Oregon Sustainability Center lobby (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Last month in an article for Atlantic Cities, I wrote about the Oregon Sustainability Center and how Portland's (and Oregon's) investment in the project amounted to a kind of stimulus package that on a national level the government (log-jammed by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives) has abandoned.
As is often the case, I wound up with a lot more interview text than could be used in that story. So I'd like to share here a series of comments and observations from Kyle Andersen of GBD Architects and Lisa Petterson of SERA Architects, the two firms collaborating on the project, as well as Mayor Sam Adams, one of its chief proponents.
The $62 million OSC, if it goes forward, could lead to what would arguably be the world’s greenest office building, or at least the first mixed-use office to meet strictures of the Living Building Challenge. (Seattle currently has such a building under construction, but it would be smaller and with a single tenant rather than the group of tenants at the OSC.) It is designed to achieve net-zero levels of electricity and water usage. It may also become a provider of green energy for other nearby buildings, as part of one of Portland's first eco-districts. And the building may even come to transform the conservative commercial real estate market. Unlike the norm with Class-A office buildings, the Sustainability Center will ask tenants to share conference rooms and even storage space with each other instead of each tenant having their own; leases will be calculated in part on how much of it you choose to use.
My conversation with Andersen & Petterson began, however, with the notion of the Center as an incubator, able to nurture and grow Portland's broader sustainability community, both in terms of the private and public sectors. "The building is really intended to be a living laboratory," Petterson said."Think of someone at PCC taking a class in photovoltaics. They go to the OSC and they’re exposed to this wealth."
The OSC's south facade (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)
"It’s like there’s a fourth dimension, where people who have vision work well together maybe the same happens with people who share this ethic and this entrepreneurial energy," Andersen added. "There’s a story there in workforce training and businesses coming together."
Continuing the idea of the building being an investment in an industry, Sam Adams said, "The OSC is the result of a community who was the first adopters of green building LEED approach to development and design. It’s radical common sense we’re talking about: creating buildings that are self-sufficient. The next wave I hope goes from sustainability to resilience. This will be one of the largest living buildings in the world. The point is to not be the only one or the first but to be the first of many."
Adams also addressed the building's cost, which may be - besides aesthetics - one of the main aspects of the project to draw criticism. In a time when there is already a glut of office space, the OSC would charge rents some 20 percent higher than the market rate. "Because we’re doing something that hadn’t been done before, this is an R&D prototype that will be replicable," Adams said. "It will be what building and construction should be in the future. There’s a premium to this building. But there was a premium for the first Model T, or for our first domestically made streetcar.There’s an entire strategy, an entire job creation strategy. What came first was the research in terms of how we as a region can export more to the world. Clean technology, athletic and outdoor, software development, and research & commercialization are our clusters. We have a world-class opportunity to export goods, services and get royalties. This will produce locally not just in construction but in the years to come the architects, the engineers, the workers will all be part of this. They’ll have expertise that no one else in the world has."
The OSC from an aerial perspective (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)
"We went through the same conversation 10, 11 years ago with Ecotrust," the mayor added. "It’s harder because of the recession. It’s harder because of the political climate, the need to balance budget. But standing alongside that is the need and the opportunity to gain market share. You do that by producing a product and an innovation that no one else has. Portland has been recognized as a sustainable city. We get 80 delegations a year from other cities to see how we do it. But they’re more than nipping at our heels. We don’t want to be the biggest city. I want us to be the smallest, scrappiest, most successful international city. And to do that you’ve got to invest in innovation."
One of the key ideas with the Oregon Sustainability Center is the idea of plug and play: that its technologies and materials can be changed easily over time as innovations continue. "The best spaces are precisely general," Petterson explained. "There’s enough structure that they feel strong, but enough looseness that they can change over time. "It’s adaption or lack of it that gets buildings dated. You need new technology but there’s no way to do it in an affordable way."
Buildings in America consume some 40 percent of total energy used, and most all offices are using energy at the same time - during business hours. Much of that power is devoted to heating and cooling loads. For the OSC, however, there will be a battery on top that "is used to shave peak load off the building," Andersen added. "The battery is charged at night time when the demand on the grid is at its lowest. Then conversely the battery is used to power portions of the building during mid-afternoon hours when the grid is at its peak load."
The OSC viewed from the southwest (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)
"In this country we’re building power plants for three days a year," Petterson added. "The idea is we’d have a bank of batteries under a big roof, getting power from the grid at night. When it’s your peak time."
Given some of the OSC's innovations, I concluded by asking the architects for some future trends in sustainable buildings.
"All buildings are going to look different depending on where they’re at," Andersen said. "And I think you’ll see improvement in the skin. You’re creating an environment that can be stabilized. It’s the buildings going up and down that become energy pigs."
"If you think about a typical building, you change out the lighting every 10-15 years and the mechanical every 20-25, there are very few that get new skins," Petterson concured. "The buildings get replaced instead. All the embodied energy of the concrete frame is lost when you make that choice. That’s why the envelope is the critical piece."
"In the future, skins of buildings are going to sweat and breathe and open and close," Andersen said, "using things like algae and photosynthesis to create energy. They’re making spandrel glass out of that now."
There may still be reason for skepticism. Personally, although the OSC has made great strides from previous incarnations, I still do not find it exceptionally pretty (although of course renderings are easy to misjudge). The building's ability to get funding from the state legislature may also still prevent it from being constructed, especially given that Adams is not seeking a second term and thus can only cheerlead it through next year. Yet to talk particularly with its architects about the building and, by extension, the future of sustainable design and construction, is to become inspired. If the world doesn't become a tropical swamp in the future with 7 billion people living at the poles and most of today's favorite island getaways under water, it will be because of the passion and smarts of architects like these showing us a different path.
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