leed International, llc

Why Green Buildings?

Green Building Programs address a diverse set of sustainability goals.

These include:

• Energy efficiency, renewable energy, and green power.
• Location and alternative transportation.
• Water conservation and low-impact development (stormwater).
• Waste reduction and recycling, and use of recycled-content products.
• Local and regional sourcing of products and materials.
• Passive strategies that rely on natural daylight and wind patterns.
• Healthy indoor environments.
• Extended life cycles through durable, flexible and adaptive design.

Approaches and Principles

Approaches and Principles

The most successful Green Buildings begin with a set of principles, which focus the decision-makers toward a common goal of creating a great building. Our goal is to bring people and ideas together to produce exciting and invocative buildings and projects.

Green Building Principles

As the planning progresses, the planning teams usually align these principles with the prescriptive strategies or measurable goals detailed in established Green Building Programs or Standards.

Green Building Principles typically fall within categories that address buildings during all phases of development.

• Design
• Construction
• Operations

These categories align well with the environmental priorities and social goals of business.

Integrated Design, Engineering, Evaluation & Certification Process

Managing and integrating environmental, economic and social considerations in the design, construction and operation of a building is what makes a structure a true “Green Building”.

The most successful green building process incorporates a multi-disciplinary and integrated design approach that promotes collaboration, encourages innovation, fosters partnerships and synergies, and evaluates performance.

The experiences of many project teams, both public sector and private sector, suggest that the conventional linear design process is a major barrier to achieving high performance, green buildings. An integrated design process is far more successful.

Project teams that use the Integrated Design Process seek to optimize performance on a wide variety of well-defined environmental and social goals while staying within budgetary and scheduling constraints. Key to the process is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative team whose members make decisions together based on a shared vision and a holistic understanding of the entire project.

The Integrated Design Process is

• An iterative process
• A flexible method
• Different each time
• Innovative, with ongoing learning and evolving features