Environmental Works Community Design Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit community-based architectural firm, founded with the express purpose of providing professional architectural, landscape architecture, and planning services to non-profit organizations, municipal agencies and otherwise under-represented communities in the Puget Sound area. Since our founding in 1970 we have provided feasibility/predevelopment studies and complete architectural services for human services agencies, community facilities, affordable housing providers, and public art projects.
Working in both the public and private sectors, the staff of Environmental Works understand the need for community involvement, the impacts of having multiple funding sources, and ways of working effectively with pre-established budgets.
Environmental Works is committed to the effective use of capital funds in creating sustainable communities. We pride ourselves on providing quality architecture and landscape architecture within this challenging framework and working to see that the ultimate social purpose of the building is well-served in each architectural design. In addition, Environmental Works has a long-standing commitment to socially and environmentally sustainable design, and have developed a number of successful strategies for designing ecologically thoughtful and affordable buildings and sites. These strategies are based on three core issues – conserving resources, promoting local economies (human, material and natural) and the careful adaptation of a building to both the natural and cultural conditions of the site.
We proactively and intentionally maintain an open and mutually supportive office culture – one of our baseline values. Information, expertise, lessons learned and constructive criticism are shared throughout all of our work together. In this way, each project benefits from our combined knowledge base, each staff person grows in their capacity to serve our clients well, and the benefits of deep collaboration spread to the entire development team.
Our office is organized into four studios - housing, community facilities, landscape, and special projects. Each studio is headed by an experienced architect who has more than twenty years experience each. Bill Singer is our Housing Studio lead, Sally Knodell is our Community Facilities lead, and Nicolas Morin leads our Landscape studio, who joins the EW team from Barker Landscape Architects. Mike Mackie is our quality control lead and building envelope expert and moves between all of the studios advising on key parts of projects. We work in teams within the office with more experienced staff heading up the teams and working closely with support staff and consultants. Our goal is to provide consistent project representation during the entire project. There is continuity of staffing throughout the project with back up provided within the organization when needed.
