When most people think of climate change, they think of carbon and carcinogens and chaos. When Craig Applegath thinks of climate change, though, he thinks of design.

Craig is an award-winning architect, a visionary urban designer, and one of the most forward-thinking voices in the regenerative city planning movement. But this isn’t just about cities. Craig Applegath makes the future feel possible again—for everyone.

He’s not just imagining better buildings—he’s imagining better futures. Ones that are resilient, regenerative, and deeply human. Craig invites us to look at the built world all around us—our cities, homes, schools, and shared spaces—and ask: Are these structures truly designed for the future? The way we’ve been constructing buildings for the past century isn’t going to carry us forward in a world with changing and unpredictable weather patterns; we could be doing it far better. 

His ideas are bold, but not lofty. They are grounded in what we know and what we can do today, with an eye fixed on what’s just over the horizon. As he says, he’s been “curious since day one about what life could look like 10 or 20 years from now,” and his work helps the rest of us imagine that too.

Craig is a rare kind of thinker who can help us feel invited into the future, not intimidated by it.

From Dread and Despair to Designing a Future that Lasts

Much of this conversation on the Conspiracy of Goodness podcast circled around one important truth: 

We’ve designed our way into many of the problems we’re facing… and we can design our way back out.

That’s not just optimistic thinking—it’s practical, evidence-based, and already in motion.

“Design is never neutral. Every building either contributes to a livable future… or takes us further from one.”

Craig talks frankly about what he calls “super-wicked problems” like climate change—complex systems where the very people trying to solve the problem are also contributing to it. Instead of falling into despair, he anchors his work in one of the most hopeful stories ever told: the tale of a man walking a beach, throwing starfish back into the ocean one at a time. 

When told it wouldn’t make a difference, the man tossed another starfish, and replied, “It made a difference to that one.”

For Craig, that’s not just a metaphor; it’s a mission.

The Buildings We Have… and the Ones We Deserve

One of Craig’s most eye-opening insights is that the buildings we live in today—especially in modern cities—were designed for a climate that no longer exists.

He explains it like this: in a standard 30-story condo, if the power goes out, there’s no elevator, no water pressure, and no air circulation—most units don’t even have operable windows. 

Compare that to a 300-year-old building in Spain with thick stone walls, openable shutters, and no dependence on power grids for basic human comfort; We’ve sacrificed resilience in the name of efficiency and profits. 

“We’ve forgotten how to build for future generations. Most buildings today are designed to last just long enough to pay off a mortgage—not to serve our grandchildren.”

There’s good news, though: we can design for the world that’s coming; in fact, some of the best answers can be found by looking back. Pre-industrial buildings were inherently sustainable—not because they were trying to be, but simply because they were crafted with local, durable materials and made to last generations.

So what if we brought that wisdom back?

The Rise of Mass Timber and Embodied Carbon

A cornerstone of Craig’s future-forward vision is mass timber—an innovative building material made by gluing small, often waste-bound pieces of wood together into beams, columns, and panels that are literally as strong as steel (and much more sustainable).

Mass timber buildings:

• Store carbon instead of emitting it
  
• Require less energy to manufacture
  
• Create interior spaces that feel…better.
  

(Yes—there’s neuroscience behind that. We actually feel better surrounded by natural materials like wood and stone. Mass timber isn’t just good for the planet; it’s good for our souls.)

Craig also helps us understand a powerful scientific concept: that of embodied vs. operational carbon. We’ve spent decades focused on making buildings more efficient—that is to say, making it so these buildings use less carbon in what they are made of and what it takes to sustain them. But what about the emissions it takes to build them in the first place?

Spoiler: many “green” buildings release more carbon upfront than they’ll save in 30 years.

Mass timber is part of the solution to this problem, and so is modular and prefabricated design—done with thoughtfulness, not shortcuts. 

Craig’s firm has even prototyped a 105-story hybrid timber tower that caught the attention of Fast Company, winning their award for Most Innovative Design Concept. And no, it’s not theoretical. They built it, tested it, and proved it could be real.

Designing for Adaptation—The ‘Thousand-Year Building’

Craig Applegath also invites us to think about the importance of climate adaptation: While the conversation around climate change often focuses on preventing damage, he points out that at this point, we’ve already crossed certain thresholds that demand new thinking. Cities need to withstand more heat, more flooding, and more powerful and frequent storms—and our buildings must be ready.

Adaptation isn’t all sandbags and setbacks, though. Craig is also reimagining how collaboration, especially with Indigenous partners, can guide the way forward. In one celebrated project, his team used the Mi’kmaq concept of Two-Eyed Seeing—a blending of Indigenous and Western worldviews—to design a stunning, sustainable educational facility. The building’s facade is clad in aluminum panels shaped like fish scales: a beautiful, organic form, born from deep listening and shared imagination.

“Collaboration is where innovation begins. Especially when we listen to people who’ve been solving problems differently for centuries.”

Applegath is also quick to credit diversity in design thinking circles as a source of innovation—not just a box that needs to be checked. When we bring together people from different cultural lenses, professions, and lived experiences, conversations diversify, and the ideas they create get better. We don’t just build differently—we build for everyone.

One of Craig’s most poetic contributions is his idea of a “thousand-year building.” It sounds almost mythical, but it’s rooted in logic: what if we designed buildings that could evolve and adapt over centuries, not just mere decades? What if the walls stayed strong while the interiors transformed over time, depending on what the community needed?

It’s the opposite of our current throwaway model, and it’s a blueprint for deep sustainability—not just environmental, but cultural.

What Craig Wants Us to Know

As we closed our conversation, I asked Craig the question I often ask guests: what do you wish people knew?

His answer was as generous as the rest of the interview:

“I wish people understood how serious the challenges of climate change are—and how mitigation and adaptation are both essential and possible. We are incredibly innovative creatures. If we work together—with honesty, imagination, and a sense of shared purpose—we can absolutely design our way into a future that’s better for everyone.”

Craig Applegath is designing more than buildings; he’s designing possibilities, and if more of us join that movement—choosing courage over willful blindness—we just might build a future our grandchildren will thank us for.

So tune in to the full conversation: share it; talk about it at dinner; maybe even contact local representatives and see if it’s something they can try to encourage in future building projects in your area. And the next time someone says, “It’s all falling apart,” tell them about mass timber, or the 1,000-year building, or fish-scale facades that shimmer with hope—then remind them what Craig reminds us all:

We already have the tools. We already have the vision. Now, we just need the will to build what’s next.

• Book: Abundance by Ezra Kline
• Book: Electrify by Saul Griffith
• Book: Not Too Late by Rebecca Solnit
• CoG Episode #166: Unlearning Modern Expectations with an Indigenous Mindset with Connor Ryan

• 00:00 – Intro & Welcome
• 04:50 – Defining Wicked and Super Wicked Problems
• 06:12 – Willful Blindness and Climate Change
• 08:29 – Predictable Problems with Modern Building Design
• 22:34 – The Problem with Building Lifespans
• 32:55 – Break
• 36:03 – Mass Timber Innovations and Benefits
• 41:26 – Biophilia and Emotional Impact of Wood
• 49:45 – Prefabrication and Modular Design
• 54:04 – Fire Safety and Mass Timber
• 56:50 – Designing for Climate Adaptation and Prototyping
• 1:04:32 – Collaborative Design and Indigenous Knowledge
• 1:11:05 – The Thousand Year Building Concept
• 1:24:08 – Climate Change and Urban Planning
• 1:29:00 – Closing