The American Institute of Architects’ Washington, D.C. headquarters is compromise embodied. More than a decade after the Philadelphia firm Mitchell/Giurgola won a 1958 design competition, the AIA at last opened its seven-story headquarters in 1973—after a bruising, protracted battle with Washington’s strict planning authorities that ultimately led to the project being taken over by The Architects Collaborative of Boston. The completed structure is tail-end brutalism: concrete and glass ill-suited to a post-1960s world of high energy prices and postmodernism.

Almost 50 years later, the AIA is determined to get things right. In late April, the organization unveiled a schematic design by San Francisco’s EHDD for a long-planned headquarters renovation that it hopes will pull the building from behind the curve to ahead of it, and in the process make a case for the AIA’s—and the profession’s—leadership in confronting contemporary crises. Its designers say that the project will achieve the rare feat of fully compensating for its carbon impact: not only is it aiming to achieve net-zero operation, but it will also offset the carbon emitted in construction through a novel arrangement in which the AIA will donate solar panels for use by low-income homeowners.