Bringing ‘Living Buildings’ to the people

The Living Building Challenge is no longer an unknown concept, at least to the crowd of architects and green-building types gathered at the Cascadia Green Building Council’s Living Future conference in Vancouver, B.C. this week.

The ultra-ambitious green building standard is tougher than the highest level of LEED and requires projects to avoid a red list of unhealthy materials and collect all of their own energy and water on site. Three projects have now earned Living Building certification (fully or partially) and more than 100 more are in the works.

But those first three projects suggest a troubling trend for the Living Building Challenge, which Cascadia designed and launched four years ago. Two of them are educational centers in fairly remote areas ­ ­­-- the Omega Center for Sustainable Living in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and the Tyson Living Learning Center in Eureka, Mo. The third is a single-family home in Victoria, B.C. None so far are in dense urban cores that let users get around without driving.

Big caveat here: the challenge is still in its super-early stages and many of the planned living buildings, such as the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle and the Oregon Sustainability Center in Portland are located on highly walkable, transit-connected sites.

Still, I was glad to see a panel at Living Future on Thursday about bringing living buildings to urban infill projects that are the most inherently sustainable sites for new development. Architect Jon Hall of Seattle firm GGLO put the next task in clear terms.

“That’s great,” he said of the first three living buildings. “But how do we bring living buildings to the masses? How to we bring it to housing that people use every day?”

Hall had developed a mock-up plan for doing just that – a mid-rise urban building with street-level retail and four or five floors of smallish housing units. A sophisticated airflow system with basement heat exchangers kept heating and cooling needs low, and a rooftop combined solar photovoltaic array and solar thermal water-heating system took care of energy needs. The roof also included a catchment system to collect rainwater, and it extended over, not just the building, but also the right-of-way and a public plaza on the south side.

That’s meant to address a key barrier to larger living buildings – it’s tough to collect enough water on site, even in the drizzly Northwest. Hall’s plan calls for using water three times – first for sinks, showers and dishwashing, then for the shared laundry facilities, then for flushing toilets (with filtration between each step). The Living Building Challenge includes seven “petals” (based off the metaphor of a self-sufficient flower), but Hall said the key for larger buildings is to focus on just three: site, energy and water. Take care of those and the others fall into place, he said.

Those factors dictate a sort of “density sweet spot” well short of skyscrapers, he said. “If we want to have everything created and captured on site, it’s four to five stories with 80 to 100 people in 40 to 50 units,” he said.

Another sign that living buildings are about more than isolated projects: The International Living Building Institute announced at the conference today that it has rechristened itself the International Living Future Institute, an umbrella organization that includes the Living Building Challenge, Cascadia Green Building Council and two entities it acquired this year, the Natural Step Framework USA and Ecotone Publishing.

“The Institute is best understood as a hub for visionary programming,” chief executive Jason McLennan, said in a release.  “As our pioneering project teams have discovered,  ‘green buildings’ don’t exist in a vacuum; they are part of a web of influences moving from the materials we build with, to the structures we create and maintain and on to the communities we inhabit.”