Energy efficiency, good water management, daylighting, and all the other sustainability strategies we champion are meaningless if they’re not available to everybody. Social sustainability and equity, as explored in this week’s podcast, must be at the core of our work. At SERA, social sustainability has roots in our founders Bing Sheldon and Don Eggleston’s dedication […]
Sustainability, when you scale it up beyond buildings to think about neighborhoods, campuses, or regions, isn’t just about stormwater and mini-power grids. Sustainable strategies have to be rooted in the character and identity of their location, and add to its richness—this is what we mean by sustainable placemaking. History, past development patterns, and ongoing community […]
As sustainable construction has evolved and our whole industry has made dramatic improvements around energy use and water management, we’ve learned to look more broadly—this is one of the biggest ideas behind SERA’s Sustainability Action Plan and in this latest podcast it extends to embodied carbon—at all the impacts involved with erecting a building, sourcing […]
This month, the Clackamas County Board of County Commissioners accepted the work of the SERA-led Park Avenue Community Project and approved the effort to move forward into a code amendment process. This is a major success for a community that over the last decade has undergone multiple previous plan efforts never to be approved. Community […]
Recently, a crack squad of designers and architects in SERA’s Workplace studio took part in an international design competition that asked competitors to envision different aspects of the return to work in an office building environment. (Spoiler alert: we won.) The specific area that we chose to investigate deeply is the first-floor lobby and shared […]
A connection to nature allows humans to feel safe, healthy, and productive. We design for human experience and take responsibility for making the people who eventually move through our spaces feel those same things. So the topic of biophilia gets a lot of attention at SERA, whether we’re talking about a new building or interior […]
May you live in interesting times. — Dubious blessing of apocryphal Chinese origin As I write this, the US has surpassed 260,000 Covid-19 deaths, Oregon continues to hit grim milestones for new daily records for both cases and active hospitalizations, and new closures and lockdowns, necessary to contain the spread of the virus, are again […]
At SERA, we published our first Sustainability Action Plan (PDF) in 2011, with multiple updates since then. Earlier this year, we published our most recent—and extensive—version, which includes some new topics and a great deal of information about both the latest thinking in the industry, and some of the recent work we’ve done which explores […]
We’re excited to announce that the nonprofit housing group First Community Housing has selected SERA and our partners Lendlease to design and build their most ambitious affordable housing project to date: a 365-unit LEED-Platinum development near the San Jose Diridon Station. Named McEvoy Apartments, the project will be built using an innovative mass timber frame […]
For her capstone university project, SERA designer Lindsey Naganuma collaborated on a library concept for Portland’s Cully neighborhood — one that builds community, celebrates diverse identities, and challenges how residents learn and share information. Her conceptual design is now a 2020 SEED Award winner, recognized by the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), the NAACP, […]