Out on a limb

Most Northwest residents living in conventional homes can sail through the region’s dry summers without much heed to conservation. But for the future residents of North Portland’s Kenton Living Building, where energy and water needs are met entirely on-site, a lack of conservation could significantly rock the boat.

“Imagine heading into July with four families living in a building with no connection to city water at all and realizing that until it rains again, no more water is coming,” says Peter Wilcox, owner of Renewal Associates, a Portland-based sustainable development consulting and investment firm. Currently locked in the design and financing stage, the Kenton Living Building proposes to turn such a scenario into reality. The 4,600-square-foot, four-unit residential building with a small daycare center aims to use only captured rainwater or gray water to meet its water needs and only power generated from on-site renewable sources to meet its energy needs.

Achieving “net-zero” water and energy are just two of 16 prerequisites the Kenton project needs to reach to meet the Living Building Standard, a new green building rating system launched in November 2006 by the Cascadia Green Building Council.

“By doing a LEED Gold building (see “Breaking ground,” Feb. 2007) that is probably going to turn into a LEED Platinum building, I am realizing how mildly LEED addresses the needs of the planet,” Wilcox says, describing the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. “I immediately realized this was a chance to really do something remarkable, to try to find out what it means to be a truly sustainable building in terms of financing, constructing, designing, developing and the people that are actually using a building of this type.”

With the team of architects and engineers he’s assembled, Wilcox says the Kenton project could become the world’s first certified Living Building — but at a significant price premium. Wilcox estimates the project will cost more than twice a similar conventional construction project. Like many others pursuing the challenge, Wilcox says he’s viewing the Kenton Living Building as a demonstration project that could prove the value of high-performance, low-impact buildings in a carbon-constrained world.

The Living Building Standard is harder to achieve but easier to document than LEED certification, says Jason McLennan, Cascadia’s CEO and author of the Living Building Standard. The LEED rating system for new buildings requires projects to meet a certain number of credits during the design-build process to attain one of four ratings: Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum. Design teams can pick and choose design elements, which earn up to 69 total possible points. Alternately, the Living Building Standard requires builders to meet just 16 prerequisites, but it doesn’t prescribe how they do it. And unlike LEED, only buildings that have operated for a full year can achieve Living Building status.

“There is a tremendous beauty in its simplicity,” says John Fleming, a senior associate at Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun. “The proof’s in the pudding. You don’t really get the award until after an occupancy evaluation to see if it’s doing what you said it would do.”

The Kenton Living Building is situated alongside Portland's light-rail line, near grocery and retail stores.

For example, the Kenton Living Building team, which includes Wilcox, SERA Architects and Interface Engineering, plans to use energy modeling to improve the building’s efficiency and then submit the electric bills for a full 12-month cycle to show the building produced as much energy through renewables as it used, according to SERA architect Lisa Petterson. “To meet the energy credit with a LEED building, you’d have to do a complete energy model and submit reams of data on a computer disk.”

Similarly, the Kenton team can prove the building meets the net-zero water prerequisite by submitting water and sewage bills. While the building includes a 40,000-gallon rainwater collection tank and a 10,000-gallon gray water tank for water collection, the city of Portland currently prohibits the reuse of rainwater for clothes washing and toilet flushing, or treating rainwater for drinking water in a multi-family building.

The team says it plans to attempt to appeal the codes, but expects the city will require the building to connect to city water and sewer systems. In such a case, the team can prove with a year’s worth of water and sewer bills that the building did not use the services.

The Living Building Challenge has some “not-so-hidden agendas,” says Clark Brockman, a SERA architect and the vice chairman of Cascadia’s board. “One is to really drive research behind products, and another is to push for changes in policy.”

Two Web-based tools have already emerged to help design teams meet the Living Building prerequisites, including the Pharos Project, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia of building materials launched by the Healthy Building Network and Cascadia in November 2006. Another product, BuildCarbonNeutral.com, is a free online carbon calculator that tallies the embodied carbon of building construction projects (see “Builders scrap construction carbon,” June 2007). Developed by Mithun, along with landscape architects at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas, the site went live in May.

Buildings consume 71 percent of U.S. electricity and 12 percent of U.S. water and account for almost half the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Yet federal funding for research on high-performance green building practices and technologies amounts to only 0.2 percent of all federally funded research — an average of $193 million annually between 2002 and 2005 — according to a 2007 study by the USGBC Research Committee.

The committee recommends the two federal agencies with the primary function of funding academic research — the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — direct at least 2 percent of their research budgets toward green building technology, research and development.

In the meantime, the private sector has taken the lead on the research and development behind high-performance buildings. Architecture 2030, the nonprofit founded by architect Ed Mazria, aims to help architects and planners address global warming through building design. The group launched the 2030 Challenge in January 2006, calling architects to immediately reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption of new buildings by 50 percent, with additional 5 percent reductions every five years. The ultimate goal: produce carbon-neutral buildings by 2030.

Nearly 100 individuals and 125 organizations have already joined the challenge, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing all U.S. cities with populations of 30,000 or more, the American Institute of Architects, representing 80,000 licensed architects, emerging professionals and partners and USGBC, representing 91,000 green building professionals.

“LEED is great, but from my perspective, it doesn’t really address the critical issues, which are global warming and energy reduction,” says Steve Straus, CEO of Glumac, a West Coast engineering firm with offices in California, Portland and Seattle. Straus says LEED is a great measuring device, but with just 17 possible energy-related credits, it doesn’t put enough of an emphasis on energy reduction.

With 19 LEED-certified projects under its belt, including the Platinum-rated Gerding Theater at the Armory in Portland, and 33 LEED-registered projects in process, Glumac is trying to meet the 2030 Challenge on a new high-rise office building slated for downtown Portland.

Glumac’s staff has grown by 39 percent since 2001, when the company began focusing on green buildings. Straus attributes the company’s growth to its commitment to green building, noting that the firm is attracting younger engineers who are more concerned about Glumac’s environmental policies than potential salaries or stock options.

But the appeal goes beyond just design and construction professionals. Straus says CEOs of large corporations are also realizing global warming is an important issue to address. “One, if they do it right, their company will have a better bottom line,” Straus says. “Two, it’s critical in attracting and retaining good employees.”

On average, green buildings use 30 percent less energy than conventional buildings. A 100,000- square-foot office building that is 30 percent more energy-efficient saves $750,000 in annual energy savings, according to “Green Building Costs and Financial Benefits,” a 2003 report released by Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.

“It’s less about staying above the competition and more about the realization of the impact that buildings have on climate change,” says Amanda Sturgeon, an architect at the Seattle office of design firm Perkins + Will. With 900 U.S. employees, Perkins + Will is one of the nation’s largest green designs firms. “We have thousands of projects nationwide, and we are trying to get them all to conform to the 2030 challenge,” Sturgeon says.

She was leading the design process for a new 85,000-square-foot office building for the Washington Department of Ecology when Cascadia rolled out the Living Building Challenge. The design team was already pursuing a LEED Platinum rating. “We thought it would be a good challenge for us to see what it would take to get it from a Platinum building to a Living Building,” Sturgeon says.

It didn’t take much.

Adding three 500-megawatt wind turbines to the Washington Department of Ecology’s proposed building took the design from LEED Platinum to Living Building potential.

The building was already predicted to be 70 percent more energy-efficient than standard Washington code and meet 20 percent of its energy needs through solar panels. The building’s location near a freeway provided good wind quality and plenty of space for wind generators. By adding three wind turbines — a luxury most urban projects don’t have — with a total generating capacity of 1,500 megawatts, the design team expects the building could produce more energy than it consumes.

The Washington Department of Ecology, which sets the state’s water quality standards, was already committed to treating wastewater on-site, so the net-zero water prerequisite was a wash, according to Sturgeon. There were other challenges though, such as naturally ventilating an entire building that sits next to a freeway. “We turned the challenges into opportunities,” Sturgeon says. The team penciled in a habitat restoration plan for the side of the building adjacent to the highway to act as a filter for fresh air.

Calculating energy savings and the elimination of water, sewage and stormwater connections, Sturgeon says she expects the LEED Platinum building design to pay back its additional costs in fewer than 10 years. The only significant added cost to pursue the Living Building design would have been related to the wind turbines, she adds. Just 35 projects have attained LEED Platinum certification, but McLennan and many others at the forefront of green building design say the market is ready for a new paradigm such as the Living Building Standard. “You have to look at how many more Platinum buildings are coming through the pipeline,” McLennan says. “The market is more ready than people think.”

He points to factors such as a reduction in the incremental costs of high-efficiency buildings, buy-in from developers and the real estate industry’s commitment to valuating the performance of green buildings in comparison to traditional ones (see “The value of green building,” Jan. 2007).

“If you look at the trends, in terms of awareness about global climate change, I think it’s going to become more and more evident to developers and other entities that they need to push as far as they can,” McLennan says, citing the 60 teams that have already signed up for the challenge as proof the market is ready for the Living Building Standard. “It’s pulling more people into the movement, including people that were disillusioned with LEED.”

Since its inception in 1994, nearly 37,000 professionals have received LEED accreditation and about 800 U.S. buildings have received LEED certification. Over 6,400 projects are currently registered with USGBC. And the LEED for Homes registry, which was launched in February 2007, already includes 6,000 projects. USGBC President Rick Fedrizzi fully endorsed the Living Building Standard at the council’s 2006 Greenbuild conference and answered by launching the council’s own Living Building design competition to recognize existing LEED buildings that meet the 16 prerequisites. Winners are expected to be announced at Greenbuild 2007 in Chicago.

Sturgeon says LEED has been instrumental in leading a market transformation in the building industry, but its ambiguity is overwhelming to many clients. She says she likes that the Living Building prerequisites set clear, firm and concise requirements. “The mass market is still not ready for LEED,” she says. “But the people at the far end of the innovation curve are ready. The Living Building Challenge can take those people to the next place the same way LEED did when it came out.”

McLennan says he doesn’t expect to certify a plethora of Living Buildings in the next decade. However, he does expect the standard will push more design teams to attain LEED Gold and Platinum ratings.

Many agree the critical piece to attaining a truly self-sufficient Living Building is the building’s occupants.

“I am coming to the conclusion there may be a hidden 17th prerequisite, and that’s the people,” Brockman says. “How people use the Living Building is absolutely key to whether the building achieves Living Building status or not. You need education to achieve a cultural shift.”

The central stairway of the Kenton building would display the electric and water meters, as well as the water tanks, to provide a constant reminder of the amount of water and energy the building occupants use on a daily basis. By including an on-site daycare center, the design team expects the building to educate young children and parents in the community about energy and water conservation. Wilcox says he also plans to include an interactive public display outside the building to educate community members about the Kenton Living Building.

But before Wilcox can even break ground on the project, he says he needs to prove to lenders he can attract four families who want to live in a building that requires active participation — and that the families are willing to pay quite a bit more than current market rates. Wilcox says he needs to sell each two-bedroom condo for $450,000 and each one-bedroom condo for $380,000 just to break even. “There is no question about it: You are paying for the green features,” Wilcox says.

The project received a $139,000 grant from the Portland Office of Sustainable Development and the Energy Trust of Oregon Inc. in March, through the city’s Green Investment Fund. Wilcox says the research element of the Kenton building could serve as a selling point. “We’re showing that if you want to build in Portland, you need to build really green.”