A modern home is not truly modern unless its design and function takes the environment into account. The more common term for this type of structure and/or philosophy is often times referred to as ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘green’. Yet one of the problems many people face these days when buying a supposed ‘green home’ is understanding the standard by which its ‘greeness’ is being measured. There are some standardized green building programs that have gained more notoriety than others; namely Earthcraft and LEED. However, while these programs and their subsequent green classifications may be more well known than others, the criteria by which these classifications are made many times are not clearly presented to the general public and occasionally are even counterintuitive to the goals they are intended to achieve. While we are certainly not oppossed to design and build for any type of project, and/or it's chosen certification program, we want to make it clear to our clients that our designs are intended to be sustainable; certification program or not.

Greensphere is the classification system we have developed for our building projects and it is intended to be a simplified and concise way of conveying a project’s level, and/or amount, of green features. Similar to the levels found in third party green certifications such as LEED and Earthcraft, the ascending three levels to Greensphere (Greensphere 1-3) incorporate more green elements than the previous level. While a structure that has a higher Greensphere level could arguably be considered ‘more green’ than one with a lower level, it does not take away from the fact that even our lowest Greensphere level structure has a higher energy efficiency and more sustainable qualities than 99.9% of other structures built or being built today.

The Greensphere classification has also adopted The 2030 Challenge that has been created by Architecture 2030. The current target is an energy consumption performance standard of 50% of the regional average for the particular building type being measured. By 2030 the benchmark will be 100% meaning a house consumes zero energy from outside sources. The 2030 Challenge goes far beyond the highest levels of almost every green certification program out there today and really gets to the point of providing real actionable guidelines that, if used and followed, will have a substantial impact on reversing climate change. It is for this reason that Concourse E has adopted The Challenge for all of our current and future Greensphere projects."

Click here to download our detailed Greensphere™ chart PDF