Michelle Amt on storytelling, improv, and reinventing the world

Architect Michelle Amt is Director of Sustainability at VMDO Architects and previously worked at William McDonough + Partners. She is serving on the jury for the AIA COTE Top Ten Awards in 2021, and cites that program with merging design with high performance in a way that no other does. Michelle says she feels like she’s part of a movement within an industry. The industry is baseline, championing things that we should all be doing whereas the movement is trying to make a much bigger change. “Let’s not lose the sense that the world can be reinvented,” she says. “When COVID-19 hit, it made us all think about what we really needed, what was meaningful, and how things could change. There has been suffering, too, but we did shift quickly. The planet mobilized for a solution. That could work for climate, too.”