Zimmer Associates International has a reputation for creating highly elegant, powerfully distinctive and truly memorable properties. Zimmer Associates International has built its reputation on a unique, holistic approach to design and development. We embrace regenerative development - a natural systems approach that comprehends and builds on the complex human, natural and economic relationships that create and sustain the vitality and viability of place. Such an approach contributes to restoration of the local ecology, revitalization of the community culture, and self-reliance of the local economy.

Regenerative Design & Development











     
Enables developments to become integral parts of their natural and cultural environments
     
Creates an appropriate match of technology to need - reduces wasteful over design
     
Depends on local processes & resources to vary widely by locale - draws on human creativity for invention and adaptation to ever varying circumstances
     
Involves intentional redesign of ecosystems
     
Creates systems that continue to evolve after taking initial form - management is necessarily a creative activity as well
     
Requires understanding of how to determine limits - sustainability requires using natural processes and resources within their limits
       

         
Sustainability - Maintaining a healthy relationship with a place
     
The first step toward achieving sustainability in environmentally appropriate development is an in-depth site assessment - a study to evaluate the assets and liabilities of “Place” in terms that relate directly to the appropriateness of planned or existing use
     
The scope of considerations is such a study focus on the relationships between the factors that created and maintain the existing system, and the health, productivity and resilience of that whole
     
For it is an intimate understanding of the connections between land, human, geologic, and natural history as well as the natural cycles and forces that play across and through a site that tells the story of Place - the breadth of the personality of our partner
     
Within these limits the elements of design can be placed in an array that not only complements the   Whole we are about to join, but also creates safe, energy-efficient, comfortable, productive and aesthetically pleasing human habitat
     
The advantages of entering into healthy relationship with place extends beyond preserving a healthy environment, our legacy to our descendants
     
It enables us to understand how to avoid dysfunctional designs, the antithesis of sustainability
     
A metaphor for healthy relationship with the Whole is the attention and consideration given to water. In   an ethical, sustainable system of design, water is recognized as the most precious resource - the lifeblood of Place
     
Every element of a design for an environmentally appropriate, sustainable development needs to address its relationship to water
     
How can water be held at its highest potential in this system?
     
How can our design s interact with the system’s - our system’s lifeblood - in a manner that retains its integrity, its purity, and its potential energy for as many cycles as possible before it finally leaves?
     
Regenerative systems, or in a smaller sense regenerative design elements, replace themselves or grow in extent to sophistication with the passage of time
     
Achieving environmentally appropriate or sustainable development is really about engaging in a process or relationship with a Place on this earth
     
A willingness to intimately know oneself and to know one’s partner with the same intimacy, respect for limits and boundaries, appreciation of the partner’s virtues, mutual sharing and sacrifice, continual communication and reassessment, a zest for life and the joy of living, and commitment to be in relationship
     
     
     
         
Sustainable Development
       
  • A whole systems approach developed out of whole sytems thinking
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  • Every issue is holographic
  • Relationship…relationship…relationship
  • Nature achieves economies by “stacking” functions, not isolating
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  • Ethic based vs. regulation and procedure based development
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  • Moving beyond palliatives
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  • Being damage neutral is not enough to pay the bills of past development practices
  • Development must regenerate our core community systemsculture, economy, and ecology
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