Page 267 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

14

LOOKING AHEAD—DESIGNING LIVING

BUILDINGS

Along with many others, Bill Reed writes about the need to continue the push for
high-performance buildings into the realm of restorative and regenerative design. In a
2005 paper, Reed (and his coauthors) wrote: “the term ‘regenerative’ is useful because
it suggests the self-organizing, self-healing and self-evolving properties of living sys-
†
tems.” Rather than green design (as LEED defines it), where the goal is just to reduce
the damage by being “less bad,” and even fully “sustainable” design, where the goal
is to evaluate our impacts against a goal of “zero harm,” the spirit of regenerative
design envisions a trajectory of responsible design (Fig. 14.1) that aims to restore liv-
ing systems to a more productive level than we found them, all the while maintaining
a prosperous and healthy human existence. Quite a tall order!
One step along the way to fully regenerative design is to create a “living building.”*
Jason McLennan, currently CEO of the Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building
Council, is a serious advocate for this concept. In a brilliant twist on the LEED-NC
system, with its seven prerequisites and 69 credit points, often criticized for allowing
buildings to be certified with only marginally better energy performance, for example,
McLennan postulated a rating system, the Living Building Challenge (LBC), that has
only prerequisites and no credits. In other words, you either have a living building or
‡
you don’t. (Certain accommodations are made in the current version 1.2 of the LBC
for present market realities.)
Here’s how it works: there are 16 categories, and a project must fulfill all of the
requirements to be certified as a Living Building. The system is performance based,

*Bill Reed strongly prefers the term “living systems,” arguing that buildings can’t by themselves be living.
Nonetheless, the term “living buildings” has become descriptive of the next evolution of green buildings, so I’ll
stick with it.
† Bill Reed, Joel Ann Todd, and Nadav Malin, “Expanding Our Approach to Sustainable Design—An Invitation,”
Brattleboro, Vermont: Building Green, Inc., December 15, 2005.
‡ Cascadia Green Building Council, www.cascadiagbc.org/lbc, accessed April 29, 2008.
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