Design the future together

Using living systems frameworks to help organize our thinking, planning and design in a way that raises the level of aspirations and affectiveness.

What does it mean to engage in an integrative process and how do you know when you are?

Our approach is to unpack the project's deepest aspirations and then match them with the appropriate rating system that reflects the values embedded in your highest ambitions.

On many projects we can offer some or all of the other services listed here, along with more formal design and engineering considerations. We can engage with your architects and engineers, or we can be and/or bring architects and engineers capable of hitting the ground running with all the other considerations discussed throughout these services. We employ the latest 3d scanning and form-making, analysis, and visualization technologies when they are most appropriate on projects.

Often our best opportunity to weave all of this together and maximize the fulfillment of our clients and their stakeholders’ goals is to team with them to orchestrate the overall process, from discovery, through concept, design, construction, operations, and the technical analysis and living community engagement throughout. Somewhat ironically leading a process of cultivating collective self-direction, ensuring deep and efficient collaboration and effective system integration and actualization.

Especially in marginalized, neglected, and/or abused cultures and communities (human and otherwise) it is critical to seek partnership with the wisdom holders of each Place, to transcend and include wants and needs with how Life is trying to work there. This must not be an afterthought, or a box to be checked to be able to do what we’ve already predetermined we want to do. But a key first step to right-fitting a project to its time and other contexts, and Essence.

All indigenous and awakened / awakening modern cultures believe in the elegant complexity and genius of the more than human living systems of our world. Designing towards a harmony among all living and technical systems is a process that has far greater benefits than modernity has typically accounted for, including psychological considerations like Biophilia and biophobias, as well as economics.

Energy analysis should begin before the design even starts.

Good daylighting design needs to be in the DNA of the project in order to make enlightened design decisions.

Water, a valuable resource, is often thought of differently; outside its a nuisance (rain, aka stormwater, or worse, flooding) while inside it's a benefit (drinking water). The same resource is thought of quite separately, and indeed totally different professionals handle the two domains of water from a municipal point of view. But it’s all one system, and modeling it as a whole offers opportunities for huge gains in safety, health, ecological benefit and more.

Despite an ever-growing list of chemicals in the breathing zones of our buildings, and research on the effects of these chemicals on living tissue utterly failing to keep pace, actual science and scientific analysis of the indoor air quality has remained almost solely academic and/or niche advocacy arenas. Real air chemistry is almost completely absent from professional practice, even amongst well-meaning rating systems that attempt to address it, until now.

While vernacular and innovative residential buildings have incorporated sophisticated understanding and orchestration of air flows to manage indoor air conditions for millennia, in medium and large modern buildings we have relied on mechanical systems for all things indoor air related. This has been driven by fear and familiarity, rather than science or even cost feasibility. CFD offers a new frontier of efficiency, comfort and health in our buildings.

Energy, water, and other technical building systems must be properly selected, verified, installed, and calibrated to function and behave as intended (or better), and have the intended impacts on the building, its site, and larger nested systems. Like all the other analysis and process management services listed here, Commissioning done right always pays for itself.

Like water, in modern built-environment projects materials span many different professionals’ purviews, and the lion’s share of the project cost. But they are seldom considered comprehensively, and managed in concert driven by cost, occupant and other living system impacts.

Stories are essential to communicating what your project or endeavor is all about. We let you tell it in your own words.