Materially Better Projects

Materially Better

Drawing on our history of helping our clients achieve Living Building Challenge (LBC) certification—the world’s most stringent green construction standard—IES can help every project team deliver healthier, more sustainable buildings, whether certifying or not. Even better, we can do it efficiently, on budget and on time, by leveraging our experience with dozens of LBC and LBC-inspired projects.

The Materially Better Building process begins by analyzing your team’s goals to create a sustainability strategy that incorporates your vision and standards, construction schedule, team buy in, budget considerations and more. The goal: ensure that each new project can be the best you’ve ever created.

Harvard Business School 25 Travis St., Harvard University, Boston, MA

Enterprise Research Campus (ERC), Harvard University, Allston, MA

Cumnock Hall, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA

One Size Does NOT Fit All

We employ the industry’s leading building product ingredient screen, the LBC Red List, to evaluate the building materials and product types your team requires. The result, in addition to making your building the healthiest and most sustainable possible, is a gradual but thorough transformation of your design team’s materials palette, accomplished in the most efficient, effective manner possible.

Materially Better projects are supported with IES’s Red2Green materials management software, which incorporates the components necessary to choose the best possible materials now and, if desired, to signal to all markets that future products must become better. Features such as decision-making criteria, record keeping and advocacy to manufacturers are adapted to achieve a fully customized and maximally impactful approach.

Harvard Business School Department of Operations, Shad Hall, Harvard University, Boston, MA

Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Tobin Montessori School and Vassal Lane Upper Schools, Cambridge, MA

A Proven Process

Leveraging IES’s experience in project delivery, each project features a responsibility matrix to ensure that roles are defined and clear cut. Materials selection begins with the best products in high-impact and widely used product types, while considering factors such as the well being of occupants and environmental justice benefits beyond the project’s boundaries. Materially Better building projects efficiently lock in progress at every step, allowing the continual transfer of data and process wisdom from one project to the next. This “ratcheting” process assures that each ensuing project can be the healthiest building your team has ever built.