Profile: Design Performance

Good design is sustainable, universal, functional and beautiful. Good design is achieved through research, observation, listening, innovation, and by implementing an integrative design process that gives everyone a voice. At Orcutt | Winslow we place value in every member of the project team from building occupants and stakeholders to engineers and contractors. We believe a design is not handed off to team members after the architect’s input, but grows organically through participation by everyone and validation of ideas to achieve the best possible outcomes.

This process will deliver a concept that timeless, resilient, universal, intuitive, and true to the culture, community and site.
Our team works with clients to set project goals for energy and sustainability. We utilize early and iterative energy modeling tools to test the hypotheses of the team, providing real time feedback and life cycle cost analysis of many sustainable strategies including building orientation, location and amount of glass, daylighting, reduction of glare, shading devices, water conservation and building materials. This gives us a very good idea of which sustainable strategies will have the most meaningful impact to the project.  We continue to validate the energy efficiency of the design through future phases with additional modeling.

Orcutt Winslow has completed many sustainable and LEED Certified projects (from Certified to Platinum levels) and the integrated design process noted above is essential to success in good design, sustainability, LEED, WELL, or The Living Building Challenge.

Orcutt | Winslow has been working on designing environmentally-conscious buildings for over 38 years. Being deeply committed to sustainability, the firm has been on the forefront of incorporating various design solutions that are both socially and environmentally responsive.  We have 27 LEED Accredited Professionals and 3 WELL Accredited Professionals on staff, a dedicated High Performance and Sustainability Leader (Ashley Mulhall), Environmental Specialists, Anthropologists, Energy Modelers and an in-house team dedicated to education and implementation of sustainable initiatives within our office, community and projects. Our thought leaders speak nationally on the practical uses and benefits of high-performance buildings designed with an integrated approach where the built environment benefits from the synergistic integration of architecture, engineering and technology.

Our experts have assisted various clients in obtaining support and grants for district and campus-wide Net-Zero/Sustainability Masterplans. Even our own office was recently designed to achieve LEED Certification as well as WELL Building Certification and Living Building Challenge Petal Certification. In addition to the first LEED High School in Arizona, Verrado High School, Orcutt | Winslow designed Pendergast Elementary, Phoenix’s First LEED Gold Elementary School. Orcutt | Winslow’s LEED Platinum ASU Health Services became one of the AIA COTE Top 10 Most sustainable buildings in the nation.