Playa Viva was recently featured in a book entitled “The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building: Redefining the Practice of Sustainability” by the 7group and Bill Reed.  We highly recommend the book as well as Bill Reed and the team from Regenesis that lead our early design process.

We have been contacted recently by several groups that have been inspired by Playa Viva as a model for sustainable development.  These folks wanted to know how to get started working in a sustainable manner. Many of the early lessons we learned are covered in this book.  A quick look at the table of contents gives a snap shot of the process we underwent over the last three years.  With Playa Viva scheduled to open November of this year, we are about to enter into one of the most important cycles in this regenerative process – Feedback and Evolving in the Field (see Table of Contents of the book below).

In reality, we have constantly maintained a feedback loop and have been evolving in the field. What started as fractional offering now will open as a boutique hotel.  Moving palm trees in order to build tree houses on the beach, evolved to moving the tree houses to were the palm trees are already located. These are just two of so many examples of feedback and evolution in our project. Yet each of these changes remains true to the core values that were agreed upon by the entire development group early in the design process (see Chapter Four).

We congratulate Bill and team for this wonderful book and thank them for including Playa Viva as a case study from which others can learn.

Chapter One: Many Minds.

Chapter Two: Building as an Organism.

Chapter One: Many Minds.

Chapter Two: Building as an Organism.

Chapter Three: Reframing Sustainability.

Chapter Four: Aligning Values, Purpose and Process.

Chapter Five: The Discovery Phase.

Chapter Six: Schematic Design.

Chapter Seven: Design Development and Documentation.

Chapter Eight: Construction, Operations, and Feedback.

Chapter Nine: Epilogue: Evolving the Field.