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June 2, 2003

Lord, Aeck & Sargent Receives CSI Environmental Sensitivity Award

Award Honors Architecture Firm for Commitment to Sustainable Design

ATLANTA, June 2, 2003 – An ongoing commitment to the routine integration of sustainability in the design and development of its buildings has earned the architecture firm of Lord, Aeck & Sargent an Environmental Sensitivity Award from The Construction Specifications Institute (CSI). The award was presented to Lord, Aeck & Sargent at the recent CSI Show in Chicago.

CSI gives the award annually to no more than two entities or individuals for showing exceptional devotion to the use of sustainable and environmentally friendly materials, and for striving to create functional, sensitive and healthy buildings for clients.

According to LouAnn Fornataro, chair of CSI’s awards committee, “Our committee was impressed with the significant body of Lord, Aeck & Sargent’s sustainable design work. Also, endorsement letters from clients clearly showed that they appreciated the firm’s expertise in the particular specialty of sustainable design, and its resulting benefit in the performance of their buildings.”

“It’s a great honor for our firm to have received CSI’s prestigious Environmental Sensitivity Award,” said Jim Nicolow, the LEED-accredited architect who leads Lord, Aeck & Sargent’s sustainable design initiative. “We’re especially proud because the award recognizes a body of work, in other words, Lord, Aeck & Sargent’s continuous efforts to design and oversee construction of energy-efficient, environmentally friendly buildings.”

Nicolow pointed to a few of Lord, Aeck & Sargent’s current and recent environmentally sensitive projects. These include:

• The Twin Creeks Science and Education Center, a project for the National Park Service in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park;
• The Southface Energy Institute Eco Office, which will be a commercial office demonstration building in Atlanta;
• The Advanced Materials Characterization Laboratory, a project for the U.S. Department of Energy, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee;
• The Automotive Research Facility at the University of Michigan – Dearborn; and
• The Science & Mathematics Building at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC.

Well before the 1999 development of the LEED standard1 for high-performance, sustainable buildings, Lord, Aeck & Sargent designed many other award-winning buildings, among them:

• Zoo Atlanta’s Conservation Action Resource Center, which has been honored by the Southface Energy Institute and received the Fernbank Science Center’s Students’ Award for Leadership Toward Sustainability; and 
• The Georgia Public Health Laboratory (GPHL), which is recognized as a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) LABS21 high-performance lab. The EPA and U.S. Department of Energy have stated that GPHL is 30-40 percent more energy efficient than it would have been if designed as a conventional code-compliant lab. GPHL was named R&D Magazine’s 1998 Laboratory of the Year. 

“With these and many other Lord, Aeck & Sargent planning and design projects, our approach is to incorporate appropriate building orientation, water and energy efficiency, sensitive resource and material selection, a healthy environment, and most important, durability, flexibility and maintainability,” Nicolow said. “Our philosophy is to create pleasant, daylit buildings that are user friendly and can be used effectively for many generations.”

About CSI

CSI is an individual membership technical society with nearly 18,000 members, including architects, specifiers, engineers, contractors, product representatives, building owners and facility managers. The Institute's goal is to enhance communication in the construction industry through products that organize and standardize construction documents, and services that keep industry professionals current in their fields. Founded in 1948, CSI is headquartered in Alexandria, Va., and has 143 local chapters nationwide. For more information about CSI, call 800-689-2900 or visit www.csinet.org.

About Lord, Aeck & Sargent

Lord, Aeck & Sargent is a full-service architecture firm specializing in science, historic preservation and education. The Atlanta-based firm, founded in 1942, works to promote buildings that are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work. For more information on Lord, Aeck & Sargent, visit www.lordaecksargent.com.

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¹ The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating SystemTM is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings. The standard was developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, which is the nation’s foremost coalition of leaders from across the building industry working to promote buildings that are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work.