The Living Building Challenge is gaining ground

June Key Delta Center (image courtesy greenposting.org)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

As soon as I entered the June Key Delta Center on an otherwise dark, stormy recent evening, the mood shifted. As part of an AIA/Committee on the Environment tour, I was greeted by two warm, friendly ladies responsible for the fruition of this newly completed community center in Northeast Portland, Chris and Leah, along with architect Mark Nye. They enthusiastically described the building’s systems, reclaimed materials, cargo containers, and community gardens. It was exciting to hear how this former gas station was converted into a simple community building and achieved such strict environmental goals (it is the first building in Portland attempting to meet Living Building Challenge strictures) on a piecemeal budget. It was even more exciting to see how this collection of retired women, have become experts on green building and some of its strongest advocates.

First established in 2006, the Living Building Challenge is gaining traction as a critical benchmark for sustainability. The LBC is the brainchild of Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council, who describes the LBC as a “philosophy, advocacy platform, and certification program.” The LBC is composed of seven “petals” or performance areas including site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. These are further broken down into twenty imperatives that must be met in order to achieve certification. The standard includes areas most practitioners are well versed in, but is very stringent- net zero energy, net zero water, and a red-list of commonly used materials, among other criteria. It also includes areas, outside the scope of LEED, that are more intangible and harder to quantify like supporting a just and equitable world, democracy and social justice, rights to nature, and beauty and spirit.

To date, there are four Living Building Challenge-certified buildings, which is quite a feat considering that a project must go through design, construction, and then be occupied for one year while meeting the imperatives. Another 100 projects are beginning in nine countries and 27 states. The Portland design and construction community is quickly lining up to take on the Challenge: 13 projects have commenced in Oregon, most of which are single-family residences.

Given the emerging enthusiasm around the Challenge, the Portland AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) has chosen this as its theme for 2012. To kick things off, the organization hosted a lecture on Peace Island Medical Center, a Mahlum-designed project striving to meet Living Building goals, as well as the aforementioned June Key Delta House tour.

For its annual Green Champions Summit, the committee hosted an evening on the Living Building Challenge with Eden Brukman, Vice President of the International Living Future Institute, which overseas the LBC. Capturing a different aspect of the Challenge, each event demonstrated that the LBC is at the cutting edge of sustainable building and demands new ways of thinking about the intersection of design, the environment, and the surrounding community. As one attendee at Brukman’s event described it, “The Living Building Challenge is LEED on steroids.” 

In his presentation of Peace Island Medical Center, Mahlum’s Erik Goodfriend discussed the rewards and challenges of certifying a small-scale medical facility. Sited near Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, Washington, a Living Building seemed like an appropriate response to the remote location’s finite natural resources. It helped that PeaceHealth, the client, strongly valued the environmental stewardship inherent to the Challenge and made this a design priority.   

The intangible petals, equity and beauty, which require a written narrative for certification, were easily achievable. Yet, other petals posed more difficulty, largely due to the programmatic needs of the medical facility. Daylighting the imaging spaces to meet the “Civilized Environments” imperative was not an option. Energy use and ventilation demands, in spite of rigorous sustainable design strategies, were still fell short of Challenge goals due to medical equipment loads.  In many cases, sourcing materials and appropriate technologies to meet the client’s budget was impossible since many of these are brand new and very costly.  Wastewater treatment technologies, designed to meet the “Water”, in the end, were not permitted. Ultimately, PeaceHealth used the LBC guidelines as a framework, but will only receive partial certification.

A recent Committee on the Environment lecture (photo by Juliette Beale)

In spite of this experience, Goodfriend remained optimistic about the LBC. He firmly believes that it should serve as the benchmark for sustainable building and that medical centers like Peace Island, will be able to meet the LBC in the future. Goodfriend remarked that we have the design principles to get us there so now it is a matter of placing emphasis on the innovation of new materials and developing precedents that open up avenues for revising the codes.

The Living Building Challenge not only demands innovation in sustainable design and technology, but it also forces designers to consider questions they may not regularly ponder as avidly as in school. Central to the Challenge is the question, “What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?” COTE’s Green Champion Summit focused on this question by presenting the “Equity” and “Beauty” Petals to a crowd of eighty architects, designers, and engineers. The audience was asked first to define the terms beauty, democracy, social justice, and natural rights. Then, they were asked to consider what metrics could be used to quantify them.  

There was much crossover in the definitions participants developed for these different categories reflecting the interconnected nature of the petals.  “Rights to Nature” touched on many site imperatives as well as the health imperative, “Biophilia.” Most people felt Rights to Nature should include day-lit views to the outside, healthy air, and basic access to resources.  A possible metric that was offered involved creating an inventory of environmental assets at the project’s beginning and making sure these were preserved through post-occupancy.

When it came to democracy and social justice, definitions were expressed more in the form of questions. Does the project exploit people? Who is being served? Is there a disparity in cost per square foot between the user group and visitors? The metrics developed were less about design and more about increasing the number of voices and stakeholders. There were ideas about having a minimum number of community members included or a minimum number of hours that key stakeholders must spend listening to the larger community.

Brukman, who collected these comments and plans to draw from them when writing the next version of the LBC, was particularly interested in the architect’s perspective on beauty. In conversations she has had with other professionals, most touch on the idea that there should be some community involvement in deciding what is beautiful, especially within the user group. But several architects present brought up the need for craft and craftsmanship with a possible metric being the number of craftsmen on a project.

It was COTE’s hope that people would leave the evening with more questions than answers.   “From a bigger picture standpoint it was interesting to focus the sustainable design conversation around somewhat intangible things,” co-Chair Erica Dunn said. “We have all heard the conversations on energy, water, and waste, but they are only a piece of being truly sustainable. And it is these intangible things such as beauty, democracy, and social justice that take the conversation beyond the four walls of the building to look at the building’s impact on the larger community.”

The Living Building Challenge forces people to consider these important questions. And it is these questions that compel us to think more deeply about the impact of our designs thereby opening new channels for discussion. To date, the predominant focus of sustainable building has largely been on the environmental impacts. By expanding this to include rights to nature, beauty and social justice, the LBC enlarges the design discourse to include underrepresented voices and elements. In so doing, as demonstrated by the June Key Delta Center and Peace Island Medical Center, all those involved become experts and proponents. The more advocates there are and the more that sustainable buildings connect to people’s spirit through their beauty and equity, the more likely it is that these buildings will be maintained for years to come. And that is sustainable design in the truest sense.

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