The Emeryville Resourceful Building Project

This three-unit affordable project, which won a 1999 Progressive Architecture Research Award, “proved that affordable housing and environmental sustainability are not mutually exclusive goals,” according to that award’s jury. The project focused on increasing energy efficiency, lowering operating costs, reducing resource consumption and creating healthy indoor environments using only conventional means of construction common to builders of affordable housing projects. “Addressing disciplines that ranged from design to life-cycle assessment to energy analysis,” a jury member commented, “and conducting research in the office as well as in the field, the team discovered that the cumulative effect of small environmental improvements combined with selected cost-saving measures can generate significant results.”