Douglas Farr

Douglas Farr (FAIA, LEED AP, CNU-A) is the founding principal of Farr Associates, an award-winning architecture and planning firm identified by the New York Times as "the most prominent of the city's growing cadre of ecologically sensitive architects." Having a mission to design sustainable human environments, Farr's niche is in applying the principles of LEED at the scale of the neighborhood and in designing green buildings exclusively for urban contexts. Farr Associates was the first firm in the world to design three LEED-Platinum buildings (Christy Webber Landscapes, the Chicago Center for Green Technology and the Center for Neighborhood Technology), which stand as models of urban architectural sustainability. An architecture graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University, Doug's work has been featured in Architectural Record, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the PBS documentary "The Green Machine." Doug is on the board of the Congress for the New Urbanism, serves on the BioRegional Development Group board of directors, on the Energy and Climate TAC of the Star Community Index, and was the founding chair of the LEED Neighborhood Development project (LEED-ND). Based on the firm's pioneering sustainable design practice and his insights gained from chairing LEED-ND, Doug authored Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature. This planning best seller visualizes Sustainable Urbanism--the growing sustainable design convergence that integrates walkable and transit-served urbanism with high-performance infrastructure and buildings--as the normal pattern of development in the United States by 2030.