Sustainability

"Ultimately our goal is to design handsome and beautiful spaces that live comfortably, provide aspects of prospect and refuge, are intuitive and nurturing to the owners, and are energy and space efficient. Thoughtfully designed buildings manifest the sacredness of everyday life and help us live healthier and more connected to the natural world. Good design instills beauty into space that is truly enduring."

What Sustainability Means To CDG

Now, perhaps more than ever the conversation around sustainability has been brought to the forefront in thoughtful design practice. The complexity of building science, cost of energy, environmental politics and the worldwide diversity of available building materials have begun to raise important issues and inform the way the architectural and building professions approach their work. We see these issues are real, pressing and vitally important to address in our design process.

It’s abundantly clear, we live in a world of finite resources. As active participants in a profession that consumes vast amounts of the world's energy and raw resources, we acknowledge that we have a profound accountability when it comes to how, why and with what we design our buildings, and how these structures collaborate with the environment around them. Rather than find compromise in beauty, comfort and energy efficiency, we find collaboration in these elements that coalesce into something much more enduring. It is through this lens that we approach each project.

The immediate rewards of a design process structured like this include higher efficiency, lower operating costs, and reduced waste. The less immediate and less tangible rewards of this process are an enduring collaboration with nature that express our gratefulness and stewardship now and for as far as we can see into the future.

As a means to that end, CDG is committed to our employee’s ongoing education of ever evolving building science, and devoted to avoiding the ‘business as usual’ attitude that often perpetuates the old, and not always good way of doing things. CDG has built a foundation on more than 30 years of lessons learned through the design and construction process on hundreds of projects and we continue to evolve through each and every project.

We believe that environmental stewardship resides in honoring the history of the place, and ultimately in doing more with less. We start our collaboration by addressing the following key site design considerations:

Thoughtful Site Design

  • Reuse of existing Structures & materials
  • Passive & Active Solar Orientation
  • Natural daylighting strategies
  • Natural ventilation strategies
  • Stewardship of unique botanical and other earth science features
  • Viewshed protection from off site as well as viewshed enhancement from on site

Sustainability & Your Building

Once correctly sited, we begin to look at energy efficiency. A tight efficient building will create space that uses less energy to heat, cool, light & power, and will create space that provides greater physical comfort. Key considerations when looking at your building include:

Conservation of Resources

  • Highly energy efficient building systems, products & fixtures
  • Use of renewable energy systems and resources
  • Reduced energy loads for mechanical systems
  • Water conservation

Sustainability & Your Community

Our dedication to sustainability continues into the construction phase as CDG strives to make responsible decisions about how, with what and by who your building is constructed. These decisions are important and have incredible rippling effects. Critical construction considerations which affect your community include:

Community Investment

  • Use of Regionally Available Materials - sustains local industry
  • Use of Local Craftspersons – keeps money and pride local
  • Use of Natural, Renewable Building Products
  • Use Non-toxic, healthy Products
  • Use of Recycled Materials