NORTHAMPTON — The camaraderie between 40-year-old Seth Lawrence-Slavas and 70-year-old Jonathan A. Wright is clear within minutes of speaking with them.
During a recent interview to discuss a changing of the guard at Wright Builders Inc., the longtime Northampton construction company, Lawrence-Slavas sits comfortably at a mid-sized office table, a smile always slightly present on his face. Wright, meanwhile, is present on a Zoom call from Puerto Rico, though his resonant presence hardly feels miles away.
Their discussion is broken up with playful jest, and mutual respect runs deep as they discussed the company’s history and its future now that Lawrence-Slavas has successfully acquired Wright Builders from Wright.
The two say Wright will continue to act as senior advisor for the company, and Lawrence-Slavas is committed to continuing Wright’s progressive and sustainable vision for the company that he founded nearly 50 years ago.
During those five decades, Wright Builders Inc. has made a name for itself in the region as a construction firm dedicated to sustainability, high performance and net-zero energy consumption. Their projects have ranged from residential renovation and construction of custom homes to commercial projects like hedge and fence restoration at the Emily Dickinson Museum.
The company also engages in larger-scale institutional projects. Their work at Village Hill Northampton spanned over 10 years and culminated in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) neighborhoods and over 90 buildings.
“Construction in its simplest form is a destructive process, in many ways, from an environmental standpoint,” Lawrence-Slavas said. “It’s really easy to do bad, and so you have to work on doing well.”
Lawrence-Slavas, a graduate from the Building and Construction Technologies program at UMass Amherst, joined the company in 2019 as a project development engineer. He quickly rose to the position of vice president of project development in 2020 and became president of the company in March 2021.
“Let me tell you about Seth,” said Wright. “Seth has a level of human caring and intuition about the well-being of others that’s really outsized, and it’s tucked under the weight of that engineer … It’s essential to being a leader in an organization.”
Back when Wright founded the company, the construction and building community cared about efficiency and low-cost materials. There was no widespread emphasis on sustainability because there was little known urgency to the energy crisis and other environmental issues. But from the start, Wright was already pushing the walls of sustainability.
“I like the life sense of being in a balanced place,” said Wright. “where our buildings can cause us to think about the way we live differently, so they can take care of us as we take care of them… So the built environment becomes a force for good, not a necessary evil.”
The company takes cues from the Living Building Challenge, which encourages the construction of regenerative and self-sufficient buildings that connect people with the natural world. In 2018, Wright Builders constructed the R.W. Kern Center at Hampshire College, which was certified as a “living building” by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The building meets high standards for green building, generates its own electricity and collects its own water.
Lawrence-Slavas aims to continue Wright’s vision of forward-thinking sustainability, but with a new leadership style and an increased emphasis on affordability.
“I think the next phase of Wright Builders really is… mak[ing] affordability hand-in-hand with an energy-efficient house,” Lawrence-Slavas said. “The bottom line is, those are the people that need it the most. They’re the ones that can’t afford an $800 electric bill.”
The National Low Income Housing Coalition found that in 2020, 60% of extremely low-income renter households faced a severe cost burden. Not only that, but affordable housing oftentimes “means small and poor quality,” according to Wright.
“We just can’t do that… It’s bad. It’s unhealthy. It’s bad for the environment,” said Wright.
“Both Jonathan and I feel very strongly about affordability and working with partners in that field that will push the high-performance affordability,” Lawrence-Slavas added. “It’s a lot of lift; it’s a lot of work; and the funding isn’t always, ‘here you go.’”
Lawrence-Slavas attributes his interest in sustainable building and construction to his young life.
Growing up in Wendell, he was raised in an environment of educators, engineers and timber framers. Instilled within him at 4 years old was, “if you don’t have it, you make it; and if it’s broken, you fix it.”
Currently, Wright Builders is involved in two major projects. The first is an addition to the North Amherst Library, which will include more accessible features and a new community meeting space.
The other is the Pine Meadows housing development project in Northampton, which is one of the first to mandate net-zero housing. The houses are, in fact, net positive, meaning they produce more energy than they use.
“The most exciting thing for us is that the building environment that we make has a positive impact on the health and well-being and productivity of the people in it,” Wright said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”