Interview with Maude Pintal of Ædifica

​Maude Pintal is a Canadian and sustainability expert, currently serving as Director of Sustainable Development and partner at Ædifica, a Montreal-based architecture and design firm. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Interior Design from the Université de Montréal and is accredited as a LEED BD+C and WELL AP professional. Since joining Ædifica in 2009, Maude has been instrumental in integrating sustainable design principles into various architectural projects, emphasizing health, wellness, and environmental responsibility. Notably, she contributed to Le Huppé, Canada’s first residential building to achieve Gold-level WELL certification, highlighting her commitment to creating healthy living environments. Maude is also active in promoting sustainable practices through educational outreach and participation in Quebec’s green building committees.

What inspires you?

The human being. It’s at the heart of what we do. We design living spaces for the individual to meet specific needs and provide a healthy, sustainable environment. We work hard to reduce the environmental impact that the construction of new projects has on the planet, in order to preserve it and ensure a future for generations to come. I like to try and find the best strategies in terms of sustainability, health, and well-being, to always push my thinking further on how we can have a positive impact on the environment and the well-being of the people who will occupy the projects we design and build.

What drives your passion for sustainable design?

Ever since I left school, I’ve always had an interest in sustainable design, but it seemed a little abstract to me because, at the time, it wasn’t covered in university curricula and there were still few tools to guide us through the whole process. Once on the job market, where we understood a little more about the impact of our work on the environment, I wanted to find out more about what could be done to combine design and sustainability. It’s a practice that’s constantly evolving, and the strategies used 15 years ago are not at all the same as they are today, and will continue to change. That’s what’s so exciting and what motivates me to want to continue to be involved in this constant evolution so as to have a real impact on tomorrow’s built environment.

How has your background in interior design influenced your sustainability projects?

My training in interior design gives me a good understanding of customer needs, especially for interior design projects, and a vision that combines the functionality of spaces with environmental performance. The choice of performance criteria for a project depends on a number of factors related to needs, occupants, operations and so on. A strategy may be easily applicable for one project, but completely useless for another.

Can you describe a sustainability challenge you’ve faced and how you addressed it?

When we talk about sustainable development, people often believe that it automatically comes with additional costs in a project, which is not true. It is possible to create a high-performance, sustainable project by integrating high-performance, low-cost and easy-to-operate strategies. This type of approach also offers multiple benefits for company managers: reduced operating costs, higher employee productivity, lower absenteeism, happy employees who stay with the company longer, etc. Simple solutions are often the most effective and least costly, and that’s what we try to communicate to our customers.

How do you integrate wellness into your architectural projects?

Particularly since COVID, where we realized the extent to which indoor environments have a significant impact on the health and well-being of occupants, and knowing that we spend over 90% of our time indoors, integrating health and well-being strategies into our projects is now essential. We draw on recognized certification systems such as LEED, WELL, Fitwel, Living Building Challenge, to identify the strategies that are most relevant to the type of project and that will have the most significant impact. We organize collaborative work meetings that bring together all project stakeholders: customer, future occupants (employees, human resources, IT, etc.), architects, designers, engineers, acousticians, ergonomists, etc., to fully understand the needs, issues and best solutions for designing a project that will meet our targeted performance objectives.

What trends in sustainable materials are you excited about?

Material transparency. With the advent of LEEDv4 a few years ago, manufacturers were required to provide, among other things, Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), Health Product Declaration (HPD), which obliged them to declare several pieces of information about the ingredients in their product, their manufacturing process and the impact this may have on health. In 2017, with Bâtiment Durable du Québec (a multidisciplinary group of players dedicated to accelerating the ecological transition in Quebec with which we’ve been working closely for a long time) we took part in an initiative bringing together several other architectural firms to raise awareness among major manufacturers to be more responsible and transparent about the components of their product. This is something that’s particularly close to my heart, since it’s the products WE specify that have a major impact on the health and well-being of future occupants.

What fuels your creativity when working on new projects?

New challenges and how we can create living environments that have a positive impact on people.

What inspires you to teach the next generation about sustainability?

As a new mother, it’s important for me to share my knowledge so that the next generation is aware of the current reality of the impact a project can have on the environment, our planet and people’s health. It’s still possible to do better to try and correct our planet’s ill-treatment and create projects that will have a long-term impact while remaining resilient.

What advice would you give to young architects interested in sustainable design?

Prioritize the occupant when designing a project, and don’t always try to innovate with strategies that can sometimes be very complex and won’t always add value to the project. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas. It’s by communicating with other stakeholders that the best ideas are born.