Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 9:57am PDT | Modified: July 23, 2010, 11:26 AM

Portland architects chase Living Building designation

by Erik Siemers
Business Journal Staff Writer

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Architect Mark Nye in North Portland

At the corner of Albina and Ainsworth in North Portland, a vacant gas station sits behind a chain-link fence, awaiting better days.

Within the next few years, the site will be home to a living, breathing community center. It will generate its own energy, make use of treated storm water, and produce no waste.

The challenge, however, comes in sourcing the building materials required to meet the Living Building Challenge, perhaps the world’s most stringent sustainable building standard.

Devised by the Portland-based Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, the Living Building Challenge prohibits developers from using materials made with components it considers harmful. Further, it limits the distance certain building products can travel to be incorporated in a development — an effort to reduce a building’s carbon footprint.

It’s something Mark Nye, the architect designing the community center that will be called the June Key Delta House, said is both vexing and game-changing.

“This has the ability to influence industry,” said Nye, the principle at Nye Architecture LLC, which is working with the Portland Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. to transform the building.

By prohibiting certain materials, the Living Building Challenge (download the standard document here) ends up limiting the choices for building developers. But in doing so, the hope is that the green building movement can capture the attention of manufacturers, changing the way they make products.

“We’re really tackling the limits of the product side of the building industry,” said Eden Brukman, vice president of the Portland-based International Living Building Institute, an off-shoot of the Green Building Council’s Cascadia chapter. “This is where the program really shines.”

To be designated a “living building,” a development must be on a brownfield or greyfield, generate its own energy, reuse its water and produce no waste.

Developers must avoid building products made from materials on the challenge’s “red list,” a rogue’s gallery of chemicals and other materials deemed toxic or otherwise unhealthy. The list includes polyvinyl chloride (PVC), formaldehyde, asbestos, neoprene, and others.

There are also geographic limitations; building products categorized as “heavy,” for example, must be purchased within 310 miles of the project, the distance expanding with the reduced weight of the product.

Meeting the standard is a pinnacle that has yet to be achieved.

Just four projects — in New York, Missouri, British Columbia and Hawaii — are built and going through their required 12 months of occupation before they can be certified as living buildings.

Nye has hit the red list head-on.

The common rigid-foam insulation easily meets the Living Building Challenge’s standard. But the membrane it’s encased within doesn’t; it’s made with formaldehyde. He considered using the insulation without the membrane, but that voids the warranty.

The red list and other limitations aren’t designed to be roadblocks, Brukman said.

The Living Building Challenge has a work-around: If developers can’t find an acceptable alternative to using a red-listed material, they must document their efforts to find acceptable products and write a letter to the manufacturer explaining that the purchase of their product is not an endorsement.

“Typically, the more conventional metrics for success of a product are aesthetics, function and cost,” Brukman said. “When we get into this new realm of additional factors people are exploring, they need to communicate that with the manufacturer as well. It wasn’t aesthetics, function or cost, it’s that you were using a known human carcinogen in your product.”

Single letters sent by one developer or architect wouldn’t seem to have much sway with a developer. But Brukman said there are already signs of critical mass.

The developers of the Omega Center for Sustainable Living, a wastewater treatment and education center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., contacted one manufacturer of a water treatment system that included an element on the red list. Later, a second team contacted the same manufacturer about the issue.

“A third project team contacted them as well for the same thing and called me up and said it was a breeze,” Brukman said.

There is a regional economic development exercise in play as well.

As developers struggle to find appropriate source materials, the hope is that a local manufacturer can swoop in to fill the gaps.

That happened with Nye.

While sourcing heavy tiling, he discovered that most of the major manufacturers were in faraway places, from Oklahoma to Italy. Though he eventually found a source in Seattle that fit within the project’s budget, Nye decided to work with a local rebuilding center that could source some used tiles.

The economic development theory could be put to a test in coming years as the proposed $120 million Oregon Sustainability Center, near Portland State University, comes to fruition.

“What we’re hoping to do is be able to work with manufacturers to be able to supply things we know we can get other places,” said Lisa Petterson, an associate with Portland-based Sera Architects who is working on the project. “Maybe there’s a manufacturer that just needs to retool.”

As an example, Petterson found an eco-friendly panel product made from straw bale. The problem is that it’s made in Texas, which is outside of the accepted travel radius.

That could present an opportunity, she said, to approach a local manufacturer and ask: “Would it be possible to use straw bale as a material as opposed to what they’re currently using?”

Nye, too, said he hopes local artisans find opportunities.

Ultimately, as more living building projects get started, the limited choice created by the red list will become less of a problem, Nye said.

“As products come available, and the knowledge base expands, it will become more of a competitive process,” he said. “But we’re in the beginning stages. You’re lucky if you can find some things.”