Rives Taylor

Rives Taylor has more than thirty years of experience in institutional and commercial architecture with twenty-five years spent focusing on strategic planning, programming, and sustainable design, scaled from facility operations to campus and city planning. A Texas-practicing architect and educator, Taylor directs Gensler’s firm-wide sustainable design task force. In 25 years as adjunct professor at the University of Houston and lecturer at Rice University, Taylor has influenced more than 5,000 students in his technical and high-performance design studios and seminars.

The approaches Taylor has developed for Gensler not only affect the firm’s extensive practice but also influence clients’ building decisions worldwide. He developed a firm-wide green practice primer called “The Four Tiers of Sustainability,” led the inclusion of sustainable design in the firm’s in-house education program and, in partnership with Architecture 2030 and the Design Futures Council, he developed an “eco-charette” process and developed a building performance metric that is now used in all of Gensler’s projects. The design and construction standards Taylor developed for clients such as ExxonMobil and Toyota are now embedded in those clients’ protocols and are followed worldwide. He represented Gensler at the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 and coproduces an annual publication for the firm focusing on sustainable design strategies.