According to the World Green Building Council, about 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to the building industry. 11% of these emissions come from the creation of buildings, and 28% come from the operation and maintenance of buildings. If we wish to mitigate the effects of climate change, everyone needs to do their part to live more sustainably. Especially architects.
SUSTAINABILITY AT CDA
At CDA, designing a more sustainably built world starts with designing beautiful places. Beauty is what makes a building well-loved, well-maintained, and long-lasting. We see beauty as the embodiment of sustainable design and always lead with it.
Lessening our carbon impact
Taking an unused or underutilized structure and infusing it with new life is one of the most sustainable design acts we can do as design professionals. Nearly 85% of CDA projects are renovations to aged and, in many cases, abandoned buildings. By reusing existing structures, we can reduce a building’s carbon footprint while enhancing the efficiency and comfort of building systems and selecting new finishes that are locally sourced, responsibly harvested, and free from potentially harmful chemicals or compounds.
Measuring building performance
Led by LEED- and Passive House-certified professionals, energy modeling allows our teams to understand the potential implications of design decisions at key intervals in the design process. From material selections to energy and water usage, these data points can showcase solutions to the daunting reality of climate change while improving building performance.
Striving for net zero emissions by 2030
In the summer of 2022, we signed onto the 2030 Commitment. This led to us learning how to energy model, researching a wide variety of sustainable design practices, learning about products that are better for inhabitants and their surroundings, and developing a plan to constantly strive for more sustainable design. That was a few years ago. We can now reflect on how those first years have gone: the challenges we had, our successes, and ways we know we can improve.
The latest update to our sustainability action plan outlines CDA’s goals for the third year after signing the 2030 Commitment, continuing into 2030. It is broken into measures to take when designing the built environment and implementations we would like to visualize in our day-to-day operations. It will be revisited once again in 2028 to maintain its relevancy, to look back on our accomplishments, and to find where we need to continue improving.