I had heard of the Living Building Challenge (http://www.livingbuildingchallenge.org) and looked at its winning entry for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge award but the idea did not come into focus until I attended the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association's (http://www.nesea.org) Building Energy conference in Boston a few weeks ago. At the conference, Amanda Sturgeon of the Living Building Challenge taught a pre-conference workshop and gave one of the keynote addresses and I finally understood what the idea is, architecture as ecological restoration.
Now that's interesting. How do you design a building like a flower?
The Living Building Challenge is not only a methodology but also a certification system.
It has 4 scales:
renovation
landscape infrastructure
building
neighborhood
7 performance levels, or petals of the flower of the living building:
site
water
energy
health
materials
equity
beauty
and 20 imperatives:
limits to growth (build only on only developed sites)
urban agriculture (requirement currently reduced as density goes up, down to 0 with FAR 3.0 and above)
habitat exchange (built land must equal land in preservation in perpetuity)
car-free living
net zero energy (no combustion allowed and nothing offsite)
net zero water
ecological water flow (all water stormwater, grey water, and black water must be treated onsite - scale jumping appropriate here)
civilized environment
healthy air
biophilia
red list (materials designated as harmful to living creatures, including humans)
embodied carbon footprint
responsible industry
appropriate sourcing
conservation reuse
human scale+human places
democracy+social justice
rights to nature
beauty+spirit
inspiration+education
The Living Building Challenge now has about 2 new projects a week, nearly 200 registered projects, 5 million square feet, and version 3.0 will be arriving in May. One of the certified buildings, the Bullitt Center building (http://www.bullittcenter.org) in Seattle, is over producing energy onsite and under consuming energy according to their design parameters. They say it is "the greenest commercial building in the world" and, evidently, a net positive energy building.
There are 5 registered Living Buildings in MA and two of the architects responsible for local Living Buildings were on hand at the workshop to talk about their work, Bruce Coldham and Charles Stevenson.
The Living Building Challenge is unusual and useful because it is setting "the ideal as an indicator of success." These days, we shouldn't settle for anything less.