Five years ago, PAE Engineers, ZGF Architects, Edlen & Co., and Walsh Construction set out to construct a building able to meet today’s most advanced sustainability metrics.

In November 2021, they completed that building.

Now, the team must wait for a full year of operation and data collection before receiving word if the PAE Living Building has successfully achieved the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge.

Systems inside the building allow it to produce its electricity, capture and treat all its water, operate efficiently, and more. But to solve big challenges, the project team first needed to turn to the little details.

One valve after another

In the back of the PAE Living Building, on the ground floor, is the mechanical room. In the far corner are two rows of tall, blue composting machines – each capable of holding five gallons of liquid waste. Above each of the 20 composters is a black-and-yellow valve.

After a 70-gallon sump fills with waste from toilets (about once per day from typical use), one composter’s valve opens for 10 seconds – waste pumps in – and then closes. The valve at the next composter then follows suit, and on down the line until the sump is empty. The system ensures that each composter fills evenly.

“If you use one composter too much, you can overload it, and then just like backyard compost would turn into a wet soggy mess,” PAE principal and lead engineer Marc Brune said. “It’s even worse here.”

The setup also allows the composters to be at the back of the building. The project team could have relied on gravity instead of pumps, ZGF principal Justin Brooks said, but that would have required alignment of the restrooms and the composters throughout the building and thus a restricted floor plan.

Project financing relied on investments, so it was important for the structure to perform not only sustainably but also economically. A 2,365-square-foot mechanical room did not help the cause. However, use of a nutrient recovery system created more leasable space.

All liquid from the urinals drains into the system, beginning with a 1,000-gallon collection tank. The liquid then runs through a distillation column (about once a month), which separates the leachate from the urine and creates both liquid and powder fertilizers that will be sold.

Without separation of the urine from the urinals and the waste from the toilets, the building would have needed 23 composters, Brune said. Each composter costs substantially more than $10,000, said Ed Sloop, chief estimator for Walsh Construction, so use of just 20 represented a significant cost savings.

As far as the project team knows, no other Living Building has a nutrient recovery system.

Nuances in materials

Holding the 58,000-square-foot structure together are cross-laminated timber panels, glulam structural columns, and beams with concrete shear walls in the center for additional reinforcement.

“It’s basically a wood building wrapped around a concrete building,” Sloop said.

So, when it came to the stairway that travels up the center of the building. Brooks said the team needed to make a design decision: Should the wood and the concrete touch? In the case of the stairway, they do not.

Also, by not adding finishes to connect the surfaces, Brooks said, the team limited its use of materials, energy, carbon … and money.

Similarly, CLT panels lay flat across the floor beams, and just a thin line separates them. But to ensure that it would be a thin line and not a gap, KPFF engineers and Walsh Construction team members needed to engage in hours of back-and-forth and prep work.

Each glulam beam is engineered to have a precise arch (camber) so that only a certain amount of it leaves when the CLT is placed. Then the rest of the camber comes out from the concrete’s weight from the roof, leaving a flat line.

A lot of the back-and-forth, Sloop said, was on how to pour the concrete and ensure the weight was proportioned correctly for the beams.

“We said, ‘OK, we’re going to pour it uniform thickness and trust the math,’” he added. “And it came out great. You can walk around … and you don’t see ‘smiles’ because it just landed flat.”

Hidden systems

Small vents scattered atop the building are the only visible markers of the unique system that allows the roof to “breathe.”

The day the roof was placed there was “bad weather,” Sloop said, and a vapor barrier had to go down. When the concrete top was poured, an abundance of moisture was left under it and within the exposed structure.

“We couldn’t get a warrantable roof unless we could do something with the moisture,” Sloop said.

That difficulty as well as the one posed by the Living Building Challenge‘s restrictive Red List of “worst in class” materials led to a new roofing system being invented for the project. A special waffle-pattern insulation allows air to circulate under the membrane. The vents atop the roof then let the air escape.

“You don’t see it; it’s not sexy,” Sloop said, “but it’s super important to how this building got built and the longevity of the roof.”

A few windows in the walls give peeks at the inner workings, but most of the systems are tucked away.

“I just think about how much is contained in a relatively small container,” Sloop said. “There are more systems on this building than any building I have ever participated in.”

Completion of the PAE Living Building is realization of a dream, Brune said, especially since it holds the engineering firm’s new headquarters.

“I’m hoping we’ve pushed the bar a little further and (we’re) a lot closer to seeing a lot more of these because of this project,” he said. “To me, it’s just an inspiration to work in here every day that I come in.”

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A wrap date is just around the corner for the PAE Living Building, which is expected to eventually be certified as the world’s largest commercial living building.

Lead team members from PAE Engineers, Edlen & Co., ZGF Architects and Walsh Construction gathered Thursday during the 91��Ƶ’s latest Builder Breakfast event to discuss lessons learned during the project in downtown Portland.

That team sought to construct a building that would meet perhaps the world’s most stringent sustainability metrics. The project spent 28 months in preconstruction to ensure that all systems would pencil out, Walsh Construction chief estimator Ed Sloop said. Now the structure is anticipated to be self-sufficient in terms of energy use, water use, waste treatment and more.

But to achieve the International Living Future Institute‘s Living Building Challenge, the building will need to demonstrate that all sustainability goals were met. Certification is given only after a full year of occupancy and systems testing.

The project team has received the green light to turn on all of the building’s systems, PAE Engineers principal Marc Brune said. The one-year audit is predicted to begin in May or June 2022, once the building is at 80 percent occupancy.

All metrics associated with building occupancy, such as energy use and water use, will be measured during that year. Then other systems will be audited separately.

Design/mechanical engineering + plumbing

The first challenge for the project team was solar energy, Brune said. Downtown Portland has a protected grid network, and if the five-story, 58,000-square-foot building were to send excess energy to the grid, a 12-block radius blackout could result.

The team engaged with Portland General Electric, Brune said, to find an appropriate amount of energy the building could feed back to the grid. That ended up being 50 kilowatts, so a battery in the building will store any surplus.

The next challenge was the building’s size – specifically its roof. The urban site meant the building’s space was up rather than out, ZGF Architects principal Justin Brooks said, so there was less space on the roof for solar panels. Also, the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District cannot accommodate reflective surfaces (i.e., solar panels can’t be visible from the street).

As a result, the project team donated 215 kilowatts of solar panels to Renaissance Commons, an affordable housing building within the same utility district, to benefit both buildings. Carly Harrison, development manager at Edlen & Co., said it’s about $20,000 worth of power every year.

Financial

Project financing came via a developer-driven model with investors. That means the building needs to not only perform in terms of sustainability but also economics, Brooks said. To the project’s team knowledge, this type of financial model hasn’t been done yet for a potential living building – or at least at such a scale.

The financial model was intentionally designed to make this type of project more replicable, Harrison said. Typically, living building projects are subsidized by grants – a model much more difficult to repeat.

“The biggest challenge was really how to thread the needle of the cost and the rent needed to make it pencil,” Harrison said.

Team members did not mention the project’s cost on Thursday; however, Portland Bureau of Development Services permit information in April 2020 placed a $20.5 million value on the building’s structure.

Much of the project cost is associated with the special systems, especially for plumbing, electrical and solar. Also, the water treatment and waste treatment composters require a large mechanical room, reducing the amount of usable/leasable space. From that standpoint, the building is inefficient, Harrison said. But with approximately half of the building serving as PAE Engineers’ new headquarters, team members were able to discuss appropriate lease rates, Harrison added.

Construction

The structure is primarily made of cross-laminated timber panels, heavy glulam structural columns and beams, and a concrete core. About 60-70 percent of the finished product, Sloop said, is the structure itself. Protecting that was challenging, he said, after the construction start date was moved from January to April. Some of the work planned for drier weather, like roofing, was pushed to wet-weather months, he said.

Additional complexity for construction came from the project team needing to ensure that items on the ILFI “red list” – materials and chemicals considered “worst in class” to people and the environment – were not used. More than 3,000 products were vetted, Sloop said, to see whether they met Living Building Challenge requirements. The construction team had to develop a roofing system never used before, Sloop added.

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Demand for healthier space is surging amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A recent report, “A New Investor Consensus: The Rising Demand for Healthy Buildings,” revealed that 92 percent of survey respondents (many of the world’s leading real estate investors) expect demand for healthy buildings to grow in the next three years.

Yet the next step of finding healthy and sustainable materials to construct the buildings is a tricky one.

Oftentimes, little information is known about a building product’s ingredients list, manufacturing process, and supply chain. It can be difficult for architects and specifiers to identify building products that are healthy, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. In many cases, no alternative to a product with an unhealthy building ingredient exists yet.

“Sometimes we’re trying to compare apples and oranges,” said Amy Running, an interior designer with Bora Architecture & Interiors.

Running and her colleague Mike Manzi, an associate principal, are immersed in the healthy building material movement. They have lobbied for more transparency in building materials.

“There’s a limit to what we do as an architecture firm as what we could do,” Manzi said. “We realized we needed to enter the marketplace.”

The initiatives range from tracking the ingredients that go into building materials to declaring their health and environmental effects. Based on the number of available transparency tools, building declarations and certifications, the movement is expanding.

The two most well-known and widely used building product declarations are Health Product Declarations (HPDs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). The HPD is an open standard format focused on disclosing a building product’s list of ingredients and health effects. The EPD looks at the environmental impact of a building’s product throughout its life cycle.

Another certification tool used is the Cradle to Cradle Certified Products Standard (C2C). It rates manufactured products based on material health, material reuse, renewable energy, water stewardship, and social fairness. If a product satisfies all of its benchmarks, it will be certified.

Building rating systems are also acknowledging building product transparency. The latest version of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, LEED v4, has credit points available for building projects using HPDs and EPDs. Also, the International Living Future Institute requires project teams pursuing the Living Building Challenge to not use items on its red list – materials and chemicals considered “worst in class” to human health and the environment.

Adam Klauba, Walsh Construction‘s sustainability coordinator for the PAE Living Building project, said the research team had so far vetted 2,737 products that could both serve the building and meet red list requirements. Of those 2,737, only 720 were naturally compliant or already approved for the Living Building Challenge.

The International Living Future Institute even has its own inventory system, Declare, to help both manufacturers and specifiers navigate the red list. Declare works like a nutrition label on food but for building products by listing its source, its ingredients, and where it will go at the end of its life cycle.

However, a satisfactory building product doesn’t always exist yet. In this case, a letter of advocacy is written to the manufacturer to inform it of its processes. As of this month, roughly 864 materials in the PAE Living Building have needed a letter written and work-arounds approved, according to data provided by Walsh Construction Co.

“Overall, what (ILFI is) trying to do is eliminate any ingredients in the materials of the building that could be hazardous to the environment and human health not only in the building but also through the entire supply chain,” Klauba said.

A couple of groups have popped up to carry the healthy building product conversation into the Pacific Northwest. The Seattle-based Healthy Materials Collaborative and the Portland Material Transparency Collaborative represent a network of building industry professionals aiming to transform the market and implement more building material transparency into everyday practices.

Another part of the conversation is what happens behind production of materials, Running said. For example, she explained, someone might identify a product with the lowest carbon, but then learn that it’s made via slave labor.

The American Institute of Architects in October 2020 adopted a materials pledge that includes the social health and equity side, stating a preference for products from manufacturers that secure human rights in their operations and supply chain.

While the initiatives are part of a long process, “there are people on both … the manufacturer and design side that want to solve these problems,” Manzi said.

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Pursuit of the Living Building Challenge can require creativity, flexible thinking and a willingness to embrace alternatives to ideals. That is certainly the case for PAE Engineers‘ new headquarters building in downtown Portland. When limitations precluded creation of a net-positive-energy structure, the project team formed a unique partnership with a local nonprofit developer in order to meet requirements.

“Honestly, I think it’s one of the better stories of the project,” said Ed Sloop, a project manager and chief estimator for general contractor Walsh Construction Co.

The PAE Living Building is expected to become one of the largest commercial buildings in the world to gain certification from the International Living Future Institute. For that to happen, the building must demonstrate over one year that it is producing more energy than it consumes, producing more clean water than it consumes, recycling all wastewater produced on-site, and more.

The ILFI uses seven “petals” – place, water, energy, materials, equity, beauty, and health and happiness – to measure building performance. Energy petal requirements at first stumped designers from ZGF Architects, MEP engineers from PAE and project managers from Walsh Construction. Two years ago, the problem boiled down to simple math: A five-story, 58,000-square-foot building on only a quarter-block would have nowhere near sufficient roof space for enough solar panels to produce needed electricity.

“As a team we were all kind of disappointed we couldn’t do it all on site,” said Marc Brune, a PAE principal and a project team member. “There’s something that’s just elegant about the concept of really modeling it after a plant or tree that’s in the forest that’s doing all of its own energy production and water harvest.”

The building’s innovative solar array, with panels facing east to west and assembled in an undulating, articulated manner to maximize surface area, is projected to have maximum output of 133 kilowatts – only around one-third of energy needed.

“If it were a smaller building for the floor area you might be able to get away with it here,” said Walsh project manager Kent Usher, who recently oversaw subcontractor EC Electric‘s installation of the rooftop array.

The project site, in the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District, limited potential solutions. Unlike the well-known Bullitt Center in Seattle, a certified living building also engineered by PAE that has solar arrays overhanging its roof edges, the PAE Living Building could not follow suit.

“Being a downtown historic district,” Usher said, “we had to keep it hidden and under the parapet height so you can’t see it from anywhere.”

Fortunately for the project team, version 4.0 of the ever-evolving Living Building Challenge allows off-site energy production solutions if they are within the same utility district as the project. And after looking around the district, the team targeted the Renaissance Commons affordable housing development on North Argyle Street in the Kenton neighborhood.

Developed by REACH Community Development Corporation and also built by Walsh Construction, the four-story, two-building complex was solar-ready; it already had the structural and electrical components needed to accept a solar array. And Renaissance Commons had three times as much roof space as the PAE Living Building would have.

“I happened to be working with Kent (Usher), who was in the same role on this other project,” Sloop said. “So, having knowledge of both projects – and the other project had a very large roof and a big footprint; I knew it had good solar orientation – so I just threw it out there.”

However, installation of the solar array at Renaissance Commons required financial support from PAE Living Building developer Edlen & Co. The firm, which has backed sustainable elements in many of its projects, agreed to cover the $670,000 cost of placing a 207-kilowatt array at Renaissance Commons.

In addition, the arrangement fulfilled a key requirement of the equity petal, which calls for donation of half a cent or more of every dollar spent on the project to a charity or ILFI’s Living Equity Exchange Program. In this case, REACH CDC qualified because of its affordable housing work.

“From my perspective, it’s really like a best-case scenario when you have a problem and you come up with a best-case solution,” Edlen & Co. partner Jill Sherman said.

REACH CDC’s CEO, Dan Valliere, said the nonprofit was simply taking advantage of an opportunity presented to it. REACH CDC agreed to pay for operations and maintenance of the Renaissance Commons array in exchange for being able to use the power generated on-site.

“We didn’t have to do a lot at the outset,” Valliere said. “It was a great opportunity to add a feature to the building with our partners doing most of the heavy lifting and still learn through the process.”

Meanwhile, the PAE Living Building will serve as an example of how project teams can creatively pursue living building certification.

“I personally think it’s a way of thinking of net-zero-energy production that has the potential to increase the benefit of it beyond the one-building footprint and into the broader community,” Brune said. “It can achieve the same goal as if you’re putting it on your roof, but with benefits for more people.”

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After several months of delays in the permitting process, crews finally broke ground on the PAE Living Building project in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown earlier this year. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, putting the team behind schedule in the effort to erect the heart of the project: five stories of cross-laminated timber panels and heavy glulam structural columns and beams.

Several months later, however, that work is almost done … just before the anticipated arrival of wintry weather.

Crews recently placed the last five-ply CLT panel, hundreds of which were manufactured for the project by British Columbia firm Structurlam. The heavy-timber columns, beams and panels wrap around the concrete building core that was completed beforehand. Weatherproofing work is on tap next.

The PAE Living Building takes its name from the Living Building Challenge, which is perhaps the world’s most stringent green building program. To attain certification, a building must meet superior standards for energy and water use, and the project team must adhere to strict lists dictating use of materials, products and processes.

“It visualizes the ideal for the built environment and uses the metaphor of a flower because the ideal built environment opens clean and efficiently like a flower,” said Adam Klauba, director of sustainability for general contractor Walsh Construction Co. “So, everything kind of flowers when it comes to the Living Building Challenge.”

This is the first potential Living Building the firm has constructed, and the first such project that ZGF Architects has designed. PAE carried out its own MEP engineering for the project, while KPFF Consulting Engineers contributed structural work.

If the building does indeed gain certification, it will become the largest Living Building in the world.

Aside from renewable timber elements, the building will have a number of sustainable features. One will be a cutting-edge micro-grid electrical system, with a large lithium-ion battery to store leftover power. The system is being developed jointly with Portland General Electric, and the project team believes it is possibly the most important part of the project when it comes to future adaptation.

Net-zero energy will be accomplished via a 95-kilowatt rooftop photovoltaic array and the micro-grid system.

“Because of the spot network and the way the grid is set up, we can’t feed as much energy as we want out to the grid,” PAE principal Marc Brune told the 91��Ƶ in 2019. “So we’re getting around that with a 250-kilowatt battery. It’s a pretty big battery for a building, and a micro-grid controller paired with batteries allows the building to operate on an independent grid within the building itself.”

The building also will have a 71,000-gallon basement cistern for storing rainwater to be converted to drinking water. Plus, a vacuum-flush plumbing system will collect wastewater and feed it to a series of composters. There, waste will be converted into nitrogen- and phosphorus-based fertilizer to be sold to other parties.

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An effort gathering momentum in Portland seeks to encourage development of high-performance buildings constructed by diverse project teams.

The initiative, named Sustainable Buildings for All, has brought together sustainability consultants, developers and building-industry professionals to lay the groundwork for new city policies. Organizers are considering a range of incentives – rather than requirements – to entice project teams.

The goal is to see more projects along the lines of the PAE Living Building in Old Town Chinatown or the June Key Delta Community Center in North Portland. The effort underscores that existing green-building programs have not enticed developers to make high-performance buildings the norm.

Sustainable Buildings for All (SB4A) aims “to help bring more projects to the table,” said Amanda Ingmire, one of the organizers. “We thought this was a really good opportunity to offer an incentive program that would incentivize folks to tackle these really high-performance buildings.”

Any new building incentives would require the City Council’s approval. SB4A members have had initial discussions with some city staff, but they cautioned that the coalition hasn’t landed on a policy proposal. SB4A is moving to present an incentives-laden pilot program to the City Council sometime in the next year.

“The core of this is the city has commitments to both climate and equity,” said Paul Vanderford, a steering committee member and Sustainable Northwest‘s director of green markets.

Steering committee members are considering possible incentives such as delaying or deferring system development charges to the end of a project rather than pre-construction, expanding expedited permitting assistance to green buildings, and providing zoning bonuses that could include additional allowable building height or square footage.

Supporters said they’re looking to structure the incentives in ways that avoid placing significant financial or staffing burdens on city bureaus. Among the options they’re considering is tying incentives to third-party certifications, such as those from the Living Building Challenge or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

“One of our goals is to not create additional review or regulatory requirements for the city,” said Kevin Kellogg, director of real estate development at Hacienda Community Development Corp.

Tiers would likely be set to encourage high performance, but also to reward lower levels of achievement.

“The tier structure allows you to say you’ve knocked it out of the park,” Vanderford said. “If somebody’s achieving at the lower level, that’s still meaningful.”

Equity targets could work similarly.

SB4A has invited to discussions a broad industry coalition that includes representatives of ZGF Architects, Colas Construction, Walsh Construction, Skanska USA Building, the National Association of Minority Contractors’ Oregon chapter, Hacienda Community Development Corp., Gerding Edlen and Downtown Development Group, among others.

The group will work to achieve consensus before presenting a policy recommendation to the City Council, Vanderford said.

“The buy-in is part and parcel to the product,” he said.

Stephen Goodman, vice president of Downtown Development Group, said he is participating in the SB4A effort to help ensure that any eventual policies are economically viable.

“In order for the program to be implemented and to be effective, it needs to work from a market perspective,” he said.

The group’s effort comes amid recognition that existing policies have fallen short. Climate change continues unabated, and equity is increasingly at the center of contracting discussions. In September, City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero released a report that concluded that there’s “substantial room for improvement” in the city’s construction contracting practices.

SB4A organizers said they’re motivated by a sense of urgency. During a panel discussion held Wednesday as part of Sustainable Building Week, Ingmire noted that Oregon cities had some of the worst air quality in the world during the September wildfires.

“Incremental change is no longer a viable strategy,” she said. “We are at a point where we need transformational change.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that SB4A supporters had discussed the project with city commissioners. The supporters’ discussions were with city staff members.

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The Living Building Challenge is generally considered one of the top green building certification programs in terms of both prestige and rigor. In short, that’s why Mahlum Architects chose to follow that path for its new office in inner Southeast Portland.

Now, Mahlum selected for its new home an existing warehouse that had been converted into office space. There was no chance for the project team to obtain full Living Building certification from the International Living Future Institute.

However, one of the challenge’s seven “petals” – materials – appeared to be within reach. That is where Mahlum chose to focus.

“Petal certification has been around since the beginning of the standard, but it’s allowed (the ILFI) to scale the program,” said Jay Hindmarsh, a Seattle-based Mahlum associate principal and head of the Living Building Challenge portion of the renovation, which covered a 7,500-square-foot office space. “The materials petal is insanely difficult, but for Mahlum it was a way for us to embrace our values around walking the talk. We’ve been advocating for our clients about better materials and lower-carbon materials, and we looked at each other and said our new space should be beautiful but also should be super healthy and have a low-carbon footprint.”

Mahlum’s new space is located in the Custom Blocks‘ south building, at 1380 S.E. Ninth Ave. The single-level building was at one time a metal stamping shop, but was gutted, renovated and seismically retrofitted.

“We were trying to find a place in Portland that would allow us to be near clients and the community,” Hindmarsh said. “The interesting thing about the space is that it had just fairly recently gotten a core and shell upgrade, but in a lot of ways there was a great historic shell there, and it was interesting to see a space where we could envision quantifying all materials we were bringing in.”

The space could not be retrofitted to achieve net-zero energy or water use. But that wasn’t a problem for either Mahlum.

“The most sustainable buildings are the ones that are already built,” Hindmarsh said, paraphrasing Carl Elefante, a past American Institute of Architects president. “Aside from cost issues, clearly we were going to be renovating a space. This concept of net-zero material impacts is where a renovation typology suits itself to the materials petal. We’re not touching the enclosure, so there was a chance for us to not focus on new construction type components and try to promote investment in local economy.”

Slightly more than 50 percent of the products came from within 500 kilometers of the site, with some of the biggest gains coming from sourcing wood salvaged from the existing building. Also, by working with Salvage Works, a Portland supplier of reclaimed wood products, the project team used lumber originally used to build Fort Vancouver to create wall cladding, display cases and more. Such accents complement the existing heavy timber in the former warehouse, as well as a host of Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood products sourced by another Portland firm, Sustainable Northwest Wood. The latter were mainly plywood and lumber used to frame the new space.

“There’s a threshold for salvage products and we vastly exceeded that,” Hindmarsh said. “This embraces the philosophy of not having superfluous materials. Materials should be true to themselves, especially with the Living Building Challenge. If you’re adding in and designing in things that need to be vetted you’re making things hard for yourself.”

Working under Living Building Challenge version 3.1, Mahlum staff vetted over 350 products and materials for red list compliance. One that fit the bill was EcoSmart drywall manufactured by USG, which is known for its popular Sheetrock brand.

“We had never used this one, as it has just come on the market,” Hindmarsh said. “But it lists a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions for the drywall, and it’s also made in Rainier (Oregon), so it was win-win for all.”

Portland’s Quartertwenty crafted custom workstations to serve Mahlum’s 50-plus employees in the new office.

“We had to catalog all the pieces of wood and steel, the nuts and bolts, the coating on the steel, the weight,” Hindmarsh said. “And getting that done was a huge lift. We were able to get something that met all our design and ergonomic needs and ended up being LBC compliant.”

Finally, waste diversion is required for certification; debris can’t simply be carted to the landfill. In the end, however, the project team managed to recycle close to 95 percent of waste materials generated on site.

General contractor Perlo Construction finished the project last year. Mahlum moved in this past November, and petal certification was achieved on March 17.

It was a very valuable learning experience for the Mahlum team, Hindmarsh said.

“I think my recommendation would be do your homework and understand what it will take,” he said. “It is a great opportunity for architecture firms and design firms to really put their process in a petri dish and look at it and their materials library and reflect on their practices.”

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From a cutting-edge micro-grid electrical system to a 71,000-gallon basement cistern that stores rainwater for conversion to drinking water, the PAE Living Building in Portland is going to be a living laboratory of innovation.

Walsh Construction is preparing to break ground soon on a parcel at the corner of Southwest Pine Street and First Avenue in Old Town Chinatown. The five-story, 58,700-square-foot office building was designed by ZGF Architects to meet the requirements of the International Living Future Institute‘s Living Building Challenge. If successful, it will be the largest commercial Living Building in Oregon and the first of its type in Portland.

“There are not many buildings like this out there,” said Marc Brune, a principal with PAE, the engineering firm responsible for designing the building’s mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems. “And they’re all different.”

Brune, who led the PAE design team, detailed several new technologies and processes expected to help the structure ultimately become a certified Living Building. That will require it to produce more power and potable water than it consumes.

Power is probably the easier of the two, Brune said, and will be accomplished through the combination of a 95-kilowatt rooftop photovoltaic array and a micro-grid system that uses a large lithium-ion battery to store excess power.

“Because of the spot network and the way the grid is set up, we can’t feed as much energy as we want out to the grid,” Brune said. “So we’re getting around that with a 250-kilowatt battery. It’s a pretty big battery for a building, and a micro-grid controller paired with batteries allows the building to operate on an independent grid within the building itself.”

The controller determines whether to send energy to batteries, the grid or the building itself. Use of a battery also allows for a larger photovoltaic array than otherwise.

The project is being closely watched by Portland General Electric, which already is running a pilot program for two other projects’ micro-grid systems. One of them is the Beaverton Public Safety Center being constructed by Skanska USA Building. PAE also served as the MEP engineer for that project and lessons learned are being carried over into the PAE Living Building.

Darren Murtaugh, a senior manager for energy storage at PGE, said the term micro-grid describes systems ranging from a single site up to a large section of the electric grid.

Unlike the Beaverton project, the PAE Living Building will have to contend with a much denser network.

“The challenge that we both recognize is they’re in the downtown core area network, where it’s really difficult to be able to feed energy back to the grid,” Murtaugh said. “That’s where the engineers on both sides of the equation both get very excited; that’s part of the fun. We’re working together pretty closely these days to figure out how can we unlock this puzzle and qualify as a Living Building.”

The key is energy storage technology.

“It’s the ability to time-shift the energy they produce with solar and ‘levelize’ it so there’s no instance in time where the back-feed into the grid is too great,” Murtaugh said.

Further, the system will automatically disconnect when power flows from one or more customers back to the grid.

“This didn’t use to be a problem,” Murtaugh said. “But in tomorrow’s world that is a concern. Fundamentally it changes everything about what was a really high-reliability design. It doesn’t work right when you have customers who want to back-feed into the grid.”

Fortunately, micro-grid systems are an emergent technology, and the price of lithium-ion battery storage has fallen in recent years. Think Tesla electric cars for a close comparison.

“Most buildings have not been designed to do net zero in places where your grid limits your ability to feed back,” Brune said. “And other projects that consider a micro-grid controller and battery are normally critical facilities, something that needs to operate independent of the grid.”

Achieving net-zero water use is a bit trickier. As designed, the PAE Living Building will use only water collected and treated on-site.

All rainwater falling on the building will be collected and sent to the basement cistern for treatment. On the flip side, a new type of vacuum-flush plumbing system will collect wastewater and feed it to a series of composters, which will convert it into nitrogen- and phosphorus-based fertilizers.

A urine separation system will even sequester and treat an anticipated 30 gallons of wastewater per day for use as fertilizer. The vacuum-flush system, meanwhile, will feed the cistern in just 0.1-gallon increments – roughly 20 percent of the average flush toilet.

The project will feature locally-sourced cross-laminated timber and not use galvanized steel products in order to avoid hexavalent chromium – a known carcinogen.

It’s the issue of power, however, that is most important to the project and future ones. That is because renewable energy systems have the most potential for wider adoption.

“Batteries are a hot topic in the industry,” Brune said. “As costs come down, if everyone is net metering, then the utility becomes stressed without the storage aspect.”

It’s an area of the industry where even the experts have a lot to learn, Murtaugh said.

“We’re hoping they (pilot projects) will give us real world experience in location-specific benefits,” he said. “We can answer how these resources can be leveraged to offset traditional distribution investment and how they can improve voltage management. Today, none of us are very good at quantifying what that potential value is.”

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By the end of 2019 a Portland-based project team will break ground on perhaps the most important building the city has seen this century, and potentially usher into Oregon a new era of environmental and technological responsibility.

ZGF Architects and PAE are leading the effort to bring to fruition the first Living Building in Portland. The five-story, 58,000-square-foot mixed-use structure, when built, will be the world’s largest Living Building, according to PAE project lead Marc Brune. Gerding Edlen is serving as the developer of the project, which will be built by Walsh Construction.

The PAE Living Building will have four stories of office space (the top three occupied by PAE) above ground-floor retail space. It’s set to rise on a quarter-block parcel at the corner of Southwest Pine Street and First Avenue, in the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District.

Portland’s Historic Landmarks Commission last month voted unanimously to approve project plans, which call for achieving the International Living Future Institute‘s Living Building Challenge. Its exceptionally high standards are intended to inspire a built environment without negative ecological impacts.

But this isn’t PAE’s first Living Building project. The company provided mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering for Seattle’s Bullitt Center, which Brune said is currently the world’s largest Living Building at 55,000 square feet. That building houses PAE’s Seattle office.

“The PAE Living Building is a logical next step for a company that has already helped show the world what’s possible in several high-profile projects,” ILFI Vice President Kathleen Smith said. “When people look for examples of companies really stepping out front to lead on climate change, the PAE Living Building should be top of mind.”

One of the most daunting elements of the Living Building Challenge is the “red list” of prohibited materials because of the toxins they contain. The banned chemicals pollute the environment and are harmful to construction workers and building occupants, according to the ILFI’s website.

But the project team is using a number of tools to avoid red-list products, Brune said. For instance, Red2Green, a database of materials information, makes location of products outside the red list quick and easy. The project team will also call major manufacturers and ask for applicable products free from toxins – and if one doesn’t exist for the needed purpose, the ILFI will make exceptions.

As Living Buildings increase in popularity, Brune said, manufacturers will eventually be forced to make more products free from the red list. He believes competitors will then emerge, and costs will drop.

Incidentally, PAE and ZGF are using an innovative investment model – one not used before – to finance the building, Brooks and Brune said. While neither one was willing to explain the model any further, they said it gives investors a return and could prove replicable for other Living Buildings in the future.

Of course, such an environmentally-friendly project comes with a cost premium – about 10 percent greater than a typical building’s cost, Brune said. As a result, tenants’ leases will cost 5-10 percent higher than market rate, he added. However, the team is confident that PAE Living Building occupants’ productivity will be better than average. Research has proven that natural daylighting and ventilation can increase employee productivity from anywhere between 2 and 14 percent, he said.

“If we get a 1 percent productivity increase, that makes it totally cost-neutral for us,” he said. “We’re likely to get more than that.”

Similar boosts in efficiency are evident throughout the project, thanks to the design team’s line of thinking that optimizes solutions over the bottom line, according to ZGF project lead Justin Brooks.

For example, the building’s roof will feature an array of solar panels as well as a cistern to collect drinking water. That left no room for an eco-roof, which ordinarily would be required under city code. But the requirement’s intent will be fulfilled anyway, Brune said, because part of the Living Building Challenge requires the team to purchase an acre of land off-site, and that land will be dedicated to natural green space.

Those solar panels are intended to give back to the city too. The building will use a 500 kilowatt-hour battery to store power, Brune said, and PAE has partnered with a low-income housing complex nearby to share some of that power below market rate.

Another example of solution-oriented thinking can be found in the building’s concrete core and wood structure. It’s intended to ensure the building will be able to not only withstand a sizable earthquake, but continue to operate thereafter.

Most buildings require a minimum amount of buffer, because in a large earthquake they will likely rock back and forth. But because the PAE Living Building will meet a higher degree of safety, regulations allow it to stand a bit closer to its neighbors. This has allowed two sides of the building to each grow by six inches, Brune said. That means more leasable space, and subsequently greater rents, which in the end will help cover the greater costs associated with seismic safety.

“The return is the same, and now we have a building that will be standing for the next hundred years,” Brune said.

“Those sorts of creative, collective thinking are what make these projects work,” Brooks added. “You have to be that much more collaborative, which for me as a designer is a pleasure because I learn something every time.”

PAE learned a lot from its work on the Bullitt Center. The foam-flush toilets in that building are each connected to a composter, Brune said. The problem is that when one toilet receives more use than the others, its composter becomes clogged. For the PAE Living Building, the project team plans to use a valve so that composters are alternated each time a toilet is used. That will prevent clogging, and reduce the number of composters required. This is the first time a five-story building will use vacuum-flush toilets connected to basement composters, Brune said.

Brune and Brooks both said they hope this kind of learning provides a road map for other firms looking to take on the Living Building Challenge in Portland. They each said the experience has been incredibly valuable for the firm, and future projects will be easier as more companies become involved.

“The next person behind is going to have a little more of a path,” Brooks said. “I hope that in such a forward-thinking city as Portland, we’ll just see people following in that wake.”

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The Portland Historic Landmarks Commission voted Monday to approve plans for a five-story office building intended to be the city’s first certified living building.

Commissioners voted 4-0 in favor of the PAE Living Building, a 54,000-square-foot mixed-use office building planned for a quarter-block parcel at the corner of Southwest First Avenue and Pine Street in the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District.

The project received design advice in January, at which time commissioners praised the concept and asked for a few small changes in the fifth-floor window layout to better match the classic 19^th century Italianate style found throughout the district.

Designers with ZGF Architects responded with changes including establishing a more clear delineation between floors and extending golden ratio proportions to the top of the building.

The response from commissioners was ultimately what the project team was looking for.

“I really love the building,” Commissioner Ernestina Fuenmayor said. “I think it’s a great addition; if you push yourself you can get great results and I think this is a very good example of that.”

Other small changes included the addition of larger ground-floor canopies and additional details added to the tops of ground-floor windows.

The project team includes PAE Consulting Engineers, which will occupy three floors of the building, as well as developer Gerding Edlen and general contractor Walsh Construction. The structure will feature cross-laminated timber framing and will contain ground-floor retail space along the frontages of Southwest First Avenue and Pine Street. The second through fifth floors will contain office space.

The building will be clad primarily in textured brick veneer, with custom finished aluminum panels, aluminum storefronts at ground level and fiberglass windows above.

Designers aim to achieve the net-zero water and energy efficiency required by the Living Building Challenge through a host of different means.

To earn the certification, the building will in part need to show over the course of at least a year that it produces more energy and water than it consumes. The project team is projecting that 105 percent of the building’s annual energy needs will be produced on-site from solar sources, while energy will be saved through daylighting, triple-paned glazing and other features. Meanwhile, to achieve net zero water, stormwater, and wastewater use, the building will utilize a 50,000-gallon cistern, composting toilets, and urine diversion for fertilizer generation.

“This is a unique building in that we’re seeking the Living Building Challenge,” said Kathy Berg, a partner at ZGF Architects. “But we’re looking to do so in a way that preserves the characteristics of the district. It’s a pretty exciting opportunity for Portland, it would be the first living building in Portland and one of less than 100 in the world, with full net-zero on energy and water and red-list free materials.”

City requirements for eco-roof standards were waived for the project in order to accommodate an extensive photovoltaic array and drinking water collection equipment that will occupy much of the roof space.

“If we were to put a green roof up there,” Berg said, “it would preclude both possibilities.”

A requirement for at least two Type A loading docks was also waived to preserve ground-floor uses and avoid pedestrian interference.

PAE Consulting Engineers will move roughly 225 employees into the top three floors of the building, while tenants are still being sought for the second floor and retail spaces.

“It shows our [design advice review] process really does work,” Commissioner Andrew Smith said. “They came in with a project with a really sound concept, and what we got coming back was something that not only simplified, but also clarified. I think it’s going to be a really good addition to the historic district.”

Commissioners Kristen Minor, Annie Mahoney and Wendy Chung were absent Monday.

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