Greening the Profession, from Food Waste to Site Preparation
How three large firms are tackling sustainability inside and out

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Sustainability in architecture is increasingly about the way we practice, necessarily including but no longer limited to design. What was so recently a fringe movement now defines the daily business of most firms as they make enthusiastic efforts to green their practices in everything from building supplies to office waste, technology to travel. Here, we look at how three large firms are striving to lessen their ecological impact.

The Walters-Storyk Design Group
WSDG recently implemented practice policies to make their domestic and international offices more energy efficient and ecologically responsive. Working under the direction of company co-principals John Storyk, AIA, and Beth Walters, WSDG project managers Fernanda Coelho in Brazil and Kathlyn Boland in New York together have spearheaded far-ranging initiatives.

At WSDG’s global meeting in January 2008, Coelho introduced a proposal “to contextualize the impacts on the environment caused by construction industry, and our responsibility as designers for damages to the planet” explains Coelho. “To ‘remake the way we make things’, we have to change ourselves.”

To change their practices, WSDG is “aggressively pursuing emerging options to ease the burdens that design and construction add to the environment,” says Boland. In addition to specifying sustainable materials wherever possible, WSDG adds a project-specific Environmental Goals Sheet to all drawings to assist international contractors unfamiliar with LEED principles in creating efficiency in envelope design and lighting and HVAC systems.

Within the offices, WSDG uses efficient light fixtures and lamps, low VOC paints, recycled-content materials, and is in the process of going paperless. To reduce travel, they are relying on tele- and video-conferencing and encourage employees to telecommute one day per week.

Gensler
International firm Gensler has focused their initiatives from the top down. Each design project incorporates a sustainable strategy that includes 3-D modeling tools and an intensive charrette. According to Washington, D.C., office Managing Director Jeff Barber, AIA, LEED-AP: “In daily practices and office operations, we are tracking waste, materials, energy, and water use and employee commutes.”

Gensler was an early adopter of BIM and now relies on it and other modeling tools to achieve the highest levels of sustainability. The company also uses its Workplace Performance Index (WPI) to help clients understand space effectiveness in their workplaces so that design solutions can be more sustainable through exceptional space efficiency, believes Barber.

“Sustainable design has been part of our DNA from the beginning,” he says. “Our buildings have always been based on an inside-out/outside-in philosophy of integrated design.” That said, adoption of sustainable design principles has not always been evenly applied throughout the firm. To ensure that all offices operate under the same principles, Gensler now hosts regional and national sustainable leadership teams to develop procedures, tools, and training that will be used company-wide. Gensler promotes competition among offices to achieve waste and energy reductions and boasts 734 LEED-accredited design professionals who include staff from designers to accountants. “There is a great deal of quiet pride in our work to date and excitement about the opportunities to come,” concludes Barber.

Durrant
Gordy Mills, FAIA, former chairman and CEO of A/E firm Durrant says that encouraging staff to become LEED accredited professionals has been important to their sustainability efforts as well. Within Durrant’s offices, recycling and reducing the use of ecologically unsound products has become standard. At the company headquarters (now on track to be the first LEED Platinum office building in Iowa) in Dubuque, Iowa, Durrant participates in a municipal food scrap recycling program that composts the scraps with yard waste and sells the compost back to the community.

Mills says that Durrant’s sustainable initiatives evolved from the firm’s recognition that sustainability “is a right and important thing to do.” While some offices have embraced sustainable design fully, others still are in the process of implementation. However, he notes, all offices are fully engaged in public discussions on the issue. “We get involved in the public dialogue in our communities so we’re alert for the public discussions that can create market opportunities, and then we strategize ways to implement them,” he explains.

The real key ingredient that makes sustainable design successful is early dialogue involving the entire project team so that the right issues are raised and discussed, and the right decisions are made early on, affirms Mills. “Even though we have a history of engaging architects, interior designers, and engineers in project discussions from the get-go, incorporating somebody who’s always raising the sustainable issues into the project discussion was probably one of the harder things to do. People get set in their ways and don’t adapt to change as much and as fast as we all might like.”