Tavkar framed the sustainability challenge around risk. There are the physical risks of climate change, which demand robustness and adaptability; the transition risks, which show up as the embodied carbon of façade systems; and the geopolitical risks, local supply chains, reparability and circularity. It is a useful lens for a program manager, because it turns sustainability into things that can be tracked across many separate designs.

On King Salman International Airport, the question was how to meet the requirements and still land a net-zero-carbon-ready design. Non-combustible insulation went in everywhere, and the interesting work was in the trade-offs: control towers, for instance, can’t carry high shading coefficients, so the balance has to be found elsewhere, in the roof and wall systems, and in higher-U-value glass where it can be afforded. The design was also readied for building-integrated photovoltaics.

Expo 2020 Dubai was the other case, and here Jacobs’ role was explicitly that of program managers rather than designers of each pavilion, setting sustainability and façade KPIs that every designer had to meet. The UAE pavilion was the memorable example, with integrated solar PV shaped like the wings of a falcon.

The lesson, from the program manager’s seat, is that on a portfolio this size sustainability is delivered less by any single clever façade than by the KPIs and decisions held consistently across dozens of separate teams.