A quantum leap in green building

Jan 182013
 

Editor’s note: As Seattle’s six-story, 50,000 square-foot Bullitt Center prepares to open its doors this month, with the aim of becoming the world’s first commercial Living Building, we asked Bullitt Foundation president Dennis Hayes to explain the vision behind this historic project. This piece first ran in the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. 

By Dennis Hayes

Sometimes, incremental innovations can’t produce quantum change.

You can tinker with carbon paper forever without producing a photocopier. The quill pen did not lead to a typewriter, and not a single typewriter company evolved to personal computers.

The built environment demands a quantum change.

Our cities were designed for an era that is vanishing. Energy was cheap and abundant. Water shortages could be solved with money and good engineering. The human population was comparatively small and rural. Two-ton vehicles were thought to be the most convenient way to transport 150-pound primates. And human impacts on the environment were local and mostly transitory.

None of those conditions will be true in the cities of the future, where the vast majority of humankind will reside.

There has been a lot of incremental improvement in buildings over the last 20 years. However, there are only a handful of significant commercial structures anywhere in the world that reflect a serious effort to design for the conditions that are likely to prevail in 2050. In fact, many of the most heralded buildings by the most celebrated architects are beautiful sculptures that are becoming white elephants.

Taking the leap

We decided to try to design, build, and operate a building that makes a quantum leap. Our goal was not to be “less bad” but to be affirmatively restorative.

The Bullitt Center under construction last year. Photo by John Stamets.

The Bullitt Center will have roughly the same impact on its site as the Douglas fir forest that covered the land 150 years ago.

We started with the extremely difficult goals of the Living Building Challenge green-building certification program. These included net-zero energy, net-zero water and use of locally sourced materials, nontoxic building materials and wood certified to meet Forest Stewardship Council standards.

To this we added a durability requirement — a 250-year design life — and some specific features, such as an inviting glass-enclosed stairway. To discourage the use of cars, we chose a walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood, and we installed a bicycle garage and showers on every floor.

The building was designed from the ground up to ensure that its components serve multiple purposes.

Ultra-efficient 10-by-4-foot windows, for example, reduce electricity use by providing ample daylight. They have external shutters to reflect sunlight toward the ceiling to penetrate to the inner core. They open and close automatically to provide fresh air and modulate the temperature.

The building’s computer “brain” analyzes data from the building’s “nervous system” to optimize internal conditions, much as your own skin does.

Few Seattle residents believe that enough sun falls on rooftops here to meet all the annual needs of even a one-story building, much less a six-story building. The key to success is a deep investment in efficiency.

The Bullitt Center is designed to use half as much energy as a LEED platinum building. And on an annualized basis, this six-story structure will generate more energy from the sun on its rooftop than it consumes.

So far, no six-story building has done this in Phoenix or Santa Fe, N.M., or anywhere else. We hope to achieve it in cloud-covered Seattle!

Walk the talk

I’m frequently asked why we decided to take this leap. There are several reasons.

The Bullitt Foundation wants to transform the built environment in ways that are truly sustainable. Because that is our core mission, we need to walk our talk where we work.

Second, there is still a lingering notion, rooted in images of geodesic domes, that super-green structures are uncomfortable and impractical. We wanted to build a super-green structure that is light-filled, with high ceilings, airy and comfortable. The Bullitt will increase productivity and decrease sick days. Hopefully, every employee of every tenant will see it as the best building he or she has ever worked in.

Third, we always suspected that regulatory and financial obstacles would be at least as challenging as the technical barriers. As a not-for-profit institution we thought we might be able to blaze the trail through some of those difficulties more easily than, say, Donald Trump. If we could establish the proper precedents, it would be much easier for others to construct living buildings.

Finally, if something exists, it is possible. The goals in this building are thought by many to be impossible. But if we achieve them, disbelief will no longer be an option. I’ve always subscribed to the slogan, “If you don’t believe it can be done, get out of the way of those of us who are doing it.”

Before we could hope to see living buildings spread rapidly around the world, we first needed to have a working example that people could touch and feel, measure and evaluate. In addition to being a working commercial building — with almost 90 percent of its space available to lease on the commercial market — the Bullitt Center will be an instrument of change. We will design educational materials and host conferences for bankers, appraisers, realtors, developers, public officials and others who influence the design of the world’s cities.

Virtually everywhere, it is illegal to build a living building and impossible to finance one. We’ve overcome those challenges in Seattle, and we are eager to share the lessons we’ve learned.

Dennis Hayes is the president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation.

Transport revolutions: Viva Las Vegas?

Jun 272012
 

Editor’s note: Writer and urban planner Tim Sullivan traveled the West this spring by bike, bus, foot and several other non-auto modes, as part of a journey to discover how revolutions in transportation are changing the region. He’s at work on a book on the subject. In this scene, he looks for the future in Las Vegas, of all places.

By Tim Sullivan

I had spent the morning walking around North Las Vegas in the zip code of 89031, which in early 2012 was named the foreclosure capital of the United States.  Nearly one in 100 houses in the zip code was filing for foreclosure. It was a microcosm of the breakdown that occurred throughout the brand-new, fast-growing West.

The houses in 89031 looked like average stucco boxes, but you could see the cheapness in the streets that were supposed to connect them. Like many other places that had experienced sharply declining real estate values, the design of the new subdivisions of North Las Vegas restricted its residents to driving and lacked quality public space. Las Vegas had been called the city that started the 21st century, but the reality was that it had driven the auto-centric model of the 20th century into the ground.

The person who had been showing me around in North Las Vegas, a retired planner, pointed out how outdated design standards had led to minimal five-foot treeless sidewalks blocked by utility poles, and politics had led to walls around every subdivision with few entries.

You likely couldn’t walk out of your subdivision here, and if you could, you couldn’t walk side by side with another person. These were traffic sewers. We had stood in one of the empty wide roads between the subdivisions with a view of unbroken walls and a dead-end into the desert.

But before we parted, she offered some hope. She mentioned there was new blood in the ranks of the engineers who ran the Las Vegas valley’s public works departments. They were beginning to shake up the standards and confront the politics.

A few hours and a long, sweaty bike ride later, I walked in downtown Las Vegas with one of those engineers. Jorge Cervantes had come to the City of Las Vegas as an assistant traffic engineer and had risen through the ranks, recently becoming the city’s public works director. As a young engineering student, Cervantes had been taught that a roadway existed to move vehicles.

But as he saw the results of his work, Cervantes realized that he couldn’t eliminate congestion – one of the traffic engineer’s primary charges – simply by adding more lanes. Like some others throughout the profession, he realized that streets were for moving people, not cars.

Now Cervantes was building over the wreckage of the real estate crash. He believed that rethinking streets as richer places that moved people rather than cars could provide the foundation for reclaiming Las Vegas’ future. He had led the changing of the rules that governed how the city’s streets were built. And then he started to build.

The new Casino Center Boulevard.

We walked until we came to what had become the centerpiece of the City’s downtown streets: Casino Center Boulevard, which swept through downtown Las Vegas in an alternate vision of the future. Instead of the monolithic asphalt, there were red-painted bus lanes running down the center, islands of meadow grass, wide sidewalks and palm trees, and animated transit stations punctuated by repurposed neon signs.

The asphalt auto lanes that usually dominated American streets were pinched to one each way, just a piece of a larger, richer picture. Where most streets in Las Vegas and the West felt like autoways that happened to allow people, this felt like a street for people that happened to allow buses and cars to move through. Where most western streets left people one option, this gave them many.

Its design was a revolt against a hundred 20th century engineering notions, each of which was a point of contention between Cervantes and the “old-school engineers” in his shop. The first was a Robin Hood capture of two traffic lanes taken from the car to give to the Regional Transportation Commission’s bus rapid transit system. This was engineer heresy – Cervantes consciously created more congestion. “Even if we lost capacity it was worth the trade,” he said.

Then there were smaller things. The engineers gave the street corners a smaller radius, which gave more space to pedestrians while forcing cars to slow down before they turned. They colored the bus lane concrete a ruddy red to communicate that the space belonged to transit. They made the sidewalks as wide as the vehicle lanes.

The new street had confused drivers initially, but it had drawn and inspired those who began to rebuild Las Vegas. We walked through a budding arts district, where two business owners stood outside a shop. “Hey Jorge,” one of them said to Cervantes.

This street had the same width as those I had seen in North Las Vegas, but Casino Center created a different world within it. Whereas most new streets in Las Vegas Valley had been hastily crammed through new subdivisions during the good times, Casino Center had been thoughtfully crafted amid vacant lots in bad times.

Unlike in the rest of the city, the street would lead the way forward, not be dragged along by the whims of the market. It announced that being a street in a new American desert city didn’t necessarily mean a bleak tunnel of asphalt. The humanity and personality of this one street gave a hint of what a future less focused on the automobile might look like.

Ecodistricts bring new life to North American cities

Jun 192012
 

By Rob Bennett

Last month, leaders from Austin, Bellingham, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Guadalajara (Mexico), Mountain View, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Vancouver (B.C.) gathered at Ecotrust in Portland for the first-ever EcoDistricts Institute, a meeting to examine neighborhood-scale development projects in each of their cities.

The leaders at the institute are all developing EcoDistricts, which are also known as “green neighborhoods” or “green districts.” EcoDistricts integrate green buildings and smart infrastructure such as energy, water, waste, recycling, transportation with community action and civic entrepreneurism. EcoDistricts can be established within brownfield redevelopment areas, campuses or existing neighborhoods.

Ecodistricts are spread across the continent. Tatiana Mac/Portland Sustainability Institute.

For the participants in the institute – which was funded by generous grants from the Blackstone Ranch Institute and Ecoworks Foundation – being on the forefront of a new era of urban innovation isn’t enough. They want to go faster, and that’s why they came to Portland. Each had an interesting story to tell:

  • Austin is redeveloping a former industrial parcel on the southwest edge of downtown into a mixed-use neighborhood with affordable, dense housing, a new central library, improved transit and preservation of a historic art deco power plant.
  • Bellingham is designing a new waterfront neighborhood on the site of an old paper mill.
  • Boston’s newly minted “Boston Innovation District” is looking to reinvent itself as a center of advanced manufacturing and knowledge companies mixed with community amenities and housing.
  • Charlotte’s South End EcoDistrict is an emerging mixed-use neighborhood filled with innovative small businesses and housing in repurposed industrial buildings.
  • In Cleveland – a tale of two neighborhoods. On the west side, a tired inner-city neighborhood is in the need of new energy and investment, while on the east side, a new urban agriculture innovation zone is slated for farm incubation and related enterprises.
  • Guadalajara’s residents of the Vallarta Sur neighborhood rejected a proposed elevated highway that would split their neighborhood, and instead are transforming their railroad right of way into a “civic park” that will spur revitalization and the creation of a digital business center.
  • Mountain View – a Silicon Valley community endowed with a vibrant downtown and progressive technology companies – is poised to lead the way in sustainable corporate campus development that supports local businesses and a need for new housing.
  • Philadelphia’s South of South Neighborhood is an existing mixed-income area, seeing new growth due to its proximity to the center city.
  • San Francisco’s Central Corridor area is advantageously positioned for dense growth, new transit, district infrastructure and high-tech industry.
  • The University of British Columbia is redeveloping a portion of its abundant land holdings to create new mixed-use neighborhoods. The newest hub is Acadia, planned to accommodate dense housing, amenities, shops and services.

Ten cities, ten stories. The reason for these projects in North America– and dozens more like them around the world – is more apparent than ever: municipal and business leaders must find effective ways to repurpose neighborhoods to take advantage of the growing trends in urbanization (millions of people coming to a city near you in the coming decade) and the changing economy that places a premium on knowledge and innovation. According to leading local economists like Joe Cortright and organizations such as Preservation Green Lab and ArtPlace, the cities that focus on rehabilitating and building vibrant, green and diverse neighborhoods have the best chance of thriving in the future.

After spending three days with over 60 leading green city leaders, I left feeling exhilarated and convinced, more than ever, that we’re on the cusp of an urban sustainability revolution. We are certainly seeing evidence of such a revolution here in Portland. People continue to flock here. Why? We’ve adopted a culture that’s ultimately led to a 26 percent drop in per person carbon emissions since 1990 while the city and economy have grown. This culture has also given rise to a true green economy, and we are becoming known as the city that builds other green cities. We have five EcoDistricts here today, with two more coming online this year. That’s all in addition to the launch of a North American EcoDistricts Pilot Program this year as well.

Even with the economy struggling to rebound and cities facing unprecedented pressure to do more with less, this year is shaping up to be a busy one for the green cities movement.  The timing couldn’t be better.

Rob Bennett is executive director of the Portland Sustainability Institute.

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