Summary
Corey Squire and Amy Donohue join Evan Troxel and Candace Kitchen to talk about how Bora Architecture & Interiors turned sustainability from a rotating champion’s cause into a named, firm-wide default: climate, health, and equity. They dig into the “Bora Perfect Project,” why window wall ratio and orientation matter more than any energy model, why mass timber is the firm’s starting assumption rather than an exception, and the moment a young intern spoke up in a leadership meeting to stop a project from drifting off its own goals.
This episode is especially relevant for architects and firm leaders who keep hearing “we don’t have the budget for sustainability” and want a sharper answer than a pitch deck. Corey and Amy make the case that sustainability is a communication challenge, not a technical or computational one, and walk through exactly how naming your values changes hiring, client conversations, and what actually survives value engineering.
- Getting sustainability ideas into actual projects: the Bora Perfect Project (climate, health, equity)
- Window wall ratio and orientation as the real levers, not energy optimization
- Naming values to change hiring, recruiting, and client conversations
Corey Squire
AIA
Corey is Sustainability Director at Bora Architecture & Interior in Portland Oregon, and a member of the AIA’s Strategic Council. He lectures nationally on a range of sustainability-related topics and was a creator of AIA Framework for Design Excellence, a resource thatʼs actively redefining excellence in the built environment. Corey is the author of the recently published book, People, Planet, Design: A Practical Guide to Realizing Architectureʼs Potential.
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Amy Donohue
AIA, LFA, NOMA
A Principal with Bora Architecture & Interiors, Amy Donohue has thirty years of experience designing spaces for education and the arts on university campuses across the country. She holds a Bachelor of Design in Architecture from the University of Florida (ʼ94) and a Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University (’01). Amy was an assistant design instructor at Princeton University and adjunct professor for architectural design at the University of Oregon (2001-2007). From 2003 to 2010, she was actively involved with the Board of Trustees for the Oregon College of Art & Craft, serving as Chair of the Board in 2009. Since June 2014, Amy has been a member of the Board of Directors for Literary Arts and currently serves as Chair.
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