Designing a building to meet uncompromising philosophical standards while serving as an integrated space for classes, offices, public lectures and community events required an extraordinary design process. From 1993 through 1998, designing the Lewis Center included these steps:

• A group of students and David Orr researched alternative technologies and design strategies and prepared an initial proposal for the building.
• Student and faculty input was sought to define building goals and design it to meet their needs.
• 13 public design input sessions were held to solicit community ideas.
• Students designed projects to further look into what specific systems and products the new building should incorporate. Some examples of locations visited include Living Technologies in Burlington, VT to consider John Todd's Living Machine, and forests in the Pacific Northwest for suppliers of certified sustainable managed wood.

From the beginning, one of the main objectives was to create a building that functioned as an integrated system. To accomplish this, the Environmental Studies Program brought together a design team composed of experts in the fields of education, design, renewable energy, and current technologies.

Once preliminary designs for the building were laid out, more engineers and planners were brought on board to fine-tune the sketches and begin modeling the projected performance of the proposed building. A discussion of the entire design phase, including the challenges and many lessons we learned in the process appears in The Nature of Design (Oxford University Press, 2002) by Professor David W. Orr.

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