Our Philosophy of Sustainability

There are two very different approaches to sustainability in the built environment—those who believe that you need to be out in front pushing the envelope and demonstrating what is possible, and those who believe in the value of moving the masses along more slowly but at a larger scale. Both approaches are right and necessary to making progress.

Demonstration projects are important because they do just that. They show what can be accomplished, and break a path for others to follow. But they also require a mission that can support great risk and lots of investment in research and development and trial and error. They are extremely admirable but typically expensive and not always replicable. Two great examples of this approach are 21 Acres in Woodinville (which we worked on) and The Bullitt Center in Seattle (which we did not).

The 21 Acres Center for Local Food and Sustainable Living, certified LEED Platinum in 2013, was designed to set a sustainable example for the local rural community. By contrast, the Bullitt Center, certified as a Living Building in 2015, is an urban office project which touts itself as “the greenest commercial building in the world.” Both projects had owners determined to push the envelope by demonstrating the possibilities of less conventional technologies and the willingness to invest in them.

Both projects incorporated composting toilets, radiant flooring with ground source heat pumps, photovoltaic panels, submetering infrastructure and lighting controls. And they diverged with respect to rainwater capture, onsite stormwater and wastewater treatment, natural ventilation and more. Each has valuable lessons to share. And we strongly encourage you to check them both out.

These projects are wonderfully inspiring and have provided many lessons learned for the folks who have attempted on a more limited scale to follow in their footsteps. But neither of these projects is replicable in the sense of providing a blueprint for others to implement. They are unique. Both required mission driven visionaries with deep pockets to make them a reality and as a result their impact continues to be proof of concept, education and inspiration oriented.

Those are admirable and necessary qualities but how much they move the needle is hard to make tangible. If one’s goal is to make every occupant and user’s environment more healthy, energy efficient and sustainable, an approach that is practical and affordable enough to mitigate risk and reach more people directly is necessary.

There are many great innovative ideas that ultimately fall by the wayside. Implementation is where the rubber meets the road, and it’s rigorous and slow. It has to overcome resistance and discomfort with the unfamiliar. It has to be affordable, and it has to make what is challenging seem achievable. That has always been the double-edged sword of sustainability. If it’s too hard and too expensive, people simply won’t do it.

Regulation and/or rebates are often a way to bridge this gap. There was a time a mere decade ago, when LED lamps were considered a flavor of the month and too expensive for the run of the mill project. And now they are literally the law of the land - affordable, energy efficient, low mercury and what everyone expects to use. Regulations moved the market toward the development of competitive technologies and suppliers that brought prices down and changed consumer expectations. Rebates encouraged consumers to become early adopters and stoked demand. But regulation and incentives aren’t always the answer.

When ArchEcology began, we chose to base our business model on the belief that incremental change adds up. We wanted to help make sustainability accessible to every project, not just those funded by visionaries.  Our approach has been to make green building strategies easier for project teams to understand and evaluate on a cost benefit basis. By doing some of the technical analysis in-house, we can make the inevitable tradeoffs clear to decision makers. We work with conventional projects that don’t have a mission centered around sustainability to incorporate strategies to green their buildings into their goals and budget. 

Over the years, we have seen many sustainable strategies become standard practice. Low emitting products, low flow water fixtures, recycled content materials, electric vehicle infrastructure, high efficiency HVAC systems, construction practices that protect the air quality of the indoor environment are all ubiquitous now and simply the baseline expectation of any project’s performance.

And at the end of the day, this is what we are all after. That sustainable, energy efficient, low carbon buildings that enhance the wellbeing of their occupants are the norm. That they are what everyone expects to build and to occupy. When that day comes, folks like us will not be necessary to guide and advise project teams on what these strategies are and how they can be implemented.

We can’t wait.