Sustainability

Recognizing early on the threat of climate change and the architect’s role in it, BNIM emerged as a pioneer of sustainable design in the 1980s, serving a founding role in the AIA’s Committee on the Environment, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and the concept of Living Buildings. This deep history has manifested itself in many forms, including: creating decision-making tools on sustainability with the Packard Foundation; piloting a LEED 2.0 project in the late 1990s for the NIST Report to help define USGBC LEED Guidelines and inform the Living Building Challenge; designing the world’s first LEED Platinum Living Building certified building; bringing net-zero design to higher education campuses across the country; and expanding the concept of eco-diplomacy in the 2010s in fourteen countries alongside the U.S. Department of State. BNIM’s instrumental work in sustainable design led to recognition by the American Institute of Architects as the 2011 AIA National Architecture Firm.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. At BNIM, we use firm-wide goals that are informed by the projects we work on and our own operations as a firm. Rather than treating these goals as a checklist to be reviewed and forgotten, we approach our firm and project goals using mesh strategies used to meet them in integrated ways.

BNIM has set several goals including:

2030 Challenge – Net-zero energy use across our portfolio by the year 2030.

2040 Challenge – Net-zero total carbon emissions across our portfolio by 2040, including all project operational and embodied carbon emissions. Further, we are committed to a 20% net positive (carbon negative) portfolio by 2050.

Materials Pledge – We prioritize responsibly sourced, healthy, and regional building materials.

JUST Label – We measure our firm performance using the ILFI’s JUST Label process, transparently reporting our firm progress to improve social, environmental, and economic justice and equity across all firm operations.

Net Positive Firm Operations by 2030 – Starting in 2023, BNIM reduces and offsets all Scope 1 and 2 operational impacts, and we are now working to measure, reduce, and eliminate all Scope 3 emissions by 2030.

To fulfill BNIM’s bold commitment and Big Goals, BNIM tracks our projects and strategizes on solutions organized through our Sustainability Team. The “Subject To Change: Sustainability Action Plan” is one of our main ways to measure projects and our firm progress. Using 18 firm-wide goals within six focus areas: Energy, Water, Ecology, Wellness, and Resources, we can push our projects to achieve more. These are informed by the current thinking from institutions and certifications such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, LEED, Living Building, and WELL building certifications.

These goals range from reducing overall projected energy consumption, potable water, planting native vegetation, bringing more daylight into occupied spaces, contributing to stronger neighborhood walkability, and finding ways to reduce embodied carbon in the design and construction.

These measured goals are essential to BNIM’s design process and delivering results and sustainable change to clients, communities, and our environment.

Progress is reported out each year with our report “Subject To Change.” This annual public report helps us stay on our roadmap and gives us a clear framework to measure progress.

Economy — The words and metrics we use matter, and learning to engage with clients through the lens of their priorities can make the difference between a “business as usual” building and a regenerative, high-performance building.

Words such as “sustainability” and “climate change” may not resonate with every client we work with. It is important to refine our language and metrics to align with a client’s motivations and goals, while establishing an understanding that we all fundamentally want clean, safe, efficient, and healthy places to exist.

BNIM collaborated with a recent client on the reimagining and transformation of their corporate office and surface parking into a living campus with housing, restored ecology and native biome, green infrastructure to absorb rainwater on site, and passive-house certified homes and high-performance commercial buildings. Through this work, BNIM developed a robust cost-benefit matrix which compares multiple environmental impact scenarios such as “code minimum,” high performance (50% energy and water reduction), net zero energy and water, and a net-positive design approach.

Each scenario of the matrix includes a range of impacts on energy, water, health, first cost, and then adds federal, state, and local incentives, advanced depreciation, and other real-world financial mechanisms to demonstrate a 40-year life-cycle cost and net-present value of each scenario. Under almost all conditions, a net-zero or net-positive approach comes out substantially ahead for the client.

BNIM has continued to develop and refine this tool, which has already proved useful on two other large-scale planning projects. Using this method allows us to have a conversation about performance through the lens (and language) of money and economy, noting that performance is key to long-term savings, as well as political balancing needed to maximize available incentives.