Toolkit Introduction

There was a time when the goal of the sustainability movement was to convince people that a problem exists. Those days are long gone. Today a majority of architects understand that global problems such as climate change, air pollution, exposure to environmental toxins, and even nature deficit disorder threaten our future. Architects also understand that the built environment plays a significant role as both a cause of many of these problems and as the solution. More and more architects see sustainable design as a major component of good design; and want to improve the social, environmental, and long term economic performance of their portfolios. The problem that most architects face is not a lack of concern about the environment, but the ability to achieve deeply sustainable projects among a myriad of competing priorities and ever tightening time frames. The COTE Top Ten Toolkit serves as that missing link. The toolkit democratizes sustainable design by making simple, high-impact sustainable design strategies available to the entire profession.

Very high performance is often seen as something only available to a few ambitious buildings with the right client, program, or budget. These high performers are important as examples of what’s possible, but they will not solve our environmental problems by themselves. Though the AIA COTE Top Ten awards program recognizes only the top performing projects, the COTE Top Ten Measures and this toolkit can be used as a framework to guide the design of all projects. This toolkit is not a resource for the 1% of projects to achieve 100%, but for 100% of projects to achieve substantially better outcomes. Only through broad implementation of sustainable design strategies can we begin to tackle the social and environmental problems that our civilization now faces.

The COTE Top Ten Measures of Sustainable Design are useful criteria for evaluating a project after it is built, however, their true potential lies in how they are applied in the design process.

The advantage of a rigid set of sustainability guidelines is that they are easy to assign responsibility, track, and translate into the physical realm. Standardized guidelines reduce ambiguity, streamline sustainability to enhance its level of adoption on a project. These are critical first steps to transforming a risk-averse, cost-conscious construction industry. However, third party rating systems often seem separate from the design process itself, and often result in incremental changes that are invisible to the end user. Furthermore, they add a significant administrative burden to an already overtaxed design team.

In contrast, the COTE Measures provide the construct for an open ended dialog that facilities a more deeply integrated, visually rich, design solution. They lead the project with vision instead of a checklist, mandating design teams to address nuanced concepts of culture and place. They are accessible to a lay audience, in a language which they understand and can contribute. These questions not only illuminate opportunities to integrate sustainability, but to further a deeper understanding of our clients, future building inhabitants and communities in which they reside.

There are an ever increasing amount of technical resources out there, and it is a full time job in and of itself to find, download, beta test and integrate it into project delivery workflow. A common refrain amongst sustainability professionals is, “What tool do you use to calculate ‘x’?” We all have hundreds of spreadsheets or research papers floating somewhere in the cloud to solve these questions. Our task with the toolkit is to combine and consolidate the most current, useful, and objective resources for architects.

This toolkit focuses on topics that are largely quantifiable and tend towards a technical perspective. This is an unfortunate shortcoming, as the COTE Top Ten is fundamentally a design award at its core. Unfortunately, there are few resources out there, and virtually no agreement amongst professionals about what beauty is or how to achieve it. These shortcomings are also the source of COTE Top Ten’s strengths, and we look forward to how future generations interpret these criteria.

The COTE Top Ten Toolkit meets project teams where they are now and helps to make incremental improvements in the performance of their projects by presenting project teams with curated, concise, and effective strategies for all ten measures of sustainable design. The goal of the AIA Committee on the Environment that this toolkit will begin to bridge the knowledge gap that exists in the architectural profession and lead to real measurable improvement in our built environment.

In A Statement of Where We Stand, the AIA outlines its core values.

· We stand for equity and human rights · We stand for architecture that strengthens our communities
· We stand for a sustainable future
· We stand for protecting communities from the impact of climate change
· We stand for economic opportunity · We stand for investing in the future
· We speak up, and policymakers listen

While “We stand for a sustainable future” is one of the central tenets explicitly stated, the COTE Top Ten Measures of Design incorporate all of these values within their structure. The big idea of the Toolkit is to integrate these core values in our daily work, and celebrate those few projects that achieve our highest aspirations with the annual AIA COTE Top Ten awards.

Namaste,

Corey and Tate