Regenerative Design: Embracing a New/Old Mindset

As regenerative design continues to gain momentum across the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, it is often presented as a new paradigm for proactively addressing climate change by design. However, many of its core principles are based on knowledge, culture, and practices built over millennia.

This program explores how regenerative design builds upon enduring lessons from passive design, vernacular architecture, Indigenous knowledge, and systems thinking that have long worked in harmony with local climates, ecosystems, and available resources. Panelists will examine how an understanding of natural flows—of energy, water, materials, and living systems—can reshape contemporary practice, moving beyond efficiency and impact reduction toward restoring ecological and brain health, as well as community regeneration. By reconnecting with these time-tested principles through the lens of today's climate challenges, attendees will discover how regenerative design represents not a departure from architectural tradition, but a return to a more holistic, place-based way of thinking about the built environment.