Our Principles

• Strategic Facility Planning and Programming: Determining whether to renovate or build new, sell existing facilities or lease, consolidate or decentralize, is critical to ensuring long-term viability, resource conservation and life-cycle cost benefits.
• Site Work and Planning: Environmentally sensitive planning looks beyond the project site. It evaluates linkages to transportation, infrastructure, and ecosystems, and considers solar and wind orientation, local microclimate, drainage patterns, utilities and existing site features to develop optimal building siting with appropriate low maintenance landscaping.
• Energy: Building orientation and massing, natural ventilation, daylighting and other passive strategies, can all lower a building’s energy demand while increasing the quality of the interior environment and comfort of the occupants. The efficiency of required systems is maximized through use of advanced computer modeling and life-cycle cost analysis.
• Building Materials: Environmentally preferable building materials are [appropriately] durable and low maintenance. Careful selection and specification can limit impacts on the environment and occupant health, while remaining within the parameters of performance, cost, aesthetics and availability.
• Indoor Air Quality: Indoor air quality is most eff e ctively controlled through close coordination of architecture, interior design and mechanical, electrical and plumbing design strategies that limit sources of contamination before they enter the building. Construction procedures for IAQ and post-occupancy user guides also contribute to good long-term IAQ.
• Water: Site design strategies that keep rainwater on the site and, where feasible, consider on-site treatment and reuse of building gray water and wastewater. Low flow plumbing fixtures, appropriate landscaping and HVAC and plumbing system design also conserve water.
• Recycling and Waste Management: Waste and inefficiency can be limited during construction by recycling demolition and construction waste, reuse of on-site materials, and monitoring of material use and packaging. Accommodating recycling into building design reduces waste while generating revenues.
• Building Commissioning, Operations and Management: Effective building commissioning is essential to ensure proper and efficient functioning of systems. Facilities operations benefit from indoor air quality and energy monitoring, and from policies for water saving, waste reduction and environmentally sensitive maintenance.
• Strategic Environmental Management: By integrating long-range environmental considerations into their proactive planning process, manufacturing-based companies can eliminate emitted or discharged pollutants. Strategic environmental management helps corporations understand and assess environmental risks and opportunities, so they can make informed decisions about their facilities and processes.