In this interview, Lloyd Alter speaks about the state of architectural education and what we need to do as educators, architects, homeowners, and citizens to achieve the drastic reductions in carbon needed to avoid climate catastrophe.

Lloyd Alter has been an architect, builder, developer, inventor, professor, public speaker, and author. He has a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Toronto, where he received the Alpha Rho Chi Medal. He was admitted to the Ontario Association of Architects in 1979 and is an adjunct professor of sustainable design at Toronto Metropolitan University. A former builder of prefab housing and a tiny-house pioneer, Alter is a passionate advocate of “radical sufficiency”—the belief that we use too much space, too much land, too much food, too much fuel, and too much money, and that the key to sustainability is simply to use less.

"I don’t think the building industry has changed all that much. The building industry mostly does what the building code tells it to do. When I look at production housing and all the renovations and custom houses that are being built, the industry still mostly doesn’t care at all. I think that is a failure. We’ve seen certain jurisdictions crank up the code, like British Columbia, but everywhere else it’s the same old stuff. I don’t know if there have been drastic changes in the housing industry; it’s all incremental. And our problem is that we can’t do incremental anymore. We have to change what we’re doing immediately."