At River Street Architecture, we are passionate about creating beautiful, efficient, sustainable buildings that are not only responsive to our client’s needs, but also to their site, community and surroundings, ensuring that they will be enjoyed for generations to come.
Profile
River Street Architecture, LLC provides full-scale architectural services with experience across the spectrum of the built environment, from broad master planning and urban design to more fine-grained and detailed building science and construction consulting.
The firm is equally comfortable and experienced designing for different types of uses, including institutional, industrial, retail, hospitality, medical, and residential. We are passionate about creating beautiful, efficient, sustainable buildings that are not only responsive to our clients’ needs, but also to their site, community and surroundings, ensuring that they will be enjoyed for generations to come. This is achieved through a process of focused listening that seeks to truly understand and respond to the inherent nuances of each particular client. We employ a holistic and highly collaborative approach to design, considering cost, practicality, beauty, consultant expertise, and building performance as integrated parts of a larger whole.
Our approach results in - and relies on - strong relationships with clients, consultants, product representatives, contractors, tradesmen, and other professionals, all of whom play critical roles in our process, which we characterize as ego-free centered on mutual respect and superb collaboration.
Leadership
In addition to our process, two specific pursuits set us apart from other firms. First, environmentally responsible design follows as a direct result of our process. Whether pushing innovative building wall systems for increased thermal efficiency or researching the latest products for cost effectiveness and performance, we are continually pushing ourselves to design more efficient buildings that last longer, cost less, and are beautiful contributions to the city. Additionally, the company is saturated with LEED expertise. Forty percent of our staff is LEED accredited, and several colleagues in the office have led community training sessions on LEED, high-performance building science, and energy efficiency codes. Second, River Street was the first local firm to employ the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software into our practice. We now employ BIM on 100% of our projects and are beginning to facilitate the integration of the virtual modeling into estimating, construction, engineering systems, and green design. Our software tools limit building systems conflicts, save money, and drastically improve communication.
The goal of our work is to design great buildings — not receive awards. Nevertheless we are proud of the acknowledgments that we have received, especially because it’s always nice to hear from someone else that what you’re doing is working. Two adapted reuse projects, our office at 714 Cherry Street and the historic Freight Depot, received the Sophia Long Award for distinguished service in the promotion of historic preservation. Additionally, our firm received the mayor’s green design award for our leadership in the community as well as the work on our new office in the central business district. Finally, our office received the first official Chattanooga LEED certification from the USGBC in April 2009, a Gold rating. As with all of these projects, our success is dependent on mutual respect of all stakeholders in our project teams and superb collaboration throughout all phases of design and construction.