Objectives

Challenges & Strategies
During our design process, we assess the environmental challenges posed by each project, and consider the appropriate sustainable design strategies within the following categories:

Challenge: L A N D - D E G R A D A T I O N
As societies develop around the world, our communities edges continue converting diverse eco-systems and productive farmlands into grids of streets and buildings.

Sustainable Strategies: Urban and Brownfield infill, buildings re-use, compact footprint designs, erosion prevention and landscape restoration can all minimize the impact of buildings on their open space surroundings.

Challenge: R E S O U R C E S
Construction and development necessitates ongoing extraction of already-dwindling resources including raw materials, water and energy fuels.

Sustainable Strategies: Re-used building components, recycled materials, sustainably-harvested and rapidly-renewable materials can dramatically reduce the need for virgin materials.
Water-efficient fixtures, gray water re-use, and rainwater harvesting can mitigate the looming water shortage crises locally, regionally, and around the globe.

Challenge: E N E R G Y & E M I S S I O N S
Extracting, fabricating, conveying, and assembling construction materials and buildings, and conditioning buildings throughout their lifecycles depend largely on energy from carbon fuel combustion. Greenhouse gases and other combustion-related emissions exacerbate global warming, and myriads of associated environmental destruction problems.

Sustainable Strategies: Highly insulated building envelopes, daylighting, passive heating, cooling and ventilation; and increased reliance on combustion-free renewable energy generated via solar, wind, geo-thermal and similar sources are transforming the way buildings are built and conditioned.

The drive to minimize our carbon consumption and switch to clean energy sources is effectively boosted by rising carbon-based energy costs, proliferation of renewable energy technologies and increasing availability of financial incentives programs.

Challenge: T O X I C I T Y
Following a century of frenzied chemical innovations and risk-taking, many of the substances we use and dispose of in the process of constructing and occupying buildings are now known to be hazardous to buildings’ occupants and to the natural world. Harmful substances continue over years, decades and centuries to infiltrate and accumulate around the globe in the soil, water and air – the very building blocks of life on earth.

Sustainable Strategies: Replacing synthetic volatile and non-degradable building materials with benign, natural-sourced and bio-degradable alternatives is essential to creating non-toxic building environments. In turn, the waste stream generated from cleanly constructed buildings, can become a stream of harvestable resources.