KPFF, founded in 1960, has established itself as a leader in civil, structural, and transportation engineering, serving a wide range of industries, including commercial, residential, and public infrastructure projects. The firm’s collaborative approach ensures that designs meet both functional and aesthetic needs. Notable projects include the PAE Living Building in Portland, the largest commercial Living Building, which features mass timber construction and operates with net-zero energy, water, and waste. KPFF provided civil and structural engineering services, ensuring sustainability and resilience.

KPFF’s commitment to sustainability is demonstrated in more than 800 LEED-certified projects, including the first LEED Platinum public housing project, Bud Clark Commons in Portland. The firm also pioneered Portland’s first integrated green street neighborhood, New Columbia. Additionally, in 2024, KPFF updated its Embodied Carbon Action Plan, committing to reducing embodied carbon in structural engineering projects by 2050.

With a focus on sustainable development and a strong presence in Portland, where its office has become one of the largest civil and structural engineering firms, KPFF continues to shape the built environment. The firm’s work supports the growth of sustainable, thriving communities across the Pacific Northwest, with a strong emphasis on collaboration and innovation.

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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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The challenge: construct a building to meet perhaps today’s most advanced sustainability metrics. The anticipated outcome: a self-sufficient building in terms of energy use, water use, waste, and more.

PAE Engineers, ZGF Architects and Walsh Construction embarked on this expedition nearly three years ago. Now the project team is just a few months from completion – the PAE Living Building is on track to open in September.

Following one full year of operation and data collection, the structure is expected to become the world’s largest commercial living building. A lot of technology helped the team reach this point.

Energy

Roughly 400 kilowatts of power are needed to fuel the five-story, 58,000-square-foot building. The International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge requires that most of that energy be harvested through renewables (zero combustion energy).

The PAE Living Building’s roof holds a 132.6-kilowatt solar array. The rest of the energy is being harvested via rooftop solar panels on Renaissance Commons six miles away. All of that energy is fed to a 250-kilowatt battery, which stores it.

Living building certification requires buildings be able to feed excess energy to the grid. However, the PAE Living Building is in downtown Portland – a protected micro-grid designed specifically so buildings don’t feed the network and potentially cause a blackout. Hence, a micro-grid controller was needed, as was special permission from Portland General Electric to feed back to the grid. That controller is “the brain of the building’s electrical systems,” PAE principal and project lead engineer Marc Brune said

The controller will monitor energy coming from the solar panels, usage in the building, and the battery. If there is a really sunny Saturday and no use in the building, the controller will be able to send energy to the grid – no more than 50 kilowatts, per the agreement with PGE. The controller will also decide when to pull the needed power and from where: the battery, the grid or the solar panels.

In a theoretical extended power outage, the building should be able to run off of its battery (if it’s full) for almost 100 days, Brune said.

Seismic

The PAE Living Building is engineered to stand for 500 years, with all its systems expected to carry on following a Cascadia subduction zone-level seismic event. The category four standard is the same one that fire stations and hospitals must adhere to, and helps keep all embodied carbon intact.

KPFF was in charge of the seismic design. The structure is made up of cross-laminated timber panels and heavy glulam structural columns and beams, but it became sufficiently sturdy via thick, concrete shear walls and additional reinforcement, KPFF’s Lee Glassford said.

Ordinarily, office buildings are required to have an 8-inch gap – a “seismic joint” – between the exterior wall and property line to allow them to wiggle without colliding with a neighboring building. With extra sturdiness, the PAE Living Building won’t sway as much at the roof level. That, in turn, allowed the building’s two affected sides to be built four inches closer, increasing the floor plate – and the leasable space.

“It was a big aha! moment,” Brune said, noting that the gain in space covered the $135,000 cost of category four classification.

“I think the thing it highlighted was looking a little bit deeper,” he added.

Water

The building is designed to collect and treat 100 percent of its water on-site. The self-contained system starts by collecting rainwater from the roof. An NSF-certified membrane is used, and a parapet (between 4 and 5 feet) acts as a basin. Rainwater runs down three sets of pipes rated for potable water to the first floor.

The rainwater is then filtered to remove any debris and then enters an underground cistern. From the cistern, water is pumped into a treatment system. Treated water goes into a couple of day tanks that hold 500 gallons apiece. From there, water runs to potable water elements such as sinks, showers and drinking fountains.

A hybrid-heat pump system, by the way, transfers waste heat from the mechanical room to water for use in showers and sinks.

After potable water is used, it drains to the gray water system, which treats it and cleans it a bit before sending it to supply for toilets and hybrid urinals. The latter are waterless because there are no flush controls. Every 72 hours, one gallon of water will flush through the system to help keep pipes clean, because crystals can build up inside drains and require regular maintenance.

“We’re hoping with the hybrid, waterless urinals (there will be) less maintenance,” PAE Associate Luke Hendricks said.

Waste

At this point, the water then splits in two directions: The waste from the toilets is removed by a vacuum flush system, and then dropped into a gravity tank below the mechanical room. After movement by a series of pumps, control valves and a manifold system, the waste evenly goes into one of 20 composting bins, where it will sit for about a year before removal. The now composted waste is then shoveled out into buckets and taken off-site to be used as fertilizer. The residual liquid “leachate” is drained underground into a 3,000-gallon recovery tank, where two-thirds of it will be pumped out by a truck regularly for fertilizer elsewhere.

The urinals are routed separately from all the other pipes and drain to the 1,000-gallon nutrient recovery tank, which has a baffle separating the urine from leachate. A decentralizing treatment system – the first in the U.S. for a commercial building – is then used.

“This is probably one of the most unique systems going into our building,” Hendricks said.

About once a month, urine is pumped into the decentralizing tank, which produces a liquid-based nitro fertilizer and a powder phosphorus fertilizer.

PAE President Paul Schwer likes to say the firm is “taking the P out of PAE,” Hendricks said.

The size of the 71,000-gallon underground cistern was chosen based on data from the past 30 years of rainfall in Portland. The cistern can hold 62,000 gallons of rainwater and 8,500 gallons of stormwater detention. If there’s heavy rainfall and the cistern reaches max capacity, a small hole will allow water to flow out at a low rate so as not to burden the city’s sewer system.

The toilet system, which uses only one-tenth of a gallon per flush, Hendricks said, played a significant role in meeting Living Building Challenge water-saving goals. A normal low-flow toilet uses more than 12 times the amount of water as a vacuum flush one.

“One of the key things we had in the back of our mind is to create something that’d be replicable,” Hendricks said of the plumbing system.

The project team didn’t seek many city code exceptions and tried to accomplish goals by the book so that others could follow suit without needing to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Looking forward

The hardest part of the project was making it pencil out, ZGF Architects principal Chris Chatto said.

The $40.2 million building contains many innovations and exotic systems, which Ed Sloop, Walsh Construction’s chief estimator, told Engineering News-Record increased the cost by 20 to 25 percent.

The rainwater-to-potable water, composting, gray water, and nutrient recovery systems accounted for $1.25 million of the hard cost.

The Living Building Challenge has reframed the concept of sustainability, Chatto said. The goal is to try to do less harm and make a positive impact.

“Living buildings are the future,” he added. “It’s where the industry needs to go.”

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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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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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