Discovering a Passion for Sustainable Architecture

A Summer Discovery Program on Campus Hooked Efrie Escott, M.Arch ’14, on Architecture, and Taubman College Set her on the Path for Success

Most Taubman College students and graduates are probably familiar with Tally, a life cycle assessment (LCA) tool that enables architects to calculate the environmental impacts of building material selections while they are designing structures using Revit software.

What many may not realize, however, is that one of their former classmates, Efrie Escott, M.Arch ’14, was instrumental in the development and rollout of this best-in-class LCA product created by KieranTimberlake, a Philadelphia-based architecture, planning, and research firm.

As a graduate student at Taubman College, Escott landed a summer internship at KieranTimberlake with some help from one of her professors, the late-Douglas Kelbaugh, who was Professor of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning and dean of the College.

“Professor Kelbaugh said the company would be a good fit for me and offered to reach out and make the connection,” Escott recalls. “I was part of the five-person core team that developed Tally.”

Escott worked on building the environmental database for Tally during her research internship with the company. After completing her graduate work in 2014, she was hired as a full-time researcher and continued to support the development of the tool. Escott also oversaw user education and workflow integration of Tally at other firms worldwide.

In 2017, she volunteered to go to Kigali, Rwanda, where she taught the employees of the nonprofit MASS Design Group the nuts and bolts of utilizing Tally and Revit software to evaluate the environmental impacts of their building designs. The three-week overseas experience opened her eyes to other global opportunities.

“We worked in MASS’s headquarters in Kigali, but on weekends, company officials took us to see other parts of the country,” Escott recalls. “It was gorgeous.”

During her nine-year stint with KieranTimberlake, she presented hundreds of talks on integrating life-cycle thinking into design, published multiple peer-reviewed articles, and represented the company at major conferences, including as keynote at the 2020 International Living Future Institute’s Zero Carbon Conference.

Escott’s outstanding contributions won her successive promotions at KieranTimberlake, which named her associate in 2019 and principal in 2022.

In 2023, she started a new chapter in her professional career. On January 1, Escott joined Schneider Electric, a French multinational corporation specializing in digital automation and energy management. Later in the year, she received the 2023 Young Architects Award from AIA in recognition of her thought leadership on new groundbreaking methods and her commitment to environmental-impact transparency.

 In Escott’s new position as decarbonization technical program leader at Schneider Electric, she continues to support innovations in architecture, industrial ecology, and construction that advance the sustainability of the built environment.

“My current job is to help buildings globally meet the performance target requirements for carbon reduction in accordance with science-based targets of climate change,” she explains.

Escott’s keen desire to merge her passions for design and environmental advocacy in her pursuit of architecture was nurtured during her four years of graduate study at Taubman College, which shaped the trajectory of her professional career.

Embracing Architecture Early On

Reflecting on her early embrace of architecture, Escott exclaims: “This is an awesome U-M story.”

As a high school student in Milwaukee, she enrolled in U-M’s “Summer Discovery.” The highly popular, pre-college, academic enrichment program brings prospective students to campus where they can take a variety of courses taught by university instructors across multiple disciplines.  

When the art class Escott signed up for turned out to be full, she took an architecture course instead. It proved to be one of the best decisions in her life.

“I loved architecture from day one!” Escott recalls. “I fell in love with the design process and the way architecture encourages you to think about space and light. From that point on, I planned on studying architecture in college.”

Escott took a slight detour to Yale University to earn an undergraduate degree in Architecture and a master’s degree in Urban Ecology before circling back to U-M in 2011 to pursue her master’s degree in Architecture at Taubman College.

“Several things attracted me to the college,” Escott explains. “Its strength in research. Its foundation in making things. And its emphasis on openness to interdisciplinary collaboration.”

The university’s worldwide reputation as a leading research institution and the prominence of its top-ranked School for Environment and Sustainability also factored heavily in Escott’s decision to do her graduate studies on the Ann Arbor campus. 

“I had a lot of phenomenal professors, probably 15 or 20 of them,” she recalls. “Lars Gräbner, Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture, encouraged me to bring the lenses of ecology and environmental sciences into the design studio and integrate them into my work. That was foundational in terms of starting to merge these areas of interest and expertise I had been developing over time into a single point.”

The Research Through Making program taught by Steven Mankouche, Professor of Architecture, resonated with Escott’s affinity for constructing things in a very physical way. In the ecology-based architecture course led by Jen Maigret, Professor of Architecture, Escott learned systems-based thinking, which provided a helpful framework for integrating the two fields of architecture and environmental science into one. 

“I was a graduate student instructor for Professor Kelbaugh for three years, and he set me on the path to teaching,” says Escott, who now teaches a course at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is an adjunct professor. 

Despite the demands of work and family life, Escott makes time to return to the Ann Arbor campus, where she gives guest lectures and mentors students. In 2024, she received Taubman College’s Outstanding Recent Graduate Award.

“My best advice to today’s students is to pursue what you are passionate about,” Escott concludes.

— Claudia Capos