Winning shades of green: CSDA entries highlight progress of sustainable development in Colorado.

• Author: Radoff, Joshua
• Position: Colorado Sustainable Design Awards

The entries in the inaugural Colorado Sustainable Design Awards represent a cross section of sustainable development activities in Colorado, highlighting both the progress that's been made in the last several years as well as the realities of the market in the last year.

In each category--Residential, Commercial, Civic and Communities--we were able to reach unanimous consensus on nearly all of the awards. In the process of comparing the relative merits of one entry versus another, we made the following observations:

Residential: Clearly, there is a segment of the single-family residential market that is pushing the edges of sustainability. The aspirations for this category included net-zero-energy houses [over the course of a year, the house produces more energy than it uses] and the thirst within Colorado to do away with the antiquated water laws and begin capturing and reusing gray water, as demonstrated in the top two winners.

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While these pioneering efforts are undeniably groundbreaking, we hope these goals and achievements can start to manifest themselves in projects that also include affordability, transit access, small size [such as through attached housing], and nestled in more pedestrian neighborhoods.

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We also saw the beginnings of a movement toward modular sustainable housing--again embracing the goals of sustainability and affordability--and we will be eager to see this trend continue. Also, we realized there is a need for a distinct category for higher density multifamily housing as these tend to be more sustainable from the get-go, and we hope to either add this category or see more of these entries in the residential section in the future.

Commercial and Civic: These broad categories cover a variety of building types. In deciding the winners, we gravitated toward those that used the vocabulary of performance and metrics in describing their projects.

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We found it difficult to credit a project with an award if it didn't reference its percent reduction in energy use relative to the baseline established by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers; or quote its projected or actual energy performance in kBtu/SF (a thousand British thermal units per square foot); or report its water reductions in gallons or percent reduction from a baseline.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards have made the use of performance...