Blog

On a high level, you can see that various elements are trending when it comes to sustainable design. It is easy to get caught up in any single one of them: electric vehicles; the housing crisis; the pandemic; and our need to transition off fossil fuels. It’s more...

Let’s use financial risk management for a couple of different possible future scenarios. The additional costs to go beyond code requirements into the realm of high performance is often seen as something that is “nice to have” instead of a “necessity”. This has...

You probably have a team of people that work on procurement of everything from the subcontractors to the kitchen sink, but do the same people that procure services for everything else hire your architects? Hiring an architect is a speciality service that deserves a...

There is no doubt. Buildings are to blame. We are going to miss our climate targets because of our crappy buildings.For decades we all got away with spending very little capital on buildings that just met the building code requirements. Actually, let's face it,...

Experts are starting to realize that Covid-19 will be with us for the long term. How do we rethink office space design so that it is more like being in the outdoors? How can we design offices in order to decrease the rate of spread of disease? What is best practice...

What is a Living Building? The Living Building Challenge was started by the Cascadia Green Building Council and has become a separate certification in its own right, based on a system of Petals.Living Building Certified used to be nearly impossible to achieve, but...

Let's get the bad news over with first. Your building is definitely not performing at its potential.Unless you have recently done all three of these steps it is not performing at its potential. To reach its potential performance for no-cost or low-cost levels of...

I've been a little obsessed with how buildings are designed since I took a trip to the other side of the planet when I was a teenager and saw how ridiculously identical everything was. Here I was in an almost subtropical city, and I felt like Dorothy from Wizard of...

We just put in two projects for LEED Certification this afternoon. It feels good! There was over one Gigabyte of information in that submission! You might not want to try this alone! Even if you are a LEED-accredited Professional, you still might need some help...

There are significant differences between LEED 2009 for New Construction and Major Renovation in Canada. Today we are going to talk about the old Sustainable Sites Category that changes to Location to Linkages. There is a new LEEDv4 Credit that rewards projects...

What does the next unpredicted catastrophic event hold for your business? This is the third in a series of posts about designing for resiliency. In the first post, our Founder and CEO, Sandra Leigh Lester, spoke about a catastrophic weather event that affected her...

What does the next unpredicted catastrophic event hold for your business? This is the second of a series of posts about designing for resiliency. In our last post, our Founder and CEO, Sandra Leigh Lester, spoke about a catastrophic weather event that affected her...

What does the next unpredicted catastrophic event hold for your business? This is the first of a series of posts about designing for resiliency. Actually, "unpredicted" is a misnomer. Lots of work is being done globally on modelling climate and predicting weather...