floods, often labeled as “unprecedented.” As extreme heat events continue to increase in frequency, intensity, and severity, the threat escalates for significant risk to human health, especially in disadvantaged communities. Schools and multifamily housing are particularly vulnerable to overheating, leading to adverse effects on well-being, educational outcomes, and health equity.
Join Mithun associate principal Mike Fowler and associate Claire McConnell for “Don’t sweat it: Designing for extreme heat and resilience,” a presentation that will share integrated design and building enclosure strategies aimed at mitigating these challenges by reducing peak cooling demand, enhancing passive survivability and improving climate resilience. Aligned with the LEED v5 EA credit to Reduce Peak Thermal Loads and the Passive House standard, attendees will learn the health risks from wildfire smoke and effective measures to protect occupant health. Case studies in hot/dry and warm/humid climates will demonstrate how advanced building enclosure design and thermal comfort modeling – using weather files with the exact conditions of past extreme heat events along with the use of projected future forecasted weather files – can improve safety and comfort during power failures, wildfire smoke exposure and extreme heat events, even when faced with all three challenges simultaneously. Featured case studies include The Bush School Upper School, Princeton University Meadows Apartments, Georgia Tech Curran Street Residence Hall and EPA CCERTA: Missoula Public Health.
Mike and Claire’s co-presenters include Missoula Public Health air quality specialist Kerri Mueller and University of Washington Integrated Design Lab research engineer Teresa Moroseos.
Date & Time: Thursday, November 6 at 1:15pm
