Environmental and Energy Board Member Spotlight: Meet Steve Krug, AIA, PE, LEED-AP, AEE Fellow
Spring 2023
Chester County is thankful to have the expertise of Steve Krug on its Environmental and Energy Advisory Board. As the owner of Krug Architects, Steve's tagline for his work is "Designing and planning for healthy, sustainable, vibrant places." Steve prioritizes all these values in his expansive and impressive portfolio of work that encompasses master planning, campus planning and design, new construction, renovations, and energy modeling and planning, which he has done at the building scale and the city scale, and everything in between. Some local examples of his work include:
- West Chester University Student Recreation Center (bottom image below)
- Kutztown University Student Recreation Center (top image below below)
- Oxford Borough Hall and Multi-modal Transportation Center
- 124 E Market Street Apartments in West Chester
- Phoenixville Borough Hall and Police Station
- Henrietta Hankin Library
- Peirce Middle School
- Stetson Middle school
- Chester County Government Services Center
- Master planning for Bucks County, Montgomery County, and Chester County
- High Street, Chestnut Street, Sharpless Street, South New Street, and Matlack Street Parking Structures in West Chester
A registered architect and professional engineer, Steve studied architecture at Syracuse University and pursued a master's in architectural engineering at Penn State. He always had an interest in and aptitude for the mechanical side of building design and started his career working in firms doing energy audits and modeling. He has led major national and international architectural firms, and currently operates his own firm.
Steve notes the colossal technological shift he's seen over his career — from designing on paper and writing your own algorithms for modeling building performance, to creating virtual 3-D building models that include all the attributes of building materials to automatically generate energy models. Although most everything is digital now; he still builds cardboard models from time to time.
Steve sees his role on Chester County's Environmental and Energy Advisory Board as promoting and educating the public on climate change, and proactively planning for the massive changes that are coming. He notes, "Today is different than yesterday, and tomorrow will be different from today — we want to be able to work together and move forward as a community."
In addition to Chester County's Environmental and Energy Advisory Board, Steve has a number of other volunteer leadership roles. He currently serves as the chair of the Chester County Economic Development Council's Smart Energy Initiative, and he chairs the Commonwealth of PA's Climate Change Advisory Committee, appointed by the Governor, which was established by Act 70 in 2008 (the PA Climate Change Act). He has helped lead the creation of the last three Climate Action Plans with the State DEP and is proud of the impact he and the Committee have made, plus excited to collaborate on the current plan being developed.
Aside from his architecture practice and volunteer roles, Steve is also an orchardist. He and his family own property in Blair County with a net-zero house (designed by Steve, of course!) and an orchard with a wide variety of fruit trees. From their orchard, his family makes apple sauce, Asian-pear apple butter, and hard cider, and experiments with other more unusual products like membrillo, a quince paste popular in Spain, which Steve says goes great with Manchego cheese.