Cascadia "Unconference" Sets the Leading Edge

Allyson Wendt

A design for a generic state office building by architects Perkins+Will won the award for “most realizable” building in the Living Future Design Competition, announced at the Living Future Conference in Seattle in April. The design features wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and a double-skinned curtain wall facade designed to broadcast messages about sustainability to passing drivers.

At their inaugural regional green building conference, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council (a chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council [USGBC] and the Canada Green Building Council) and the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) brought together experts and practitioners to explore the leading edge of green building.

The Living Future “unconference,” as the organizers called it, focused on interactive sessions that involved attendees in design processes and the improvement of the Living Building Challenge, a building certification program announced in November 2006 at the USGBC’s Greenbuild conference.

The Living Building Challenge, spearheaded by Cascadia CEO Jason McLennan, was designed to establish a target beyond LEED Platinum and consists of 16 requirements. The program’s tagline declares that it has “no credits, just prerequisites.” A day of workshops at the Living Future conference allowed attendees to talk about each aspect of the Challenge, from energy and indoor air quality to the requirement for beauty and inspiration. The general sense among the ambitious participants in these sessions was that many aspects of the Challenge were too easy: to really be groundbreaking, certification must be harder to achieve. In other sessions, such as that on beauty and inspiration led by Bob Berkibile, FAIA, and Freda Pagani, participants struggled with how to measure success. The Cascadia chapter hopes the conversation about the Challenge will continue on its website, where a discussion forum has been set up.

In a design jam session organized by AIA Seattle, participants were visited by ambassadors from 2037, played by James Weiner, AIA, Ralph DiNola, Assoc. AIA, and Penny Bonda. They were asked to solve the problems that would lead to the destruction of the Earth’s climate. The participants broke into groups to work for an hour on a solution to global warming, then presented their ideas to the group and received feedback from their visitors from the future. Most solutions focused on how to change the way people interact with the world around them, by creating a process that turned carbon into alcohol, for example, or a currency based on resource use.

Ed Mazria, AIA, opened the conference with a speech about the 2030 Challenge. Opening the second day of the conference, Berkebile offered personal reflections in a speech on the role of the architect in preserving the environment. Starting with his personal call to environmental responsibility after a catastrophe in the 1980s in a hotel he had designed, Berkebile challenged the group to think in new directions. “Unless we do something we haven’t talked about so far,” he said, “we won’t make the 2030 targets.” His speech ended on a hopeful note, however, saying of some doomsday predictions that he chooses “to believe that [they have] underestimated our capacity for change.”

For more information:

Living Building Challenge
Cascadia Region Green Building Council
Seattle, Washington
503-228-5533
http://www.cascadiagbc.org/lbc

This article was produced by BuildingGreen, Inc.- www.buildinggreen.com

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