About the same time the United Nations Climate Change Conference was taking place in Copenhagen in December, Stan Wrzeski, LEED AP, joined HOK’s Sustainability Consulting group as director of carbon and climate action. Intrigued by Stan’s title and equally unique resume, I gave him a call in HOK’s San Francisco office, where he’s based, to ask “Five Questions.”

1. You are the director of carbon and climate action at HOK, and your bio says you will be “identifying and pursuing carbon market opportunities.” What does this mean?

SW: I think it means HOK is drawing a much bigger circle around what we do. The word “carbon” is in there because we are dealing with greenhouse gas emissions. That conversation typically revolves around the notion of carbon equivalents. “Climate action” means doing something about it. It’s no longer about climate change—it’s about action.

I believe we’ll discover that our carbon market opportunities aren’t new ones. Rather, we’ll overlay carbon analysis on our current core activities, whether it’s strategic consulting, planning or design. This is an opportunity to both inform and build on what HOK already does. What will be different is that it will be extended across the full life of the environments we create. And therein lies the business opportunity.

Since we create environments that result from an interaction between people and the things we design—be they buildings, infrastructure, vehicles or any other design artifact—we must attend to both sides of the equation. It’s not enough to design or retrofit a single building that has the capacity to reduce emissions or energy use. The reductions are realized through policies, practices and, ultimately, people. Because buildings don’t generate emissions—people do.

And it’s not just about the built environment. We need to help clients address the supporting natural and infrastructure environments, along with the operating and financial environments that are the basis for each enterprise.

I think the business opportunity is for us to position ourselves as lifelong stewards of our clients’ environments. That’s where we bring value. It’s also where our clients achieve value.

2. What will you be doing at HOK?

SW: My role at HOK is to build a climate action perspective into our existing and evolving infrastructure. As you might imagine, it’s a big endeavor. So I’d like to use my new home at HOK San Francisco as a “test bed” to develop approaches that may be replicated firm-wide.

As part of the effort, I hope to develop HOK University tools and WebEx training sessions. But I’m a big fan of learn-by-doing, so I want to create ongoing opportunities to share what we’re doing with folks from other offices.

I come from a background in academe, and have a strong affinity for the young leaders being cultivated at HOK. They are my constituency. I want to help build new skills and paradigms so they can lead us into the future.

Though I am a Corporate employee, I asked to be based in San Francisco because, in my mind, the California market is one of the world’s best sustainable markets. It is the most progressive and aggressive in terms of the combination of public policies and environmental settings. It has the potential links to Asia, where climate action will become more and more critical.

3. You took a long, winding road to HOK. Can you take me through your path?

SW: I was a music major. I had a scholarship to study theory of composition and studied tuba with the great Arnold Jacobs of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which at the time had the world’s greatest brass section. I was planning to be a composer. Vietnam intervened, and made me grow up way too fast. But I came back changed, compelled to make the world a better place.

I got a pre-law bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spent my 20s working as a legislative staffer. I got involved in politics, did some community organizing and founded a citywide development corporation in Madison, Wisconsin. That was my decade of social advocacy in the public sector.

During my 30s, I ran a venture capital pool that funded and helped underwrite energy-related businesses, then set up my own consulting and contracting business providing state-of-the-art energy conservation services. Those were the early days of “unintended consequences.” First we made buildings tighter, then we made money remediating the resulting indoor air quality problems. It was a cautionary tale about who bears the risk of new ideas.

When I was 39, I got invited to join the University of Minnesota’s Building Research Center, where I did some exciting work in Siberia—not unlike Minnesota in winter—just when the Soviet Union was falling apart.

Thereafter, I did my graduate work with the interdisciplinary Building Technology Group at MIT. I loved academe, so I sold my business and paid cash for my education.

It was the experience of a lifetime. I rowed on the Charles River twice a day, then co-taught courses with brilliant people half my age. There’s nothing quite like going back to school in the middle of your career, when you know what life is about. Education, like love, is wasted on the young.

For the next 20 years, I was an Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow in architecture and urban planning programs at the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin and the Savannah College of Art and Design. I packaged public/private partnerships that explored innovative approaches to sustainable communities, mostly large-scale projects in central-city neighborhoods that involved state-of-the-art technologies.

Two years ago, I took a break from academe to join Affiliated Engineers, Inc., in Madison as Senior Sustainability Planner and Project Manager. I worked with Cornell University and several other schools to develop climate action plans detailing paths to achieve carbon neutrality.

Over my career I’ve spent the bulk of my time finding opportunity in the interstitial spaces among different disciplines—architecture, engineering, public policy, teaching and research—and sectors including public, private and academe.

In a world of vertical specialties, I have a horizontal perspective. That seems to fit with HOK’s broad, strategic and holistic perspective. I’m looking for the capstone experience of a career that has been one long theme with variations. Compelled to make the world a better place, I never stopped composing and orchestrating.

4. What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

SW: I live in Sausalito, one of America’s great sailing communities. I’m looking for slip space and trying to decide whether to ship my sailboat here from the Midwest or keep it on the Great Lakes where the fresh water is much gentler on the parts. She’s a 32-foot sloop that I restored, then single-handed through the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal and down the East Coast.

I must have an affinity for lost causes, as I’ve also saved seven buildings in my life. My parents were raised in the Depression and we always found satisfaction in “making do” with what we had. So a sustainable lifestyle flows easily for me… and makes room for a big life.

I chose where I live to create a simple commute. I walk or ride my folding bike five minutes to the ferry terminal in Sausalito. The 30-minute ferry ride passes by the Golden Gate Bridge and it’s 10 minutes to our office in the financial district. At night I do the same thing in return. It’s delightfully taciturn and peaceful… amplified in the evening by a shared bottle of wine among the regulars. I love my commute. How many people can say that?

I also love to bike, and Marin County has some great mountain bike trails. A couple of years ago, I set off to ride my folding bike 350 miles from a conference in Montreal to Ithaca, New York, to begin work on Cornell University’s Climate Action Plan. The “350” was symbolic of the 350-part per million concentration for atmospheric carbon dioxide needed to avoid global climate change. I made it 250 miles before getting a flat tire in the Adirondacks. I was picked up by two Unitarian women returning from a women’s writing retreat. They were heading back to Ithaca, where they rented rooms to students. I stayed at their home—for $35 a night—during my work at Cornell and Ithaca College that year. Serendipity is a core outcome of a life well-lived.

Regrettably, the fact that I did not quite ride the entire 350 miles to Ithaca foreshadowed Copenhagen: We haven’t quite figured out how to do what needs to be done.

5. What did happen in Copenhagen?

SW: Drift. But what didn’t happen will give us more time to develop the capacity to solve this challenge. Unfortunately, we tend to focus on crises rather than long-term, chronic problems.

Climate change will cycle in and out of the collective consciousness. But I fear that it will quickly be upstaged by water as the critical issue early in this century. The challenge for HOK is to develop the capacity to frame both climate action and water in a broader context. After all, water is part of the climate cycle.

We need to frame a holistic, integrated response that addresses our clients’ long-term strategic interests, rather than having it pop up later as the issue du jour. When we start dealing with the long-term institutional and built-environment needs of our clients, this creates a context in which we are framing these issues early, so the response is proactive rather than reactive.

6. I’ve used our allotted five questions but still don’t know how to pronounce your last name.

SW: The Polish “W” is pronounced like a “V” and the “Z” is like a Russian “ZH.” Rolling the “r” between the two is more than a western tongue can handle, so it is ZHEH-skee. It’s taking an extra three weeks to get my HOK business card because I had to add a pronunciation key.

When my grandparents came to the United States, the spelling of our name included three Zs and one vowel: “Wrzeszcz.” It would have made a great Scrabble word.

Make it easy: Just call me “Stan.”