NEWH - Spring 2025 - 56

SUSTAINABILITY | POINT OF VIEW
A Sustainable Approach for 2025: Building on
the Architecture of the Past
By David Mahood and Erik Poole
As the new year begins, we all seek inspiration and motivation for making positive strides in our outlook and
performance. Lazily, we call these resolutions. Adopting measurable sustainability actions is more than a
yearly resolution, it is the identifiable vision for our future. Climate indicators have predicted that the global
average temperature for 2024 will reach 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This has long been the
established target limit for warming set at the Paris Accords. Understanding this watershed moment requires a reflection on what measures can be
taken by global corporations, in this case, IHG Hotels & Resorts.
Our NEWH Green Voice crew, led by Rachel Berkin, was joined at BDNY in November by a team from IHG for our annual Green Voice session. Their
presentation, Breathing New Life into Winston-Salem: Adaptive Reuse of Two IHG Hotels demonstrated a genuine appreciation for the spirit of the
original buildings as well as the challenge of modern sustainable practices. Their adaptive reuse of these older, but very distinct, historic buildings
is an intriguing sustainability challenge. They profiled two such IHG projects, both in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and both, coincidentally, iconic
buildings I had visited in the 1990s.
Erik Poole, Helen Bissell, and Bryan Easter, IHG; and moderator Rachel Berkin, Rockfon, during the
NEWH Green Voice panel at BDNY
Can historic properties like the Reynolds Building,
corporate headquarters of R.J. Reynolds Corporation for
over fifty years, or the Art Deco Pepper Building maintain
their past glamor and still look to the future as modern
Kimpton hotels? Listening to Erik Poole, IHG Regional
Director, Sustainability, it was clear that converting an
existing structure was a good, cost-effective alternative
to ground-up construction, and it also opened up a world
of options to honor the local community and revitalize the
neighborhood. Downtown Winston-Salem is indicative of
many diverse, midsize cities grappling with modernization.
Cognizant of that, IHG wanted both properties to embrace
these challenges.
As is often stated, the most sustainable products are the
ones not made or minimally the ones made of necessity.
Reusing buildings and products can support this theory
if they are deeply conceived in sustainability. I often
ask clients if they have exhausted the larger question
of why? If that is addressed satisfactorily, it usually is a more focused task ahead. And to a larger extent, that is the task for all of us in 2025 as we
inhabit a world stretched thin. The careful balance between conservation and consumption will require us to be both resource responsible and
creative. Repurposing and reapplying existing buildings and materials is a sustainable alternative to excess and unneeded development, and one that
demonstrates a path to the future without losing the sights of the past.
David Mahood, Olive Designs, LLC, LEED AP, is a sustainability consultant and strategist, author, NEWH College of Fellows.
Erik Poole, AIA / LEED AP, is a Regional Director, Sustainability within the Americas region of IHG Hotels & Resorts who works on executing and
implementing decarbonization strategies within the IHG estate. He resides in Atlanta.
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NEWH - Spring 2025

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