INTEGRATED SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

Transdisciplinary

Our design professionals include architects; interior designers; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, civil, structural, and transportation engineers; and landscape architects. With 78 LEED Accredited and/or Green Globes Professionals, every discipline incorporates sustainable design expertise and works with intersecting disciplines to develop innovative strategies for more sustainable projects.

Sustainable Expertise

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By Discipline

Building Science Practice

The Building Science group has long served as a companywide resource for energy modeling and analysis to improve project performance and generate long-term operating cost savings for our clients. In 2022, Clark Nexsen decided to make the Building Science Group into an official practice and Brian Turner, PE, BEMP, LEED AP BD+C, was tapped to lead Clark Nexsen’s newly created Building Science Practice. Formerly the mechanical department head in the firm’s Virginia Beach office, Brian was key to establishing building science as an internal resource and looks forward to formalizing it as a practice. He has been a sustainable design advocate for a long time, challenging our teams to do more or look for innovative solutions to reduce carbon emissions on each project. As the Building Science Practice Leader, Brian expects to focus on expanding the resources his team is able to provide and improving the Integrated Design process more effectively across projects. Providing dedicated, fulltime access to energy modeling from concept design to construction documents, the Building Science Practice will be integral to informing design decisions and improving Energy Usage Intensity (EUI) outcomes.

Sustainble Design Leader Promotion

In 2022, Clark Nexsen decided to make a dedicated position for a Sustainable Design Leader and Adam Torrey, AIA, LEED AP BD+C was promoted to the position as Sustainability Leader. A LEED and WELL Accredited Professional, Adam is an architect and passionate advocate for sustainability in our firm. Adam represents Clark Nexsen as a member of the North Carolina AIA Committee on the Environment Leadership Group, the AIA Large Firm Round Table sustainability group, and has recently presented at multiple industry events on the emergent topic of embodied carbon. As a Sustainability Leader, he partners with design teams and clients to help them identify and realize their project’s sustainability goals and help lead the Integrated Design Process. Adam brings a wealth of knowledge in what it takes to deliver sustainable projects and is skilled at working across disciplines to bring analysis-driven perspectives to human-centered environments.

Integrating Building Performance With Site Design

Our goal is to integrate the unique qualities of any given site with the building and site infrastructure systems in order to maximize energy performance while protecting natural resources. Using a careful bioclimatic analysis combined with passive solar strategies and renewable energy sources, our team works to minimize energy usage while restoring the environment. Our approach is to focus on helping clients optimize their building systems to increase reliability and resilience, lower costs, and protect the environment.

Sustainable Interiors

Our interiors team sees their role as critical not only to creating an environmentally respectful design, but also to supporting human health and wellness in the built environment. Responsible for specifying the materials and products people interact with every day, the interior design team carefully selects materials that are environmentally friendly, regional, and made of high recycled content. In addition to ongoing education and research regarding non-toxic and sustainable materials options, this group is conducting research on the impact of sustainable interior spaces on workplace productivity.

Sustainable Infrastructure

Our Sustainable Infrastructure Envision Team guides Clark Nexsen's Infrastructure and Transportation departments to design more sustainable site/civil and landscape infrastructure. This group utilizes the Envision system to engage stakeholders, evaluate projects from multiple perspectives, and develop solutions that address life cycle costs and long-term environmental challenges.

Resilient Design

With 50 percent of the U.S. population living along the coast, our waterfront engineering team plays a high profile role in researching and developing strategies to adapt to rising sea levels. Recent research efforts include a community-driven resilient master plan developed for the Virginia Beach area, which examined current flooding and projected sea level rise as well as neighborhood layouts to reimagine the area for decades to come. Designing for resiliency in coastal settings is just one aspect of delivering sustainable solutions for our clients.

Project Goals

Setting clear, meaningful goals for each project and communicating those goals to everyone on the design team is essential to the success of integrated design. To that end, Clark Nexsen has developed a system for facilitating the establishment of goals early in the project and documenting those goals in a way that is trackable and easy to share. Our accounting and project management software, Deltek Vision, has been customized to allow design teams to enter their project's goals into a database, incorporating the aspirational goals of the client and designers with clear, measurable sustainability goals within the categories of habitat, energy, water, and materials. This data is then linked directly with Clark Nexsen's intranet, called "the Cube," making the information easily accessible for the entire design team and ensuring everyone is working together toward the same goals.

Sustainability Tools

A major initiative in growing Clark Nexsen's proficiency in Integrated Design has been the establishment of a set of sustainability tools and resources available to design teams. Available via our intranet site, we have consolidated a number of useful documents and tools including AIA COTE documents, LEED resources, and tools for specifying green materials. In addition, Clark Nexsen has developed a number of in-house sustainability tools, including our "Appendix G." This tool serves as a summary of the AIA COTE Top Ten Toolkit, giving design teams a concise checklist of issues to consider throughout the life of a design project. Appendix G is linked into our Revit template, ensuring that each project addresses these issues and that everyone working on the design documentation has easy access to the established sustainability goals for the project.

Path To Net Zero

By signing on to the AIA 2030 Commitment in 2015, Clark Nexsen has joined a growing number of firms that are measuring the energy performance of their buildings and working toward designing all new buildings and major renovations to be carbon neutral by the year 2030. The 2030 Commitment requires design teams to track the predicted Energy Use Intensity, “pEUI,” measured in kBtu/sf/yr. The 2030 Challenge has established a current goal to achieve energy performance of 80% better than the national average per building type, which requires design teams and building owners to work closely together and share performance priorities. Clark Nexsen is currently reporting more than 90 projects over a cross section of building types. While the pEUI reduction is not yet reaching the 80% goal, it is significantly less than the baseline across all building types.