Design for Sustainability
In every project we look for ways to reduce the building’s long-term stress on the environment. This usually means combining a variety of ideas and technologies. Here are some of the green strategies we use.
Sustainable Design in Architecture
Success is personally defined, criteria for measuring success is selected, while skills and methods for getting there are learned. At Carnegie Mellon University sustainability has for many decades been an essential criteria for judging successful design. Carnegie Mellon has had an Environmental Systems program that is the strongest in America. Long before the current (long-overdue) buzz around sustainability CMU was training architecture students to use dozens of methods for measuring and managing the relationship between buildings and their environment.
In the process of achieving sustainability in our projects we also make the buildings structurally sound and weathertight, which gives the owners a great sense of security. It is a comfort to know that with solar energy, super-insulation and other techniques we can make minimize the consumption of energy. Even in notoriously foggy neighborhoods of San Francisco we have projects with near-zero energy use. There's great security in knowing that despite the world's struggle over fuel, we can make homes that are relatively free and independent of that struggle, homes that are warm, dry, and secure.