Some statistics: Cornell has, ahem, the number one architecture program in the United States. The United States each year produces six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions — which is, per capita, almost 200 times more than poorer countries in the world. Buildings represent 39 percent of those emissions. Let’s round that up to 40 percent. While turning off the lights in Rockefeller overnight is important, the energy saved by doing so is chump change compared to what could be wrought by the education of a well-trained and knowledgeable generation of builders and designers.

Shock and disbelief were the only two feelings stronger than nausea when judges announced the results for architecture at the recent Solar Decathlon competition in Washington, D.C. After a two-year, Herculean effort, Cornell’s Solar Decathlon team (CUSD) had produced an innovative house of remarkable craftsmanship. Its peculiar form and materiality exerted an uncanny architectural magnetism, attracting the press and public and eliciting praise and pride from everyone involved.

Despite news of rising employment rates and other positive economic indicators, the recession is still very much on everybody’s minds. The Fall 2009 collections that debuted last spring are interesting snapshots of the fashion community’s take on where we were then and where we would want to be this fall. The general consensus is that designers handled the gloom in one of two ways: through extravagance or a more staid conservatism. This, as with any binary system, is a gross over-simplification, and many designers mixed these two elements in one collection.

Sustaining the environment can be stylish. In a Call Auditorium packed with people and filled with photos of biota-full building roofs and solar cell-paneled buildings, William A. McDonough made this claim as he was featured yesterday afternoon as the eleventh annual Jill and Ken Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lecture “Cradle to Cradle Design.”

Named by Time Magazine as a “Hero for the Planet” in 1999, McDonough has served as an alumni research professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and a three-time recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development — the most prestigious environmental honor awarded in the United States.

“I thought when there’s a recession hemlines are supposed to go down,” was just one of the entertaining and informative comments I was privy to while sitting in the front row of Cornell Design League’s 25th Anniversary Fashion Show, Once Upon a Runway. I sat next to a woman who was trading insider secrets and approving nods with her neighbor throughout the show, and she and I had an interesting discussion of the show; for better or for worse, it turns out that we had very similar reactions. The above comment was a reaction to the ubiquity of above-the-knee (and above-the-mid-thigh) hemlines in the show.

As her fellow seniors scramble to secure jobs in an ever-dwindling economy, Fiber Science and Apparel Design major Constanza Ontaneda ’09 is forging her own path. A designer who grew up in places as divergent as Romania and Brazil, she’s already started her own international business, Bernales & Goretti, which imports fair-wage clothing made in Peru to be sold in the United States. The Sun sat down with Ontaneda in Risley Hall to discuss her passion for fashion, how she hopes to change Peru and her plans after school.

The Sun: How did you get started in design?