Frederick Steiner advocates for a focus on regenerative design that is inspired by his mentor Ian McHarg.
“Sustainable is fine, it’s the word we have and know now,” says PennDesign Dean and Paley Professor Frederick Steiner, who was a landscape and regional planning student of McHarg’s at Penn back in the day. “But I don’t think it’s ambitious enough. We definitely have to be sustainable, indeed we should leave the world a better place for future generations, but I think we could go further to regenerative design—creating systems that, instead of taking energy, produce energy, and instead of taking life, give life.”