ADVOCACY FOR SUSTAINABILITY: BEYOND LEED—THE LIVING BUILDING CHALLENGE

Greg Hepp, AIA
Bassetti Architects

In terms of the environmental impact of buildings: the various LEED levels are about doing less harm; the zero point is the living building, which does no harm; and beyond that is the regenerative building, which actually benefits the environment.

The metaphor of the living building is a flower. When you look at a flower you see that it harvests all its own energy and water from its site; it's adapted to the place where it lives; it operates without producing any pollution; it promotes health and wellbeing by processing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen; it's an integrated system; and it's beautiful.

In 2000, BIM was working on a project for Packard, which wanted a green building. They asked, “How green?” The client asked, “How green is green?” So BIM developed a sustainability matrix that compared initial construction costs and lifespan costs for market-rate buildings, LEED-certified buildings and a “living building.” The living building cost approximately 40 percent more in initial construction costs—about $14.2 million, compared to $10 million for the market-rate building (in 2001 dollars). But when you look at the net present value, the living building costs much less over a 60-year lifespan ($22 million, versus $400 million)—when the market-rate building's cheap systems and lower quality materials and external costs such as energy reliance and pollution are taken into account.

That was how they came up with the idea of the living building. But what would it look like? Jason McLennan, one the people who pioneered the concept, is now the director of the Cascadia Region of the Green Building Council, where he developed the living building challenge, which is a checklist.

There are no credits, just 16 simple and profound prerequisites, in six categories: site design; energy; materials; water; indoor environmental quality; and beauty and inspiration. Beauty is important because people won't keep buildings that aren't beautiful.

It's very simple—but simple isn't the same thing as easy. The living building challenge is performance-based. You can't get a building certified until it has been in operation for at least a year, because certification is based not on what a building will do but on what it actually did.

Some people have already accepted the challenge. The Cascadia Chapter will award petals for partial compliance, one for each prerequisite met. These prerequisites are challenging, but each of them has been achieved in some building somewhere. No one has yet done them all, but it is possible.

Additional Information

Living Building: www.cascadiagbc.org/lbc

Carbon calculator: www.carbonneutral.com