Living Future Community: October 2025 Roundtable | Circularity and Social Impact: Non-Extractive Economies

The October Living Future Roundtable conversation focused on how the potential prioritization of repair and preservation paired with the use of locally available natural resources are a key part of the essential recipe for living in a less extractive way.

Subject matter experts Ace McArleton, Co-Founder of New Frameworks and author of The Natural Building Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to Integrative Design and Construction, and Lori Ferriss Co-Founder of the Built Buildings Lab, shared their experiences and perspectives on restoration as a sustainable practice and the use of natural materials in modern AEC projects. Conversation was guided by attendee questions voiced aloud or through chat. Questions answered by both subject matter experts with additional commentary from Community Leaders.

Creation as a social activity 
Community Leader Jim Newman started the conversation by asking the experts about how they conceptualize the process of building and creation as a social activity and why that is important. Much of the emphasis of the building process is focused on the completion of the build, the time after creation but before habitation. Design is elevated above stewardship. Both Ferriss and McArleton talked about the elevation of maintenance as a key component of preserving our built environment. Buildings and shared spaces need to be valued across time, not just at construction. People engage in relationships with buildings across their whole life cycle, so the whole life cycle has value. Preservation is integral to cyclical stewardship. AEC professionals often show little consideration for the people who live in and maintain the built environment. This lack of consideration can lead to worse outcomes for both people and the buildings themselves.

Natural Materials 
The overarching goal of design is the creation of beautiful, usable spaces, but also to think about the holistic impact of the work, while ensuring good long-term outcomes for the built environment. Materials play a crucial role in the creation of these spaces; they become the interfaces that building users interact with on a daily basis, and form much of the environmental footprint of the building process. Working with natural and native materials more strongly ties architecture to place and reduces the environmental footprint of the building process. People have used the natural materials around them for all of time. From the wood and mud Takienta houses of Togo and Benin to the bamboo Madhesi houses of Nepal, taking from the resources in the environment of a place ties culture and environment back into the building process. There is value in incorporating and using natural materials in the green building industry. 

In a risk averse industry like AEC, prioritization of new materials, technologies, and techniques can sometimes take the back burner, but all it takes is one person demonstrating that it can be done for change to begin. Ace’s company, New Frameworks, works to incorporate straw materials into the building process. The straw panels are created with materials easily and readily available in the Vermont landscape he calls home. There are materials that are local to everyone, no matter where they live or come from. By remembering how to use local resources, the green building community can foster better connection to place, reduced building footprint, and environmental longevity.

Ace McArleton — People as Priority 
McArleton was drawn to the AEC community because he aims to make beautiful things for people in ways that take care of the people doing the actual building, and prioritize the comfort of the people that use the environments he creates. He values comfort, safety, and inclusion of everyone involved with a project over the prestige or isolated “success” of the building as a creation removed from the humanity that utilizes it.  

Lori Ferriss — Preservation as Practice 
Growing up in Southern Louisiana, Ferriss spent time in historic Cajun buildings with strong ties to history, and a greater connection to the environment around them than many modern buildings. The work she does today straddles the line between preservation and design. Ferriss founded the Built Buildings Lab to highlight the gaps in data, in stories, and in policy that are preventing the current built environment from being a more central resource to modern efforts to green the built environment. She prioritizes a culture of repair, human comfort, and preservation of historical knowledge in her work. 

Conclusion
Relationships with buildings should bring joy. People interact with the spaces, places, for so much of their lives that it should add to their lives and personal capacities. Going forward, Ferriss and McArleton urge the green building community to focus on storytelling as a mechanism for implementing these practices. The data supports restoration and preservation, but the data cannot stand alone. The narrative is how relationships are built, and relationships are how change is initiated to promote a greater culture of maintenance, preservation, and continuous care of the built environment.