How Does Two Decades of Green Building Add Up?
We Built a Dashboard to Find Out.
In 2004, when our cofounders began their first LEED project, the framework was still in its infancy, but our first certified projects were trailblazers on an international scale, and a meaningful part of Pittsburgh’s post-industrial reinvention as an intellectual and creative hub.
More than two decades and hundreds of sustainable design projects later, evolveEA’s leadership in this space continues to grow, right alongside the ecosystem of building performance frameworks itself. Our Building Performance Studio remains the cornerstone of that work, helping teams identify ambitious goals and providing the tools, consulting, and design services to reach them.
To make the full scope of this body of work visible, we recently launched our Building Performance Dashboard. Built on more than twenty years of consistent project tracking, this platform surfaces insights that actively shape our strategy, deepening the effectiveness of sustainable design, broadening access to resilience and wellness practices in construction and operations, and helping us lead the next phase of transformation.
Check out the dashboard: projects.evolveea.com
The Dashboard and Directory together offer a new data-driven window into this body of work. Each certified project is documented in the project directory, which we’re actively expanding to include WELL, Passive House, Energy Star, and Living Building Challenge projects. We’re also implementing client logins for portfolio accounts — so owners and managers of multi-building campuses can log in and track their cumulative impact across an entire portfolio of projects. A few highlights from the current data:
- More than half of evolveEA’s LEED projects achieved Gold or Platinum status, reflecting clients who set ambitious goals and followed through
- Education and Commercial clients have invested the most in LEED certification — both renovations and new construction — and have seen significant returns in energy cost savings as a result
- Water savings may be the most striking result across the full portfolio: the average across 128 LEED certified projects stands at 37% per square foot of built area
Our Building Performance Studio takes a data-driven approach to the environmental challenges that conventional design and construction consistently produce. We help teams find the practical early wins, while also building a framework to push toward more ambitious performance targets. We analyze impact potential at every stage of the building lifecycle — and our goal-setting process with project stakeholders helps identify the rating systems and frameworks that fit your situation best. From there, we offer a full suite of consulting and design services to guide the work.
If you’re exploring sustainable design for an upcoming project, we’d love to talk.