Sustainable Design

We have a profound respect for our physical and cultural environment.  The Arizona high country inspires and influences us.  After all, that's why we live here.  As Architects, it is incumbent on us to play an active role in the preservation of our physical and cultural landscape through sustainable development.

Green design is simple in concept but complex in practice.  In short, green design is assessing all aspects of architectural design, construction and occupancy over the life of a building to reduce resource consumption and promote occupant comfort.  Two key principles of Green Design are reducing environmental impact and minimizing the use of non-renewable resources, including energy consumption.

Green design represents a paradigm shift in architecture.  Driving this shift is the realization that buildings can be more delightful, less expensive to build, less expensive to maintain and healthier if we judge them by a more intelligent set of criteria.  We are starting to realize that the traditional measures of success in design: construction cost and aesthetics are not the whole picture.

By going green, aesthetics need not be compromised.  We believe that high design and green design are not mutually exclusive.  By elegantly incorporating green technologies, materials and methods into architectural design we make our buildings fresh and innovative.

There is a certain level of green design that is hard-wired at Valdez Architects - it is standard in everything we do.  Passive solar design, an efficient heating system and a well insulated building envelope are where we begin.  Geothermal heating systems, reused, recycled or low-embodied energy materials, active solar energy collection, high thermal mass systems are all within our scope.  How far we go is up to you.