Brian Johnson//June 21, 2024//
Rick Carter
Q&A: LHB’s Carter talks about career journey, sustainable design
Rick Carter
Brian Johnson//June 21, 2024//
It may be said that Minnesota architect Rick Carter was green before green was cool.
In the early 1990s, before green design became an industry buzzword, Rick Carter took a keen interest and early leadership role in designing buildings that tread softly on the environment, and sip rather than gulp when it comes to consuming energy.
Raised in Cloquet, Carter played a big role in developing the state of Minnesota’s “B3” guidelines for energy efficient and sustainable building design, among other accomplishments.
Carter recently stepped aside as CEO of Minnesota-based architecture and engineering firm LHB after five years in that position. He first joined the company in 1982 and went on to become an “early champion” of the company’s “Healthy Building Design,” which dates to 1991, according to LHB’s website.
Now chairman of the board at LHB, Carter is currently working on sustainable design goals and strategies for mixed-use developments such as The Heights in St. Paul and Rice Creek Commons in Arden Hills.
In the following interview, Carter talks about his career journey, development of the B3 guidelines and more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What inspired you to get into architecture and go down the sustainability path?
A: It literally started in high school with a drafting teacher, Mr. Larson, and I really liked to draw with pencils and straight lines, and somehow that turned into, ‘I want to go to architecture school.’ I grew up in Cloquet, Minnesota. I could have gone to UMD, but if I went to the University of Minnesota [Twin Cities], the pre-architecture program would only be one year. So I was one year in pre-architecture, and then four years in architecture.
At the end of 1981, I moved to Duluth. I always tell people, if you look at a tracking of economics over time between the Depression and the Great Recession of 2008, the low point is the year I graduated in 1981 or 1982. I just thought it was hard to get a job.
I had met Robert Berquist, who was with LHB. They had about seven or eight employees — civil, structural and architecture. I walked out the door and walked down the street and asked Robert if he needed help, and he hired me on the spot. I started there a couple weeks later. [I was in] Washington, D.C., for about five years, where I worked for a couple of really great firms without any kind of focus on sustainability, although I think it was in the back of my mind from being at the University of Minnesota during at least some years of energy conservation.
I came back to Duluth at the end of 1988 and within a year, they asked me to be part of a new office in Minneapolis. By that time, there were probably 40 or 50 people in the firm, but there were six or seven of us in Minneapolis, and we had some big projects.
Within a year or two, that work started to run out, and it became very clear that it was going to be very difficult for us to compete in this market because no one knew us. The goal was to decide what we could be good at that would differentiate us from all the other firms that were established.
In the fall of 1991, what we wrote down was like a precursor to LEED. It was energy efficiency, occupant health resource efficiency, including building materials and site and waste. We really focused on having those things apply to our projects, trying to get work from people who are interested in those things happening, and learning what it was and how to do it.
That would be 33 years ago. It was 10 or 15 or 20 pretty lonely years, to be honest. But now, of course, it’s kind of the biggest thing out there.
Q: Tell us about your involvement with the state’s Buildings, Benchmarks and Beyond (B3) sustainability guidelines.
A: We’ve had various types of sustainability guidelines for buildings. There were a couple in place in 1991 when we started. We found the Colorado Built Green Program, which was a single-family program out of Denver. We found the Austin Green Building Program. But there was no USGBC, there was no B3. So we were cobbling together lists of good things to do.
LEED was starting to get traction in the late ’90s, and the state passed a law, I think it was the very early 2000s, that every building that got state funding, meaning bond proceeds, would be required to meet a set of sustainability guidelines, and every public building, including schools and city buildings, would be required to benchmark their energy performance. They did an RFP. We teamed up with the Weidt Group at the time (now Willdan), and the Center for Sustainable Building Research with John Carmody. We created, from scratch, the original B3.
There’s a lot of different systems out there. All I say is you should have a set of guidelines, because it gives you a common language. When someone says, ‘I want the building to be energy efficient,’ that’s very vague. But if you say, I want to get 19 points in LEED v4 or if you want to meet SB 2030, those are very specific. You have a common language, you have goals that you can track over time and determine final outcomes.
Q: I recently had a conversation with Gina Ciganik, CEO of Habitable, about building materials. There has been so much focus on energy efficiency and things of that nature. Do you think building materials are the next frontier in sustainability?
A: There will always be new things. But when we first started in 1991, we had three big buckets. There was energy conservation. We weren’t really talking about greenhouse gas emissions at the time. ‘Healthy buildings’ is the term we used, or health of the occupant. And then resource efficiency was kind of a broader bucket that indeed would include materials and site and waste.
What we learned right out of the chute was that there was a lot of expertise in energy efficiency. The Weidt Group had been active for probably 20 years at that time. We knew that we had experts, international experts, in our own community, and we just needed to get them plugged in and learn from them and use the information that was out there.
On the resource efficiency side, it was a little bit more of the Wild West.
Where the biggest gap was, was in occupant health. It was just starting to hit that there were things like sick building syndrome and indoor air quality issues, things like Legionnaires’ Disease. When I actually studied some of the legal trends, it started popping like popcorn in the early 90s.
We had a very interesting early introduction to it. One of our first projects, once we made this decision and kind of laid this gauntlet down, was for a woman who had multiple chemical sensitivity, which is still a thing. It was less likely to be diagnosed at the time, but when she was in her home or in her office building, the materials and the indoor air quality in the space were making her sick. She was less able to function. She wanted us to help her find a site to build a house where she would live and work and at least not get more sick.
I remember distinctly putting a paragraph in the contract saying, ‘We don’t know how to do this, we’re not sure, but we’ll do our best.’ And we ended up helping her find a site with the right kind of flora and fauna and the ability to orient the house the right way. They built a new house. It had to be all hard surfaces. There was no fabric, there was no carpet, there was no fossil fuel. Ironically, it was an all-electric house.
She had to take every product and then, if it was a composite, she had to take that composite with her to the doctor and do physical testing to see, for example, is this one better for you? Is that one better for you?
So that was an indoctrination that caused us, I think, to always be focused on it. I think, whether you’re talking about our firm or our industry or profession in general, or the world in general, that’s ebbed and flowed, and I think Gina’s organization is really putting a focus on it.
If you think about the cost of a building … an office building’s energy cost is something like $1 to $2 a square foot. It’s a lot of money. You can cut it in half, and if someone has half a million square feet, that’s real money. The space that they’re in costs $10 to $20 a square foot, right? They’re either leasing or they built and they financed it. The people who you pay to be in there, just their raw cost, salary and direct benefits, usually average between $100 and $200 a square foot. So if you could theoretically make the population in that building 1% more productive, better at their job economically, that’s more than the total cost of energy in the building.
Long answer, but I think you’ll hear more about it because of people like Gina in the spotlight.
RELATED: Q&A: Former LHB intern takes over as the firm’s CEO
Share this!
After 15 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, Marcus & Millichap’s Joseph Fergu[…]
June 14, 2024
CEO of Habitable Gina Ciganik talks about her work with Habitable and discusses […]
June 7, 2024
Josh Talberg talks about his role at JLL, why he is reserving some of his nerves[…]
May 31, 2024
Company founders Kent and Brian Roers talk about the company’s history, the Pr[…]
May 24, 2024
Rebecca Noecker, who chairs the Housing and Redevelopment Authority for St. Paul[…]
May 17, 2024
Ryan Safety Director John Gaddini talks about why drug overdoses are on the rise[…]
May 10, 2024
Sign up for your daily digest of Minnesota News.
See the full list of events here
Lakeville Council OKs 64-unit apartment and townhouse development
6/21/2024
Q&A: LHB’s Carter talks about career journey, sustainable design
6/21/2024
Ramsey County plans for Rice Creek Commons infrastructure work
6/20/2024
Rental townhouses clear hurdle in Rochester
6/20/2024
Inside Rosemount’s housing and industrial building boom
6/19/2024
The Lakeville City Council approved a Planned Unit Development on Monday for a project that will bui[…]
Minnesota architect Rick Carter talks about his career journey, development of the B3 guidelines and[…]
Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell in May for the third straight month as rising mortgage […]
The bridge is part of a federal highway project to connect Iquitos, in Peru’s northeast, to the El E[…]
Crews will start running test piles at the site of The Edison in downtown Milwaukee, as the August c[…]
A state worker safety board approved standards that would require employers to protect workers from […]
Barrett Lo Visionary Development on Tuesday announced new renderings of its planned mixed-use develo[…]
High housing costs on Martha’s Vineyard are forcing many regular workers to leave and are threatenin[…]
Newly published findings show that under the new EPA standard, potentially harmful lead exposure fro[…]
Despite coming up short with a funding request at the legislature this year, Ramsey County is still […]
Finance & Commerce announces Top Projects of 2023
5/9/2024
Earth Day 2024
4/24/2024
Top Women in Construction 2024
3/11/2024
Proud to highlight female business leadership for International Women’s Da[…]
3/8/2024
Beyond the Skyline is a podcast and video interview about economic development, real estate and construction in Minnesota.
Listen here
Finance & Commerce provides news, analysis and commentary on Minnesota business. We are the only independent daily newspaper dedicated to business reporting.
Get our free e-alerts & breaking news notifications!
Subscribe for access to the latest digital and special editions.
© 2024 BridgeTower Media. All rights reserved.
Use of this website is subject to its Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell My Info/Cookie Policy