Throughout this book, I ll be showing you examples of high-performance projects, generally LEED Platinum level achievements and telling you how the participants worked together to achieve these outcomes. In this chapter, I ll show examples from several projects and draw some general conclusions from the experiences of architects, owners, engineers, and contractors. The bottom line: it s very difficult to achieve high-level outcomes without some form of integrated design process.

A leading exponent of integrated design is Boston-based architect William G. (Bill) Reed. Reed is widely credited with being one of the original coauthors of the U.S. Green Building Council s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. For the past several years, he has been beating the drum for the integrative design process as a way to produce not just green buildings but buildings and sites that are actually restorative in process and outcome. Reed is a principal with two firms, Regenesis and the Integrative Design Collaborative. He says this about the integrative design process. ^[*]

It s very easy to implement the integrative design process but you have to have a design team and clients that are willing to change the nature of their design process. It s not hard, but it s different. This is about change. How easy is this to do? It really depends on how willing people are to begin a change process.

To do different things with sustainability (which is what we re doing in integrative design), we have to do things differently. To do things differently, we...