Crafting a Community: 20 Years of Partnership with the Santa Lucia Preserve

In 2004, Feldman Architecture designed our first home in The Preserve, kicking off a long-term relationship with the community, and introducing a precedent and appreciation for contemporary and sustainable design - with numerous homes completed and 5 more currently in design or under construction.

Feldman Architecture is happy to announce that we’re officially a Just certified organization! The Just Label, run by the International Living Future Institute, functions similarly to a nutrition label that scores organizations on socially just and equitable operations and policies. As a voluntary disclosure tool, it’s a transparency platform for organizations to disclose specific information about their operations, from employee demographics and benefits to financial and community investments. It requires reporting on a range of operational indicators that outline accountability metrics for each organization to be recognized at four levels of performance. See Feldman Architecture’s complete Just Dashboard below, which provides information on each of our 24 performance indicators, and our company policies individually addressing each indicator.

Launched in Spring 2023, this initiative takes aim at each residential project’s operational and embodied carbon, setting an aggressive target of 100 metric-tons (tonnes) per home (for reference, driving from San Francisco to Atlanta emits 1 metric ton of carbon, and the average FA home has a carbon footprint of ~200 metric tons). We will measure the projected carbon emissions of each project throughout the design phases via energy modeling and embodied carbon analysis, using this to data to further optimize our designs. We will continue to measure operational carbon emissions post-occupancy, and carbon offsets will be purchased for those exceeding the budget one year after completion.

We’re excited to add an installment to our Living Building Challenge blog series, tracking our progress with Curveball, which will aim to be our first project to achieve a Living Building Challenge certification, as well as the first residential certification at CORE level or higher in California.