Mission Statement

Low Heat is a lab whose members engage in research, speculative design, and experimentation in the built environment. Our members represent the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and ecology. We are united by our commitment to healthy building materials with low embodied energy and low potential to pollute. We combine today’s technologies with traditional approaches to craft to explore these materials.

Low Heat’s primary goals are to open professional and citizen discourse and to disseminate well-researched information. Our work joins larger conversations about the role of “clean economies” in climate change. We are advocates for architecture that respects and responds to America’s ecological and cultural diversity. Washington, DC is the geographic epi-center for the lab’s work; however, many projects that the lab takes on expand our radius further afield into the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond.


Who We Are

Founding Members:
Jack Becker, RA: Principal, Becker Linn Design
Andrew Linn: Lecturer, Virginia Tech University; Principal, Becker Linn Design
Jana VanderGoot, RA: Associate Professor, University of Maryland; Principal, VanderGootEzban Studio

Institutional Partners:
National Center for Smart Growth, http://www.umdsmartgrowth.org/