commentFor anyone curious about sustainable design's impact on the market, one need only look at the results of ENR's Top 100 Green Design firms list. As a group, the Top 100 generated $3.74 billion in design revenue in 2010 from projects registered with and actively seeking certification from third-party ratings groups under objective sustainable-design standards, such as the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards. This revenue is a 12.3% increase over $3.33 billion in 2009 for the group. Domestically, green design revenue rose 19.4%, to $3.30 billion in 2010 from $2.76 billion in 2009. The Top 100 had $442.9 million in revenue from green projects outside the U.S. in 2010, down a surprising 15.4% from $523.7 million in 2009.
This revenue increase shows that interest in green design remains strong, despite the industry recession. “Sustainable design is finally going mainstream,” says Kirsten Ritchie, principal at Gensler. She says many state and local building codes are adopting sustainable design requirements, which is requiring the industry to pay attention to green design.
Sustainable Savings
In a tough economy, more owners are focusing on facility life-cycle costs in addition to initial costs. This trend has sparked new interest in the efficiency of operating green. “If green design saves them money, clients love it. In recent years, the cost of utilities alone has been a compelling reason for both industrial and institutional clients to take notice,” says Louise Schlatter, SSOE Group architectural department manager.
Further, many owners are willing to pay up front for savings down the road. “The marketplace has become progressively receptive to a larger up-front investment in intelligent, high-performing building design,” says Ronald W. Krentz, assistant vice president of the Michael Baker Group.
Thus, there has been a greater focus on the measurables in green design. “We are seeing clients provide very specific and aggressive performance targets in their RFPs,” says Tom Hootman, director of sustainability for RNL. “[The design profession] is becoming better at measuring and quantifying building performance during design. The real game-changer is the continual improvement in how we are monitoring and operating our buildings,” he says.
Some designers say this bottom-line approach may cause some owners to ignore other elements of sustainable design. “We've seen some pushback from going through formal certification using the LEED system due to the added costs for documentation,” says Roger Chang, director of sustainability for Westlake Reed Leskosky. He says facility managers, in particular, prefer to invest in tangible improvements to infrastructure rather than focusing too much on issues like recycled content or certified wood.
The drive toward performance-based design is influencing both owners and designers. When the market turns around, “we will see an increased focus on hard, meaningful sustainability metrics that require some level of scientific/administrative rigor to establish,” says Wolfgang Werner, director of sustainability for Thornton Tomasetti. He says the industry is moving beyond the “check-list mind-set” of counting LEED points to a “performance mind-set” of measuring, tracking and improving actual performance.
Thornton Tomasetti is beginning to quantify and track “energy/carbon values associated with our structural projects,” Werner says. He says that while the load-bearing portion of a structure is the most massive of a building's elements, little attention has been paid to the carbon footprint of structural design. The company wants to identify the impact of structural design on the sustainable design process and how it can be improved.
LEED’s Continued Acceptance
There is some concern whether new laws and codes will supplant LEED. For example, the Washington, D.C.-based International Code Council has completed its public comment period on a proposed International Green Construction Code. ICC is expected to publish the final IGCC in 2012. Designers expect many jurisdictions across the U.S. to adopt the IGCC.
“Some predict that, once municipalities begin to adopt green building codes, certifications will tail off. However, I believe that this will likely lead to an even greater share of the market seeking certification,” says B. Kirk Teske, principal and chief sustainability officer at HKS. “Clients have seen the value of the third-party verification that LEED provides as a way to get what they are paying for as well as to provide evidence of their sustainability efforts,” adds Kris Phillips, sustainable design coordinator of SSOE. “No one brags about their building meeting fire or safety codes. The same will be true for green codes.”
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