Something truly monumental happened this week. The Living Building Challenge℠, the world’s most rigorous green building performance standard, crossed the divide that separates compelling ideas from proven strategies.

Omega Center for Sustainable Living: Farshid Assassi, courtesy of BNIM Architects.

Two projects, the Omega Center for Sustainable Living (designed by BNIM Architects) and the Tyson Living Learning Center (designed by Hellmuth + Bicknese Architects) have achieved full Living Building Certification, earning the right to be called the world’s greenest modern buildings. A third project, Victoria, BC’s Eco-Sense residence, earned partial program certification (“Petal Recognition”) for meeting all of the requirements in the Site, Water, Health and Beauty categories. The remaining two Living Building Challenge Petals in Version 1.3 are Energy and Materials. (A seventh Petal, Equity, was added to version 2.0, released in November 2009.)

The accomplishments of these pioneering teams are a victory for all of us. Read more…

Water and civilization are fundamentally intertwined. The world’s cities, great and small, have developed alongside the waterways that meet our drinking needs, irrigate our crops, transport our goods, and power our industries. Sadly, dependence has not bred respect. Our cities have been unkind to the rivers, streams, lakes and bays they border, and as we settle into the 21st century, we face a water crisis of epic proportions.

 Water is our most intimate resource (on a very fundamental level, we are water) and we are only too aware of the consequences of consuming water that has been contaminated by viruses or bacteria. We don’t need to look to the distant past for reminders: more than one billion people worldwide  currently lack access to clean drinking water, and water-borne illnesses kill over two million people each year.

 Unfortunately, developed countries have transformed fears about these very real sanitation concerns into complex and counterproductive phobias. As a result, we have constructed incredibly elaborate, energy-intensive systems that not only allow us ready access to potable water from our taps but also insist that we use this most precious resource to flush our toilets. These systems, born of our desire for purity, have substantially degraded our fresh water supplies.

The EPA estimates that at least 40,000 times each year, combined sewage-overflows lead to the direct release of untreated sewage into the United States’ waterways. Read more…

The Living City Design Competition invites project teams from around the world to imagine how existing cities might be retrofitted to achieve all twenty imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building standard. Like the standard itself, the competition reflects our belief that humanity has all of the necessary tools and skills to resolve the environmental, social and economic crises of our day. If we are to live up to our potential, however, we must first clearly define what a truly sustainable society would look like. With that powerful and practical vision in mind, we can begin working toward the future we hope for. Read more…

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This morning, the International Living Building Institute (ILBI) announced its Living City Design Competition, which asks designers, engineers, and urban planners to imagine cities capable of meeting all the requirements of the Living Building Challenge 2.0. Participants must select an existing city anywhere in the world and transform it through computer renderings and 3-D models. Successful entries will capture the attention of a broad audience while including technical information that will stand up to expert scrutiny.

Below, Jason F. McLennan and Sarah Costello, the CEO and development director, respectively, of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council—which founded the ILBI in 2009—introduce the new competition.

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Close your eyes for a moment and think of the cities of the future. What do you see? Vast stretches of gleaming skyscrapers connected by speeding trains or hovercraft? Dark, crowded streets whose only greenery comes from the weeds that assert themselves in untended pavement? For over a century, novelists and filmmakers have helped define our visions of the future, shaping our dreams and our assumptions about what is possible. Think of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner–or even the cartoon future of The Jetsons. Our manifold imaginings of tomorrow’s cities run the gamut from hopeful to despairing, from silly to deadly serious; yet all reflect a profound sense of ecological dislocation. We seem to take it as inevitable that the cities we bequeath to our grandchildren will be massive and developed without reference to the ecosystems they inhabit. Exactly how these cities will be powered, how their inhabitants will secure food, water, and clothing, is anybody’s guess.

We have grown used to predicting an increasingly mechanistic future, but what we have forgotten is that a future that crowds out the natural world is not simply bleak: it is impossible.  A world without a healthy and vibrant natural biosphere simply cannot sustain human life. Read more…