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Last week, Portland Mayor Sam Adams, a longtime advocate for the Oregon Sustainability Center, acknowledged that it won’t be built.

His disappointment was shared by the project team, said Steve Clem, director of preconstruction for general contractor .

鈥淭o the project team, it was much more than a shrine to Mayor Adams,鈥� he said. 鈥淭his was a quantum leap for the design community.鈥�

Clem and other team members, including developers, engineers and architects, say the strategies developed for the project were innovative and have helped them gain work elsewhere.

鈥淲e continue to leverage (the strategies), bringing all that experience together on these new projects,鈥� Clem said. 鈥淧eople keep looking to Portland and the team members to tell (them) what we learned even though we didn’t have the pleasure of actually building it.鈥�

The OSC, at one time a $72 million project, was expected to become the world’s first net-zero high-rise, according to city officials.

It was going to achieve Living Building Challenge goals via innovative design strategies, said Omid Nabipoor, president of .

For example, advanced water reclamation was planned for gray water and black water. Also, a direct current loop would have reduced power usage by letting computers and other machines operate without power transformers.

These strategies are not the only reason Interface Engineering is gaining work (in a press release, Adams said the OSC played a significant role in the firm getting a five-year contract in Qatar), but they are being used on new projects, Nabipoor said.

鈥淲e are doing work all over the nation basically as a result of our knowledge gained through this project and others on sustainable design,鈥� he said. 鈥�(The OSC) was never fully designed, but there were a lot of interesting designs that were developed that we use.鈥�

For , the most valuable strategy learned was tenant engagement. A net-zero building’s performance is dependent, in part, on occupants. So, the design team came up with ways to educate tenants and communicate with them regularly; for example, one idea was for an iPhone application to inform tenants of the building’s energy consumption.

鈥淐hanging tenants’ habits and expectations about how they use a building was the quickest way to achieve significant efficiencies and savings,鈥� said Kyle Andersen, an architect with GBD. 鈥淲e learned a great deal from working on the OSC.鈥�

The firm also used the project to push the boundaries of what was feasible in regard to renewable solar energy technology, sustainable material sourcing and on-site wastewater treatment via constructed wetlands.

The lessons learned are being applied to some of the firm’s current projects, such as the four-tower Lloyd Blocks and the Con-way Master Plan, Andersen said.

The project also revealed how everything in a net-zero building ties together, Clem said. Everything 鈥� from energy use to aesthetics 鈥� is related and integrated, he said. As a result, design team members had to take on multiple roles.

鈥淚t was very unclear at times of who was doing what and I thought that was the beauty of the whole thing,鈥� he said. 鈥淐ontractually we all knew our roles, but because everything was so interrelated, we couldn’t just stick to our script.鈥�

Skanska has taken the strategies it has learned and used them on multiple projects around the country, including one for the Boy Scouts of America in West Virginia and a Living Building Challenge effort for the University of Florida.

鈥淭he OSC was a leap, one we thought the city and region was ready to take,鈥� Clem said. 鈥淲ith our partners in the design community, we’re going to keep on looking for a way to make that leap.鈥�