Sustainability and Green Architecture
Bast and Rood have been committed to green, sustainable design practices since 1973. We have experimented with many passive solar strategies and superinsulation techniques. Orientation, glazing and envelope are always evaluated for energy efficiency. We encourage owners to consider life cycle costing which gives the true measure of the economy of a design. Much of our work has taken us beyond the traditional boundaries of a strict architecture practice:

Clivus Multrum Co. - The principals of the firm founded a company in 1975 to conduct research and development on composting toilets. We manufactured sold and installed the product, with improvements of our own design, for eventual incorporation into the main product line.

Mad River Hydro Co. - In order to promote alternative energy generation, Macrae Rood and William McDonough established this company to develope hydroelectric plants that sell electricity to public utilities generated from a renewable resource. Mad River Hydro also arranged for financing of North Wind Power Co., a company which manufactures wind turbines.

Yestermorrow Design Build School - We helped grow the school, which has as its central mission the teaching of sustainable design to lay persons as well as professionals in the field of architecture. We have been teaching in the school since 1980.

Public policy issues are an important aspect of sustainability As an elected local official for two decades, Bast has been a local and statewide advocate of sustainable practice. His town of Hinesburg created the first town-wide recycling program in Chittenden County. He helped lead the VT League of Cities and Towns towards reinforcing compact village infrastructure development, and has been involved in efforts to understand the dynamics and cost of sprawl.

He has been active in transportation issues on a regional and statewide basis, chairing a regional transportation planning group for towns and serving on the committee that developed new road design standards for the State of Vermont in 1997. These were the first standards nationally to reach beyond the safety of motorists, deferring to community and village goals, pedestrians and cyclists, for example. The new state standards were recognized by a special trustees award for excellence in public policy by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Rood helped a group of Lakota Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation, start a sustainable community to break the cycle of dependence on government support. We taught a core group how to build with local materials, including mud bricks, and logs cut and peeled on site. Rice hulls, normally a waste product, were used as insulation. The modest fund raising effort which we assembled was used to purchase state of the art windows for solar heating and photovoltaic panels for lighting. The community is completely off the grid, and five miles from the nearest road.

Northern Power Systems, MarBina Bridge and Green Mountain Valley School are just a few examples of the projects we have designed or are currently in the design process with sustainablitity issues at the core of the projects.