Our journey began more than 25 years ago as we explored what constituted a green building. Our initial focus was on trying to figure out how to implement specific strategies related to technical building systems. We caught the LEED wave very early and worked to help create it in a myriad of ways as it swept across the market. We developed a keen focus on systems thinking and an integrative process. Impactful videos on our approach and projects put us on the map here and abroad.

We wrote a book on integrative design with Bill Reed in 2009 that has become the definitive guide on the subject as applied to green building projects.

While we still apply an integrative process to all of our work, the epilogue to the book, Evolving the Field, foreshadowed where we were headed. The book ends with the question, “Where do we stop integrating?” While working to develop our capacity to think this way, we discovered that applying an integrative process to technical systems was not enough. Our focus needed to shift from seeing buildings as the outcome, to buildings as a developmental instrument for achieving a larger purpose and processes aimed at the vitality and viability of the larger systems in which the building is nested. This process called us to shift our aim and direction toward regenerative design and development associated with living systems.

Our trajectory of thinking over the years has followed the path Bill Reed laid out years ago, moving from doing less bad to focusing on how humans understand our role in service to sustaining and regenerating life. Together with our clients and colleagues, we have been imagining a whole new way to understand how humans, their built environment and the natural world around us all live and breathe with each other as co-creators. Through learning, community, design and story, 7group is stepping into a new era of deeply regenerative work.

Regeneration is rooted in the understanding that healthy living systems have an inherent capacity to continually generate new sources of life for and within themselves and their environment – i.e., to Re-generate. This work is grounded in a philosophy that humans (and human activities) are not apart from the development and ongoing evolution of healthy living systems; rather, humans serve a participatory role in their continuing regeneration of viability and vitality. Through the practice of developing how we are thinking in this way about whole living systems, any project can be leveraged as a highly effective acupuncture point for helping transform community vitality and regenerating life.

As the world evolves and transforms from the old story to the new, we are striving to work on nurturing the process of transformation with like-minded friends and future partners. We are most interested in helping to explore connections to develop interrelationships and to promote holistic affects that you are aiming to manifest.

Over the past few years we have continued the process of regeneratively developing ourselves. The initial outcome of this work is beginning to be reflected in our new website which will continue to evolve over the coming months and years. Our Facebook and LinkedIn pages reflect our sharpening focus. We invite you to check us out and come back frequently. Over the coming months we will be exploring how the work that we do can be applied to the systems you wish to transform and what it means to work regeneratively.

We have also put together a major event in early October with David Abram (author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal) to help launch the regeneration of 7group and our partnership with a retreat center in the Catskills called Spillian.

What is it you seek to transform? Visit sevengroup.com.

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