The following description was used for soliciting sponsors and inviting participants.

Purpose

Tools and methods to support “green design” are becoming more available and widely used in the United States and in many other countries. There is increasing recognition that we have to go beyond the improvement of individual pieces of a project to an understanding of the whole. Some of the leaders in this field are beginning to ask what the next steps are to enable us to continue this trend toward a more sustainable, or even restorative, built environment. Our goal in this charrette is to develop a vision of how project teams and others can explore this broader perspective in their work.

At this charrette we will flesh out the opportunities for innovation in the practice of integrated design. Participants include innovators, visionaries, and leaders from across North America to discuss the potential for next-generation thinking in innovative design. Following the charrette we will develop information resources that document what we’ve learned so that these ideas can be explored more widely. In addition, the design team for a Border Station in Alexandria Bay, New York, will be exploring the application of any resulting ideas for that project specifically.

Background

After almost a decade of experience with green building assessment and rating systems, such as LEED® (U.S. Green Building Council’s Green Design Rating System) and the GBTool (an international green metric and benchmark system), we still understand amazingly little about some fundamental questions: * Can buildings and human development participate in a healthy manner with the place they inhabit? * How much better are green buildings, ecologically, socially and economically, than conventional buildings? * What is the role of rating systems and performance metrics tools in encouraging and maintaining improvements? * What does it take to sustain the performance of a green building and its relation to natural and social systems over time? * What design and project delivery approaches have the most potential for creating buildings that stretch towards their ultimate potential, moving beyond sustainability to catalyze restorative and regenerative ecologic relationships?

Architectural visionaries and thinkers have explored these questions in conceptual terms. In practice, however, even the most progressive designers and developers are barely beginning to explore the implications of these questions for actual projects.

The Task

An integrated design process is now widely recognized as the most effective means of delivering a green building within a budget. Bringing the entire project team together early in the process is essential for optimizing the synergies within building systems and avoiding overdesign, unnecessary redundancy, waste, and additional cost. But even this integrated design approach often sets its sights too low. Low-impact, efficient, and functional buildings still presuppose a lot of environmental damage, and strive merely to minimize that damage. What would it mean to strive to have people in the process of building and operating their buildings actually restore and enhance their sites, watersheds, and communities? How can designers and clients expand the scope of integrated design dramatically, including not only the project team but a wide range of stakeholders? And what indicators or metrics could be used to evaluate the success of such an endeavor? Innovative thinkers in the U.S. are beginning to address these and similar questions. We now have a rare opportunity to collaborate on this targeted initiative to move the field forward.

Conclusion and Summary of Importance

The rating and assessment systems currently in use are proving effective at moving the building industry from conventional practice to a greener approach. As practices evolve, there is a need to be looking further ahead, toward a vision for the built environment that is not limited by the paradigms of the current building industry. This vision must expand beyond the idea of a building as a fixed end-point, toward a more fluid understanding of project delivery and operations as they relate to sustainability and regenerative relationships.