Jill Kurtz, AIA, LEED AP, SEEDS AP

Jill is a Principal and Director of Building Sciences at Page. As a registered architect and environmental building design specialist, Jill leverages her strengths as a systems thinker and her ability to “speak engineer” to work across the firm’s interdisciplinary practices to integrate building performance analysis across Page’s market sectors. Skilled in communication and persistent in management, she is able to overcome challenges and fluidly incorporate green building standards and strategies into processes and projects. Her strategic vision has helped grow the influence and services of our building sciences team across our offices. “Intention requires rigor” is the mantra she frequently repeats, reminding us all that we need to follow through on our ideals and aspirations towards meaningful and measured results.

Jill has a bachelor’s in Architecture from Kansas State University, Masters in Intercultural Studies from Union University, Master of Environmental Building Design from the University of Pennsylvania, and certificate in Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership from Harvard.

As part of our pursuit of exceptionalism in design, Jill and the building sciences team created the “Design for Impact” framework that Page now uses across their portfolio to set early priorities around environmental, community and resilience goals. This internal tool provides teams with the resources they need to advance performance and impact on their projects. Jill works with teams to apply a triple bottom line approach to their design strategies to truly measure value of design decisions from a holistic perspective for our clients.

With sustainability at the heart of the building sciences team, Jill has led Page’s efforts to establish a building performance analysis set of services and team. She advanced our firm in its AIA 2030 commitment by ensuring 1% of our design project’s energy use are reported every year and has set up annual accountability to the market sectors. With more than 75 LEED certifications under her belt, Jill has helped Page evolve our use and processes for green building certification to increase our success and surpassing our client’s goals.

Jill is an industry leader in sustainability and performance driven design. She recently served on the AIA Large Firm Round Table Sustainability committee, guiding industry peers across the industry in alignment and advancement. She was named Building Design + Construction Magazine’s 40 under 40 in 2021 for her leadership in green building and sustainability impact. She is a highly reviewed speaker at Autodesk University when speaking about modeling what matters, draws a ballroom of people at Texas Society of Architects when sharing about trends in sustainability, and helps curate content for conferences for our clients with BUILT National on Environmental and Social Governance issues.

After college, Jill spent a year working as a non-profit architect in India. It was there she realized designing with less was not an option for most of the world and she committed her career to making sustainable practices best building practices. For five years, Jill served as board president for a non-profit in South Sudan, focused on building a school and advancing education and taught as a visiting professor at Kansas State University on “Public Interest Design”. Jill has extended that social minded design at Page by developing its first “Design for Impact” report with the goal of reminding Pager of our ongoing commitments, provide updates to our strategy and creating record that will track our progress.