Peter Busby Honorary Doctorate Citation, Ryerson University, Toronto

Mark Gorgolewski, Associate Professor, Department of Architectural Science:

Chancellor Chang, President Levy, Provost Shepard, Deans, esteemed colleagues, and representatives who join us on the stage, students, family members, and friends, honoured guests…

It is my great honour and privilege to deliver this citation for Peter Busby upon whom Ryerson is conferring the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa, our highest award. For many years Peter Busby has consistently distinguished himself as an articulate and passionate advocate for sustainable design and for the larger social responsibilities of the Architect. Primarily through his practice of and advocacy for sustainable design, he has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Canadian Architecture. Both his built work and his advocacy have been instrumental in bringing Green building to the forefront of Canadian architectural practice.

I think it is particularly appropriate that we at Ryerson are granting Peter Busby this degree today, as through his career he has clearly and explicitly embodied Ryerson's core institutional values by putting theory into practice, putting thought into action, and applying knowledge to the betterment of society. His influence can be seen in projects across Canada, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

As Founder Father of the Canada Green Building Council, and recently as its Chair, Peter Busby has been instrumental in stimulating change toward sustainable practices in what is one of the most conservative of industries. He has taken a leading role in education, lecturing and publishing widely on the subject of sustainable architecture. He is an exemplar to many students from various programs at Ryerson, not just from architecture, and from students around the world who are becoming aware of the imperative to work towards a sustainable built environment and who see his work as inspiration and as a way forward. His architectural practice, initially Busby+Associates Architects and more recently Busby Perkins+Will, has grown to be arguably Canada's or even North America's premier Green building practice. His building designs have put many others to shame by demonstrating how high quality architectural design can embrace the highest sustainable standards leading to stimulating architectural solutions that have minimum environmental impact.

As many of you may know, Ryerson has recently completed a major master planning exercise that has addressed how the University can enhance and expand the built environment that we occupy. This process has included sustainable design as one of the key areas of focus. I think it is particularly appropriate that we honour Peter Busby today, since his work offers us an inspiration and an example of how we at Ryerson can develop a built environment to become an exemplar campus of the future. And, after all, we have a responsibility as educators, to educate not just through the curriculum but through our buildings and the way we run our buildings to show an example of a campus of the future. Maybe soon Ryerson can boast a Busby designed building to demonstrate to our students Ryerson's commitment for a sustainable future. Furthermore, as we send our students out into the world where we expect the sustainability imperative will increasingly define their future activities, we can offer no better role model in the Canadian building industry to inspire our graduates than to look at the work and the advocacy of Peter Busby.

I would like to now call on Chancellor Chang, President Sheldon Levy and Peter Busby to the podium for the conferring of the degree.

Convocation Address from Peter Busby, Managing Director, Busby Perkins+Will:

Thank you very much, everyone, colleagues, graduates, families.

I am deeply honoured to stand before you and offer some thoughts about the future that shines so brightly for you. I grew up here in Toronto, as an immigrant, and so it's a very real pleasure to return to receive this honour today. We were immigrants here 50 years ago, the streets were paved with opportunity and my youth here in Toronto was wonderful. Today, I'm filled with optimism about your future.

Through the eyes of my young employees and my four children, three of whom are attending university at the moment, I have learned much about your priorities and values. Parenting is a profoundly two-way learning event as you will find. You feel a sense of purpose and determination to fix the environmental and social wrongs you find around you. You ask, why have we been born into a world where the air is filthy, where poor live on the street, where nature is receding, where food is scarce in a quarter of the world? How can it be that your parents left you with politicians that can't tell the time, let alone imagine your set of values? Where you are sure that the places you live and work in are poisoning you? The food you ingest is laced with toxins, yet to be discovered?

Let me tell you it didn't start out that way. 40 years ago I was sure my parents were idiots. We railed against the military industrial complex that controlled our lives; we watched daily reports of young men sacrificed on faraway fields for dubious reasons. We found freedom in love and music, rebellion and confrontation. We chose clothes and hair, music and lifestyles that were forcefully different, and we took to the streets. We would change the world, and for a while we did. Then, as you know only too well, we lost our way, our spirit and energy wavered, the necessity of employment intervened, we felt materialism. The eerie similarity of our early ambitions and yours in today's world strikes me every time I pick up a newspaper or engage in discussions with one of you. You are, after all, our children. Except today the stakes are bigger, far bigger. 40% of America has no health care insurance, 12% of her black men are incarcerated. Many Americans carry guns because they fear the world they have created. That fear extends to every border and every airport screening, every government building and every high school lock down, every newscast and every vision of the future.

Here in Canada we can't be so glib either. We have 10,000 civil servants in Ottawa toiling at native affairs and most of our first nation citizens are ill fed, ill housed, uneducated and angry. At us, right now. Every one of our politicians tells us they care about the environment, it is their number one priority, they have the answers, yet not a scrap of evidence suggests anything is changing. We have more policemen than ever, tougher drug laws than ever, more addicts and social injustice than ever. Canadians hold the number one or number two spot globally in water wasted, energy consumed, CO2 emitted and garbage created. The challenges you face are daunting. And time is running out. Since 1997 the polar ice cap has halved; in 10 years it will be gone. The Artic will absorb sunshine, not reflect it; the tundra will melt and release millions of years of stored methane. Desserts of the world will double in size, rising oceans will flood billions. Only the rich or the powerful will have energy. There will be another 200 nuclear power plants ticking away, haunting us with their futures. And it will be hot in Toronto, very hot.

Of the challenges ahead, there are three I would like to highlight for you.

The challenge of technical and scientific development. We have no idea what is in store for you. During my professional career, I experienced the first fax machines. Wow! Were they amazing! Then in 1982 a 64 kilobyte computer found its way onto my desk for the princely sum of $25,000. Then telephones you could take off the wall and use anywhere. Only 12 years ago, this internet system, I still don't really know how it works. For you, it is as related as air and breathing. The rate of technical and scientific development in your world is on an exponential change curve that holds so much promise and potential, if put to good uses, to solve our problems and poverty, not to make more efficient war.

The second challenge is the environment. Some of us have tried to make a dent in this one, but our legacy to you is appalling and getting worse. Can you develop lifestyles that don't depend on consumerism and values that don't reflect consumption? Can you find the right lens to filter the ever wily adverting media and superpose them with your own values? Is your dream home in Aurora or in downtown? Do you want a new car or a comfortable transit system? Do you want chemicals on your food crops or not? Do you want tar sands despite the pollution? Do you want to leave behind hundreds of spent nuclear power plants that glow in the dark for 10,000 years? I know the answers that you hold in your hearts to these questions and I am joyous. Take to the streets on this one, ladies and gentlemen. We need action now, not the platitudes politicians offer. Build a revolutionary movement and make it last, just as we failed to do so.

The third challenge is social justice and peace. With this too we have left you an overwhelming task. Your unprecedented levels of education, and your world of communication ease built around the internet, should be the tools you need to expose the tyrants, wrong doing, injustice and inequity in the world. Self confidence in your own opinions is evident whenever you choose action over indifference. You cannot afford to be indifferent. Develop tenacity and patience and your generation will leave the world a better place than you found it. You are lucky, you will all have jobs anywhere and any time you want them. Believe it or not that is only a recent phenomenon, even in Canada.

So how about now for aspirational suggestions, from me to you, as to how you might frame your success in life. First, give 20% of your time in your professional lives to public advocacy and public good. I have over the last 25 years, and this time has brought me more learning, joy, success, accomplishments, friends, colleagues, than any paying job I have ever held. And it has allowed me to make a difference in Canada with my life, a vow I placed on myself as a child walking on the shores of Lake Ontario, counting the millions of fish killed every spring by water pollution. Consider also life as a civil servant, it needs new blood and new ideas. Our cities, our governments, our healthcare and educational systems were designed in more generous times and have languished over the last 15 years as we have passed through regimes and leaders with other lesser values.

Choose a life and a career that reflects your values and aspirations. I wake up everyday, charged with energy to get at the piles of issues around me. 30 years on and I can't wait to get to the office, a conference, a classroom, a meeting or a design session that will hold my attention for the day. This morning I had a thoroughly engaging design session with some of you, working on the Solar Decathlon. It will stay with me for weeks. Be an expert, excel at whatever you do, be the best you can be at whatever your chosen passion. Expertise is actually a process of continuous learning, challenging and re-learning, in your entire life, everyday, and it helps you give back during that day, a day a week to the public good. Find and work for the best in your field. I had the privilege of working for Norman Foster when his office was 12 persons; 3 years later I left, it was 160. He shaped and inspired me. I learned lessons I still refer to today. It was a wonderful experience.

And finally, given that you are part of a Faculty of Science and Applied Sciences, learn from nature. It is fragile, beautiful, no longer boundless and today in peril. My freshest ideas are coming from scientists that study nature. From bio-mimicry to ecology; we have so much to learn. Let me give you an example. Architectural design from the industrial revolution through the Victorians was the triumph of science over nature; it culminated in the 1970s with machines that can air condition you and look after your every need. It turns out those buildings are poisonous. Early sustainable design ideas involved architectural and engineering solutions as alternative strategies. We learned about natural ventilation, thermal mass and many other strategies to produce greener buildings. More recently, we've developed green roofs, bio-swales, living walls; we're in fact turning to nature for the right building solutions.

In my most recent project, we're seeking to make a natural environment and a living environment indistinguishable from nature; we're hoping to make a living building. The building will live off the rain water that falls on it; it will use plants and plant life to treat the sewage; there will be no waste going off-site; the plants will cleanse the air for the occupants; earth excavated from the site will be turned into rammed earth for the walls; the roof will be green but connected to the landscape for bio diversity and critters, so they can live with the plants that are up there; wood, the only material made by the sun, will be the structure; restaurant food on-site will be waste that will be turned into bio-mass energy; the building will have no net energy or Co2 impact on the environment on an annual basis. This is just a glimpse, you will do more. You must always link science with nature.

Congratulations to you on your successful graduation on the receipt of your degrees. The stakes are bigger now, the mission is yours. I've learned that if all you do in life, you do with honesty, integrity and tenacity, the results will always be positive.  Thank you for a humbling ceremony and a deeply felt honour.