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Earth Day co-founder Denis Hayes and architect Jason McLellan are behind a project that aims to build the greenest office building ever.
SEATTLE – An office building that lasts 250 years with no monthly electricity or water bills? It may sound like an environmentalist’s pipe dream, but it will soon be a reality, say the builders of what they hope will be the biggest office tower in the nation that produces as much water and electricity as it consumes.
Currently rising from a pit in downtown Seattle, the $30 million, six-story “living building” is being spearheaded by Denis Hayes and Jason McLennan, who believe they can save the world one building at a time by reducing the massive energy appetites of modern cities.
"Eighty-two percent of Americans, and more than half of humanity, now live in cities -- none of which have been designed for sustainability," said Hayes, who in 1970 helped create Earth Day, which has developed into the planet’s unofficial holiday.
Hayes, 67, now heads the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental nonprofit that intends to practice what it preaches by moving into the building when it’s completed, currently planned for November.
The Bullitt Center, as the building will be known, is designed to use just a third of the energy consumed by a typical office building its size. It also aims to minimize its resource footprint by generating electricity from solar power, collecting water from rainfall and treating all sewage and wastewater onsite. It also will have no parking for cars -- just racks for bikes.
It won’t be entirely off the electrical grid, so that it can make it through the periods when there isn’t enough sunlight to meet the tenants’ demands. But it will later repay those withdrawals, said McLennan, 38, who is CEO of the Northwest-based International Living Future Institute.
"In the summer it gives excess energy to the (power) grid and in the winter it gets it back when we can't generate enough," he said. "It nets out at zero on an annual basis."
As for the water system, Seattle law requires the building be hooked up to its water supply but the goal is to take in enough rainwater to make ends meet.
Standard buildings are a "negative gift" to taxpayers, he said, because of the burdens they impose in terms of pollution and wasted energy. "We clean up our own messes ... that's the big picture," he said.
Hayes said that in addition to being self-sufficient, the building will make sense financially, explaining that while it may cost a third more to build than a traditional office building, it is designed to last centuries longer.
"We are using the Bullitt Center to explore what is possible on the cutting edge of green, using existing technology and constrained by reasonable economics," said Hayes. "Durability is key. The average building lasts 40 years, we're going for 250 years. ... It's a fundamentally different approach."
Getting the building to last 2 1/2 centuries, McLennan said, comes down to three factors: quality building materials; careful and clever detailing from the architecture firm; and high quality construction from the contractor.
Ultimately, the partners hope to get the Bullitt Center certified under the “Living Building Challenge,” which is run by the Living Future Institute.
In order to be certified as a living building, developments much meet benchmarks in seven performance areas. The slideshow at the top of the story illustrates those areas, each of which includes several "imperatives," such as "car-free living" and "urban agriculture."
So far, about 140 projects are registered for the Living Building Challenge, including a handful in Seattle. Only four have been certified as meeting the challenge criteria so far, as many are under construction or have not yet met the year of occupancy necessary for certification. Most are small projects; a few are office buildings, but none is as large as the Bullitt Center.
Net-zero homes have been around since the 1970s, but McLennan noted that it's "much harder to achieve this in a larger building, as the larger the building the more difficult it is to generate all your own energy and harvest all your water. Scale makes it challenging."
If the Bullitt Center is certified as a living building, it will be the largest net-zero office building in the U.S., McLennan said. A three-story Center for Sustainable Landscapes also is under construction in Pittsburgh at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, he noted.
Here are some of the major pieces that Hayes and McLennan say will enable the building to meet the challenge:
- Solar panels on the roof that extend over the sides of the building will provide the electricity. (Panels have gained enough efficiency in recent years to make them operable even in places with as much cloud cover as Seattle.)
- Water will circulate through 26 geothermal wells, each 400 feet deep in earth that's a constant 55 degrees, to help offset heating costs in winter.
- Rainwater will be collected in a 56,000 gallon basement cistern. Purification steps include a special membrane for the roof, ultrafiltration and ultraviolet light. Because the process has to be tested before Seattle will consider authorizing it for drinking water, sinks and showers, Hayes calls it "the last big hurdle" for the center.
- Sewage will be sent to 10 basement composters and then shipped offsite to become fertilizer.
- All timber frames and other wood will be certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council.
The criteria for certification, McLennan said, are "more high performing" than the standards of the better known LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, which were developed by the U.S. Green Building Council and adopted by many developers across the country.
"It's time to move the ball farther," he said, adding that "single projects can change the way the design community thinks."
The U.S. Green Building Council said it welcomes the living building concept and has worked closely with McLennan, who also runs the council's Seattle chapter.
"It's more challenging," acknowledged Scot Horst, the council's vice president for LEED. "Most buildings that attempted but couldn't meet the (living building) criteria were still LEED certified."
John Brecher / msnbc.com
The six-story Bullitt Center will block the downtown views from the apartments at left, as well as partly obscure those from the condos in the center of this photo.
Even a cutting-edge development like the Bullitt Center can have difficulty meeting the living building benchmarks. For example, it is replacing a single-story bar and thereby covering up the views from apartments behind it.
That would appear to violate the Living Building Challenge's "equity" imperative: "The project may not block access to, nor diminish, the quality of fresh air, sunlight and natural waterways for any member of society or adjacent developments."
But McLennan notes the apartments went up knowing that the Bullitt property would some day be developed. "The windows for the adjacent building were placed along an alley where development was always expected and part of city zoning for that site," he said.
STORY: 'ZeroHouse' concept debuts in California
Hayes said tenants will get a rent reduction in return. "It's not a perfect solution but we're doing what we can," he said.
McLennan added that the upsides -- more diversity and added jobs in the area -- outweigh any downside.
Architects from Pink Cloud leap into the future with their eco-friendly vision of turning oil silos into low-cost housing and share their award winning ideas with Msnbc.com's Dara Brown.
Eco-friendly projects aren't immune to the community frictions that often greet new developments.
In Wallingford, a neighborhood of homes and low-rise commercial buildings in Seattle, a green developer inspired by the Bullitt project says it needs to exceed the city's height limit in order to make its building cost effective.
That has angered neighbors like Katherine Bragdon, herself an environmental activist, and put the project on hold as city government deals with the opposition.
"No developer should be given special privileges to exceed current zoning by 44 percent, impair views that belong to the public, and trump years of work and consideration that have gone into neighborhood planning," Bragdon said. "I’ve worked on a number of conservation campaigns around the country over the past two decades so I want to stress that I respect and value the green building aspect of this project. … But I also believe that we can’t trample over one good cause (well-planned neighborhoods, public process, fair zoning) for another."
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Leave a Comment:
It's being assembled in America. I hope it's components are being built in America as well.
MIC - I agree I hope so too - FYI generally "green" also means locally sourced materials - within a few hundred miles. Cuts down on fossil fuel emissions.
Any number of large NYC developers - Albanese, Durst, etc. are building green and making a profit at it! You know, those anti-capitalist NYC real estate developers!!! (for the sheep - that's sarcasm)
Please "pipe dream" etc. - wake up to the fact that green can mean profit! Private/Public Partnerships - not anti government - not anti-corporate! The SMART follow the nerds and the visionaries and always have a job. Google it!
The UN-informed and the fear filled - follow the naysayers! And they. the sheep, will always be blaming someone else and get left behind when progress happens without them! My advice read a book on modern construction and take a trip to any airport anywhere else in the world. Find out how much the engineers/operators of these facilities made/make for running and building/running these places - and ask yourself if you would like that salary for yourself?
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/salt-water-fuel.shtml
Fuel From Salt Water
Summary:
Series of videos and messages claim that an inventor in the US has found a way
to burn salt water with a radio-wave generator (Full commentary below).
Status:
True
Example:(Submitted, July 2007)
Subject: salt water can be used
for auto fuel
Check this out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk
Commentary:
Claims that an inventor has found a way to "burn" salt water with a
radio-wave generator are circulating in the form of videos, emails and website
articles. The technique has generated so much excitement because there have
been suggestions that it could potentially be used to power vehicle engines
from that most abundant of resources, sea water, and thereby break our
increasingly troublesome reliance on fossil fuels.
Although the process described may sound somewhat far-fetched, the claims in
the videos and messages are factual, at least in the sense that the salt water
actually does "burn".
Several years ago, retired broadcast executive John Kanzius began working
on a radio-wave generator that could kill cancer cells. The
machine has so far shown promising results and has raised the interest of
prominent doctors and scientists.
Kanzius and an associate, Charlie Rutkowski, later discovered that the
radio-wave generator could actually burn salt water when they were
experimenting to see if the machine could be used for desalination. A news video of the process shows how a
test-tube filled with ordinary salt water with a piece of paper towel as a wick
ignites and burns without consuming the paper. In fact, the water produces a
flame without any wick at all. The footage also shows a miniature engine being
powered by heat from the burning water. A chemist who examined the process
determined that the energy released is hydrogen. The heat breaks down the bond
between hydrogen and oxygen in the water.
It should be noted, however, that the process is not yet considered a practical
method of generating energy and quite possible never will be. According to a PESWiki article on the subject, the radio-wave
generator consumes more energy than can be produced by the burning salt water.
Some of the more enthusiastic reports on the invention tend to gloss
over this fact.
References:
Salt
Water Fuel
Salt Water into Fuel part 2
Florida Man Invents Machine
To Cure Cancer
Fire from Salt Water
Salt Water Fuel
I'm impressed with the energy part of it, but I don't like "...treating all sewage and wastewater onsite..." This seems like a inefficient method of handling waste and one more susceptible to local failures due to the inconsistencies that would surely develop from one building manager to another. What happens when someone, accidentally or on purpose, pours 5 gallons of vegetable oil down the toilet and kills all the algae? Why not (like it is now) pump it all to one municipal waste site and have professionals always monitoring it?
We all bein Green for thousand of years, we just didn't have the equipment to be self efficient until now. It's just too bad that we can't afford to purchase the items needed and I'm pretty sure the utilities companys who keeps us in immediate debt well NOT lessen their strangle hold to give us the window of opportunity to purchase such required items????
It sometimes amazes me that with all the progress Americans can rightfully brag about throughout our history, we STILL refuse to learn from that same history. While developing new and life-changing technologies like the steam engine, automobiles, air travel, steel-hulled ships powered by engines, space-travel, and all the rest, there was always that segment of the population that foresaw the horrors and insanity of it all. They look at any new idea or attempt at change and first see all the reasons why it will not work, why it is unaffordable, or unnecessary. And as with any real change, there are setbacks to be overcome, and these same naysayers jump all over it. If we had listened to these people, one of the biggest problems our society would face today would be how to clean up the tons of horse manure from our streets and what to do with it. Rest assured that even with those problems, they would be against any proposed remedy. They just can't seem to handle anything they do not understand. Worse yet, they want nothing to do with anything that might ask them to change the way they interact with the rest of society.
So here we see it and hear it again. The simple fact is this; alternative fuels and new approaches to energy production are GOING TO HAPPEN simply because they MUST! Now we can kick and scream because it makes us uncomfortable to grasp it, or we can embrace the fact that our lives will be made better as a result and make it happen quicker and more effective and efficient. In any event, the people in the forefront will eventually be recognized in the same breaths as the Edisons, McCormacks, Bells, the Wright brothers and the rest, and the naysayers will fall by the wayside like the buggy-whip supporters of the past.
So to the buggy-whippers on this blog, look in the mirror and you will find someone who is already irrelevant. And to the builders of this innovative technology, thank you for your contribution to the future!
Ugly Thing! I guess it would be a tower, if it was made up of ADOBE!
As with a good bit of commentors here, I love the idea except for no vehicle parking.
What's the deal with all the collapsing that goes on in the comment boards here?
I know this sight is a left leaning one.
Do Demos hate hearing anything other than their own words?
For quite awhile now I've read through these comments and always see numerous callapsed comments.
Hell. you Demos would have fit right in with the Third Reich or the Communist Party.
Squash those with differ opinions than yourselves, god knows people shouldn't hear all sides of a story, hell people might actually have an informed opinion if that happens.
I'm refering to the Honest Jo comments or whatever his/her handle is.
You know, the several comments that were collapsed in a row.
Back to the topic at hand.
I love it when my dept. has to bid on one of these LEEDS projects and we can't get the job because our manufacturer is outside the 500 mile radius. But when we do happen to get a project that fits their criteria and I have to submit drawings for the project they want anywhere from seven to twelve hard copies. I always try to push for them just to take three hard copies and keep a pdf file. But they insist on seven to a dozen.
250 years! YEA! if you wanna live in a log cabin with the JETSONS!
Oooh! 250 years? Why is that so crazy? How old are some of the still inhabited buildings in Europe? Only in America, do we think we need to tear everything down and build new.
A building is considered pretty "new" in parts of Europe if its less than 100 years old. Why on earth do Americans think that they have to rip everything down every 20 years?
The only way in the future is UP or DOWN! That building is already in the way of PROGRESS!
I've noticed a theme with you Steve... none of your comments make any sense. Have you had your pills this morning?
Never mind the green initiative of this endeavor. This is what American ingenuity is all about. Imagine a building lasting 250 years. Not that you would want it to, but imagine. Huge monuments to human engineering and adaptability. Who says we can't be on the forefront of science and technology while being good stewards of the precious space we occupy. This is cool. Oh, one last fun thing. If they had sufficiently deep footings and walls around the building they might also have provided a second important function: zombie safehouse!
HEY! Green is Great! But act accordingly! 250 yrs and that'll look like SHANTYTOWN! Make the New Towers Green!
Must be Green! I don't see any GASPUMPS!
Stupid
The negativity reminds me of a couple of anecdotes: I worked in a law office when computers were just becoming a wave of the future for offices. A salesman was demonstrating and one of the typists entered an affidavit, which was inadvertently "lost" when saved. The lawyer/owner refused to ever get computers based on that very early technology.
About the same time, the credit union of the small town I lived in installed an ATM machine. This was new technology and people were slow to trust a machine with their money. It was removed and for years none of the banks would install an ATM because "they didn't work out."
All "new" ideas take time for people to accept and take time for the bugs to be worked out. What a different world we would live in today if everyone had accepted the idea that computers weren't reliable and ATMs weren't worth the money to install!
250 years from now, that building will be under water, the way the glaciers are melting! WHERES the Periscope! Jules Verne!
LOL - what about modern development is about less paperwork? I spend hours a day on paperwork! Eventually - I hope - but everything eventually tracks back to a Department of Buildings - right? And our government is not yet "green"/modern - unfortunately. Good luck I hope more development comes your way. But to do that we need to encourage infra-structure spending - and that involves the government - right? Let's encourage re-development of our country - Private/Public Partnerships! Bureaucratic messes, but when they are done right - you get Battery Park City in NYC. Maybe not perfect at every step along the way, but a success in the end.
30 million dollar joke. Green energy is a joke. Drill baby, drill!
Shut up, Idiota, Shut Up! The hell is wrong with you?
I think General Dynamics is the wayve of the FUTURE! SUBLETTING!
Look BACK 250 yrs! CHRIST! Tepees were GREEN!