Green Design

'Sustainability' and 'green design' are the standards as developers, architects and engineers are personally or professionally being charged to meet energy, water and environmental challenges. Our community is being asked to meet these challenges within the constraints of limited budgets and tight timetables.

At Stewart Engineering, our commitment to sustainability is through the application of integrated engineering design to buildings and infrastructure to determine the optimum solution for each of our clients' particular needs.

At the heart of our approach, is a design framework that consciously integrates each subsystem as part of the larger, interdependent whole system.

Let's take a simple example of how designing an energy-efficient building requires an integrated design strategy.

Heating, cooling, and lighting represent 90% of the energy load in a typical Florida home or office. The building orientation, massing, envelope (roof, walls and windows), and other passive design elements will be the most significant factors in determining the overall building performance and the on-going operating costs for providing these core services. If each of the core services (heating & cooling, hot water and lighting) are designed as separate systems the opportunity to cost-effectively design a high-performance building is lost.

In short, sustainable, high-performance design requires collaboration across and within the architectural design and engineering teams and the engineering team needs to be included as early as possible in the design process.

At Stewart Engineering, sustainability is integral to our design approach and not a bolted-on extra. We believe true sustainability must meet the needs of our client, the environment and the budget.