Sustainability

Slowly but surely we are all becoming aware that sustainability must be a cultural goal. In the professions of architecture and development, it is an approach to the design and construction of a building that allows its occupants to live comfortably using less power, less water, and producing less waste.

In nature and in buildings, sustainability is a balanced integration of systems. Site, water, energy, materials and waste are the primary components of a sustainable, built system. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), WSSP (Washington Sustainable Schools Protocol), and CHPS (Collaborative for High Performance Schools) are design templates that outline sustainable objectives and offer resources of information that Josephson + Day embrace.

One of the most effective sustainability choices available is the adaptive re-use of historic and other existing structures. By retaining and restoring an existing building you retain the “embedded energy” in that building (the energy that has been “invested” in the process of creating that building), rather than discarding that energy. As a reminder of that, we include several of the historic preservation projects in our site within this special Sustainability section.