Page 23 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

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THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS IN

HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS

Throughout this book, I’ll be showing you examples of high-performance projects,
generally LEED Platinum level achievements and telling you how the participants
worked together to achieve these outcomes. In this chapter, I’ll show examples from
several projects and draw some general conclusions from the experiences of archi-
tects, owners, engineers, and contractors. The bottom line: it’s very difficult to achieve
high-level outcomes without some form of integrated design process.
A leading exponent of integrated design is Boston-based architect William G. (Bill)
Reed. Reed is widely credited with being one of the original coauthors of the U.S.
Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
rating system. For the past several years, he has been beating the drum for the inte-
grative design process as a way to produce not just “green” buildings but buildings and
sites that are actually restorative in process and outcome. Reed is a principal with
two firms, Regenesis and the Integrative Design Collaborative. He says this about the
integrative design process.*

It’s very easy to implement the integrative design process but you have to have a
design team and clients that are willing to change the nature of their design process.
It’s not hard, but it’s different. This is about change. How easy is this to do? It really
depends on how willing people are to begin a change process.
To do different things with sustainability (which is what we’re doing in integrative
design), we have to do things differently. To do things differently, we have to think
about them in a different way. To think about them in a different way, we actually
have to be or become different people.

So how easy is that? The practice aspect is relatively the easy part, the change aspect
is very hard. The most successful practice process that we’ve employed to help
people to change their process is at the first charrette. We map out a design process

* Interview with Bill Reed, February 2008.
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