Pop Star: Vivian Loftness

To say that Vivian Loftness, Professor at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon, has been shaped by the world is a bit of an understatement.  Born in Stockholm, (her father was in the Foreign Service), she spent her formative years in L.A. and Paris and attended public high school just outside Washington, D.C.  After a combined bachelor/masters program at M.I.T., she received a Rotary scholarship to study in Finland, a country where architecture is the most esteemed profession. 

Returning to Washington, D.C., she joined the AIA Research Corp. to work on residential energy and environmental issues, did a stint in New York City and then headed to Athens, Greece to build a solar village from the ground up.  Love brought her to Pittsburgh in 1981, where she married longtime beau Volker Hartkopf, who was already a professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Architecture.  Loftness joined the faculty in an adjunct capacity and promptly took a gig with Public Works Canada to study why energy-efficient buildings put up in the 1970s were failing a decade later.

"I'm entrenched in this notion of total building performance," she says.

Returning to Pittsburgh full time in 1984, Loftness was head of the School of Architecture for ten years and still teaches the core curriculum to both undergrad and grad students.  In her ongoing role as researcher, she is focused on three areas, including  High-Performance Buildings and how offices, schools and hospitals can be built to be more effective.  Hand-in-hand with that is the health and productivity impact of good and bad buildings and why it matters. 

Factors such as adult-onset asthma can be caused by poor ventilation and materials, the lack of proper maintenance budgets and, according to Loftness, "this notion of first cost/least cost decision-making on the product we own the longest is problematic.  We must get the mindset to shift."

The area of study nearest and dearest to her heart is access to nature in buildings.  We need to let nature provide free heating and cooling, she says, a trend she dubs "environmental coasting."  A subset of this work is the Intelligent Workplace, a living laboratory where products and techniques are constantly being modified.  "This is a way in which to learn and innovate in architecture," says Loftness.  "We spend too much time on paper.  We need to build, test, re-build,engineer – an iterative, lab-based learning approach.  This will be critical to the next generation, to get them away from book-based learning and back to the sciences.  Every school being renovated or built should be a living laboratory." 

As proof, she cites the Edible Schoolyards seen in California schools where students are planting and nurturing enough food to run their own farmers market.  "Pittsburgh needs the creative juices to flow," Loftness continues.  "This is the birthplace of invention and it can be that again if we catch kids young."

This child of the world loves that her adopted city, Pittsburgh, is a river city.  "We have beautifully engineered bridges and miles of riverfront," says Loftness.  "The folks at Riverlife are awesome!"  She also gives a shoutout to our ethnic neighborhoods and notes that while, architecturally speaking, we're not New York or Chicago, Pittsburgh has its share of interesting 20th-century buildings led by the U.S. Steel Tower.  She is also fond of Alcoa's old and new headquarters and holds a special place for the H. H. Richardson-designed Allegheny County Courthouse. 

What Loftness does take issue with is the sprawl that is taking over southwestern Pennsylvania.  "We're losing population in the city and county core and moving it to greenfields that are turning into housing, malls and office parks.  Our infrastructure isn't built for sprawl – we can't even fill the potholes we've got!  You cannot sustain an increase in land mass without an increase in population."  As a possible solution, Loftness points to the urban growth boundary created in Portland, Oregon to keep sprawl in check.

For better or worse, Loftness is sticking with Pittsburgh.  "It's a great city," she says.  "I love being here."

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Photographs copyright Brian Cohen