Architects and designers by nature look to the future, visualizing and planning spaces to meet the demands of tomorrow’s built environment. These leaders have taken sustainable design to the mainstream, where it has become not just a basic business tenet but a competitive advantage in a marketplace that continues to evolve around that innovation.
“Firms that practice sustainable design strive to mitigate the negative impacts with the long term of creating only positive impacts,” said Breeze Glazer, research knowledge manager and senior associate at the global design firm Perkins+Will. “Leveraging that approach as a competitive advantage is not only ethical, I would posit that firms that do not practice sustainable design yet neglect to share with owners the resulting impacts of those choices are fundamentally unethical.”
According to Linda Sorrento, executive director at the National Academy of Environmental Design, sustainable practice consultant and former senior director of Education Partnerships at the U.S. Green Building Council, “Whether you are an architect or designer, together we have a huge impact on the outcome. Ourinvolvement as leaders in decision making and utilizing design, which I characterize as environmental design, offers a huge opportunity to not only take science, but take science into actual practice by what we do. This is very powerful.”
