Book Discussion on Climate Optimism with Lindsey Wikstrom & Sierra Bainbridge

"Is optimism the most radical climate tool we have?"

This conversation brings together architects Lindsey Wikstrom and Sierra Bainbridge, designers, thinkers, and authors who are redefining public space through regeneration, material experimentation, and ecological imagination. Through a discussion of their current thinking and respective books, together Wikstrom and Bainbridge will explore how design can move beyond crisis narratives to cultivate resilience, care, and the possibility of flourishing.

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Sierra Bainbridge and Alan Ricks are with MASS, a design firm that focuses on creating spaces that foster human flourishing while considering the needs of the environment. Their work spans a variety of sectors, including education, healthcare, and conservation, with a commitment to using architecture as a force for positive change.

Seeking Abundance: Design, Ecology and a Flourishing Planet, forthcoming in December 2025, explores regenerative design as a way of building that heals our planet and our communities by halting biodiversity loss, reversing climate change, and improving social equity. Over the last decade, the nonprofit design practice MASS has proven that we can yield positive social, environmental, and economic results through a series of projects in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Seeking Abundance argues for reducing the harm our building activities wage in our environments and that we can--and must--help people and the planet thrive together. The proof? MASS' projects represent a coherent and replicable philosophy that responds to local ecologies and transforms lives. This groundbreaking new book, co-edited by Sierra Bainbridge and Alan Ricks, examines how the power of multidisciplinary collaboration, regenerative practices, and community engagement can actively contribute to a healthier, more harmonious world.

Lindsey Wikstrom is an architect and author, known for advancing regenerative approaches to design, with a focus on material innovation, biodiversity, and non-extractive processes. She is the Founding Principal of Mattaforma, leading the design of all projects big and small, public and private. Lindsey is also the author of Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures (Routledge, 2023), a book that situates architecture within living forest systems and argues for more just and ecological building practices. Through both her studio and her scholarship, Lindsey advances the idea that architecture can be a choreography of care: designing not only for buildings, but for the interconnected flourishing of communities, landscapes, and planetary systems.

Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures positions the supply chain of mass timber as a design project, critiquing sourcing today and proposing a species-based methodology. It first interrogates why these relationships are difficult to cultivate across landscapes and industrial frameworks, and then identifies gaps that are preventing the transition towards a fully mass timber built environment. An era of renewable energy and renewable materials are slowly being phased into our built environment, but why is it taking so long to adopt? Using the tools of architecture as the site of inception, this series of essays and drawings positions designers as choreographers of carbon, transferring and trading between forest, factory, site and beyond. With a focus on species-driven decision making across all scales, the book recalibrates a designer's sensibility beyond singular buildings-as-objects towards a material flow, prompting future interpretations of the forest that have the potential to change the way the built environment is conceived. It will be an important read for any architect, urban designer or landscape architect working with timber, as well as students of architecture and design interested in the generative nature of materials.

Head Hi in the City is an Archtober pop up shop and program space at Center for Architecture spotlighting recently released architecture publications selected to celebrate the festival theme of Shared Spaces and a commitment to deepening our relationships with the places we inhabit. Featuring books and design objects for sale, as well as weekly events including book launches, talks, and the New York Architecture & Design Book Club gathering, Head Hi in the City is an extension of Head Hi, New York’s premiere architecture and design-focused bookstore and cultural organization bridging architecture, design, and art via projects, reading materials, and public programming.