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.
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Regenerative Design & Development
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Enables developments to become integral parts
of their natural and cultural environments |
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Creates an appropriate match of technology
to need - reduces wasteful over design
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Depends on local processes & resources
to vary widely by locale - draws on human creativity for invention
and adaptation to ever varying circumstances
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Involves intentional redesign of ecosystems
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Creates systems that continue to evolve after
taking initial form - management is necessarily a creative activity as
well
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Requires understanding of how to determine
limits - sustainability requires using natural processes
and resources within their limits
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Sustainability - Maintaining a healthy
relationship with a place
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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The advantages
of entering into healthy relationship with place extends beyond preserving
a healthy environment, our legacy to our descendants |
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It enables
us to understand how to avoid dysfunctional designs, the antithesis of
sustainability |
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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 |
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Every element
of a design for an environmentally appropriate, sustainable development
needs to address its relationship to water |
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How can water
be held at its highest potential in this system? |
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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? |
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Regenerative
systems, or in a smaller sense regenerative design elements, replace
themselves or grow in extent to sophistication with the passage
of time |
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Achieving
environmentally appropriate or sustainable development is really about
engaging in a process or relationship with a Place on this earth |
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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 |
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Sustainable
Development
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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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