Sustainable Building Week is returning to the Portland-metro area in 2022. Beginning Oct. 10, experts and organizations representing sustainability – including architecture, design, construction, education and community planning – will lead and participate in a wide variety of events in person and/or online.

Six years ago, co-founders Terry Campbell and Webly Bowles saw the need for a collaborative space where industry professionals could connect to positively impact environmental sustainability in the region. Campbell and Bowles believed they could provide a platform for like-minded experts to learn about the work being done outside of their expertise, Campbell said.

Since its first year in 2018, Sustainable Building Week has hosted 108 events for an estimated 2,500 attendees. Collaborators design their own events, which differ each year. But themes often repeat, such as wildfire – this year one event will spotlight a film about living with the threat of wildfire.

Attendees can sign up for individual events, which will take place in the Portland area, virtually or in both formats. Admission for most events – primarily building tours or presentations – is free, with nominal fees charged for specialized training and select opportunities.

Bowles said she is most excited about the large number of events this year. Some include: a tour of zero-energy and “path to zero” homes led by Solar Oregon (Oct. 8-9; $25-$60); a tour of new homes showcasing sustainability, comfort and durability (Oct. 14-16; $25); a cluster of quick, informal presentations featuring sustainable schools (Oct. 12; free); and a panel discussion on reimagining schoolyards (Oct. 11).

To see a full list of events and register for them, visit .

“There’s a new heightened interest this year,” Campbell said. “The environmental issues we’re facing are not going away.”

This past spring, organizers launched a companion event called Sustainable Building Monthly: a series of short talks at 7 p.m. on the second Tuesday of each month in the PAE Living Building. Presentations introduce projects, and there are opportunities for networking.

“We’re very passionate about sustainability,” Bowles said. “There’s a lot of passion in Portland.”

Representatives of several disciplines return to Sustainable Building Week year after year. They include AIA Oregon, Oregon Green Schools, Portland Materials Transparency Collaborative, Solar Oregon, U.S. Green Building Council, the Portland chapter of American Society of Plumbing Engineers, Electrify Now, and ZERO Coalition.

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Sustainable Building Week, stretching beyond its name, is set to offer 10 days of online panel discussions and other events beginning Monday.

While last year’s version attracted about 1,500 attendees to 25 events, this year’s production will have no in-person assemblies because of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than two dozen events will take place weekdays through Oct. 23. The website notes that the calendar is being updated daily.

Sustainable Building Week, also the name of the nonprofit group that coordinates the production, aims to encourage connections across disciplines in the building industry.

“It’s still the whole idea of fostering collaboration between design and construction, and even suppliers and professionals,” said Terry Campbell, co-founder of the event. “The whole idea with this slate of events is to break down those silos.”

Many of the 2020 events will be self-guided, and online access means they will be available to professionals from around the globe.

“One of the silver linings is people from anywhere with an Internet connection can register for these events,” said Campbell, who is director of business development for Sustainable Northwest Wood. “We’ve been doing some outreach outside Portland to bring some more people in.”

Topics were influenced by current events, Campbell said. Constructing buildings to stand up to unpredictable events is increasingly a focus, he added.

“Building resilient buildings – whether they’re more wildfire-proof or earthquake-proof – that’s sustainable too,” he said.

Designers are also thinking about healthy building materials as people spend more time indoors.

Expanding diversity within the industry is another priority.

“It’s sort of not as diverse a sector of the industry as anyone would like,” Campbell said.

On Wednesday, a “Sustainable Building for All” town hall will examine incentives for increasing diversity in the industry. Some industry leaders have been considering tiered levels of participation by minority-owned and woman-owned contractors, for example, that would be tied to development incentives.

The effort has been ongoing for several years, and the idea is close to fruition, Campbell said.

“That’s definitely something that’s going to be in front of City Council within the next year,” he said. “There’s just enough momentum behind it.”

Other incentives would be tied to sustainable building certifications such as high levels of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), or the Living Building Challenge. Some incentives could be reached by reaching net-zero water consumption.

Sustainable Building Week revamped its website, and organizers are being encouraged to upload videos of their events. Though attendance of most events is free, a few have fees attached.

For more information or to register, visit .

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In 2007, conceptualization began for a highly energy-efficient office building as part of a mixed-use development in Milwaukie. Around 12 years later, Northwest Housing Alternatives has a two-story headquarters on track for net-zero-energy certification.

The five-building campus was designed by MWA Architects and built by O’Neill/Walsh Community Builders. Three three-story, wood-framed buildings hold a total of 28 affordable housing units, and another building serves as an emergency shelter. All of those were designed and built to Earth Advantage platinum standards.

But the office building stands out for exceptional sustainability. Project team members discussed the effort on Wednesday during an event held as part of Portland‘s second annual Sustainable Building Week. Crews broke ground in summer 2018 and finished roughly one year later. But design work dates back to 2013.

“The project started with net zero as the goal,” said Bill Lanning, a MWA Architects principal and lead designer for the project. “Early in the design it was going to be net-zero ready, but as we moved through design and funds were made available through grants we were able to add the solar.”

That was a huge component, said Afton Walsh, project manager for O’Neill/Walsh Community Builders. PGE provided an especially important grant, Northwest Housing Alternatives Executive Director Trell Anderson added.

“With the grant we said, ‘How much solar can we do?’” Walsh said. “And what is needed for net zero?”

A 38-kilowatt solar array placed on the office building’s roof not only powers that structure but at full capacity is also able to feed power into the campus shelter building.

“There will never be any power going back into the grid,” Walsh said. “It will all be going back into … the shelter.”

In addition to the solar array, the office building’s envelope played an important role in energy performance.

“We tend to spend a lot of our love and effort on the envelope,” Walsh said.

Under-slab insulation was used, all sheeting was taped, and an additional air barrier was installed beneath the weather barrier. Meanwhile, the double-ventilated roof assembly features three inches of spray foam under the ceiling sheeting. This gives a final energy efficiency rating of R-69 – far higher than required by Oregon Specialty Code. Finally, vinyl triple glazing is used throughout the building.

Testing showed the building is exceptionally airtight.

“We did a lower door air test and it came out to .047 (cubic feet per minute) per square foot,” Walsh said. “We had to reach 0.1, and we basically cut that in half.”

Lanning and Walsh worked with Green Hammer on the project’s sustainable aspects. The design-build firm has net-zero-energy project experience, especially on the financial side.

“We talked about budgets and how to set the stage so we could be successful with net zero,” Lanning said. “Really, it was looking at how to simplify things as much as possible and focus on the envelope; that’s the first place to start.”

Design started with a passive house model to estimate energy usage. Then the same approach was used for mechanical systems via readily available equipment, including ductless heat pumps and high-efficiency water heaters.

But one of the biggest interior factors was use of a zonal ventilation system.

“The building is split into four zones for ventilation,” Lanning said. “And with that we used a cross-counter-flow heat recovery system. It isn’t readily used in the U.S. right now, and it has an efficiency of 84 percent, which is much higher than most (energy recovery ventilation) systems.”

Budget constraints led to decisions to forgo other options for ventilation, passive cooling and some automated mechanical systems.

Nevertheless, “constant communication” among team members helped advance the project, Walsh said.

“We were always verifying,” she said.

That paid off during construction of the office building, when an air gap raised questions.

“We had started framing and sheeting the roof, and that second gap didn’t make sense to us, so we went back to design team and asked” about it, Walsh said. “And they made changes that meant they were able to give a pretty good credit back to NHA to use on other features. This project was definitely a labor of love … a lot of hands touched it.”

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The notion of equity in design can have many different meanings.

For instance, the U.S. Green Building Council in 2013 introduced Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design social equity pilot credits. They address equity within the project team, equity in the community around a project and equity within the project supply chain. However…

“When folks questioned us about the human impact we found it was missing the people side of the framework,” said Kimberly Lewis, U.S. Green Building Council senior vice president for market transformation and development.

Six years later, the LEED social equity credits remain a work in progress. But Lewis believes the design community can do more to move the needle.

“We struggle with amplifying the message,” she told attendees at a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for Architecture in Portland. “Our heart and our mission are as powerful as we want, and it’s a great social justice message. But to the people on the street all things are local, and engaging vulnerable communities is not easy. Trust takes time, and we have a responsibility to shift the conversation. It’s us – even here.”

The discussion was part of Portland’s second annual Sustainable Building Week, a weeklong event dedicated to sustainable design and construction.

Equity has to do with access and empowerment, said panelist Elaine Aye, a regional manager with RWDI Consulting Engineers and Scientists. A good example, she added, is the .

Created in 2009 by Prosper Portland (the Portland Development Commission at the time), the Lloyd EcoDistrict uses public money to prioritize projects and programs that address transportation, water, energy, waste and education. It’s all in the name of prosperity, environmental quality and social welfare.

It’s a unique framework for sustainable development that has seen its share of success, Aye said. She pointed to an effort to retrofit buildings with LED lighting as one example.

“The value of a framework is it creates a path for an individual, an organization, a building type,” she said. “We had two listening sessions in the community and it was fantastic. We asked about resiliency and climate change, and it’s diverse. It impacts everyone differently.”

The key point, Aye said, is that the discussion involved the community and not merely a project team.

“In the world of an eco-district it is the essential elements that have to be done,” she said. “There are resiliency, equity and sustainability; those are the essentials, and we have to address them systematically – not at the building level, but at the society level or at the city level.”

Money for such initiatives is always an issue, said panelist Dave Otte, partner and development director at Holst Architecture.

But Aye said the issues at hand go beyond mere funding. It’s also a matter of listening to the wider community before making critical design choices.

“I think we scale it up by having conversation, by listening and observing what’s in our communities and finding the touch points where we can effect change,” she said.

Panelist Afton Walsh, community outreach director for Walsh Construction, agreed and pointed to the passage last year of Metro‘s $652 million affordable housing bond measure as an example.

“If you live in the metro area, you passed a monumental affordable housing bill last November,” she said. “On top of the city of Portland bond from 2016 the community has really stepped up, and we need to now fix this. Implementation obviously is just getting under way, and that will be the real scorecard.”

To build equitably, Walsh said, means using new and more efficient materials to advance energy performance, indoor air quality and other areas.

But those are the places where developers often look to save money, Otte noted. That is particularly true with affordable housing projects, he added, especially those constructed with the expectation of profits from the sale of the building.

“The bond is a great step, but frankly we’re playing catch-up – and in some ways we’re going in the wrong direction,” he said. “There’s something to be said for a long-term investment in housing, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact these buildings will be around for 60 years, so much of it is based on the cost per unit and not based on the quality per unit.”

Otte added that he hopes this does not come back to bite public housing authorities in coming years when they make use of Metro bond dollars.

“Housing is not just a human right; it’s also health care,” he said. “So investment in housing will pay off in ways we don’t even understand yet. Look at the long-term benefits from an energy and social justice perspective, because every project out there will still have a (financial) gap; every project will struggle to find a way to get built. It’s a stop-gap and it is going to take everyone working hard together and having the conviction and drive to make it happen.”

Otte noted that designers and builders are in a strong position to guide the conversation.

“We are the trusted agents in society, more than politicians and policy makers,” he said. “People will listen to us, and that’s an exciting opportunity. It’s in this discomfort that we’re going to be able to move the needle. That’s where design gets exciting, is in that discomfort.”

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Prior to the Great Recession, Portland was the “shining hill that everyone wanted to be” when it comes to sustainability and green building, according to New Buildings Institute project manager and architect Webly Bowles. But that has changed, she said.

“People were coming here to see how we were doing things,” she said. “And now we’re just falling back into the status quo. So we want to inspire our design community to get back to that.”

The inaugural Sustainable Building Week, planned for this fall, was born out of organizers’ desire to restore Portland’s reputation as a green industry leader. And with construction booming here and the rest of the country, Bowles said, the need to further emphasize sustainability became even clearer. So she and like-minded Portland design professionals put their heads together and came up with a series of educational events.

Starting Oct. 8, panel discussions, lectures, building tours, design slams (challenges), open houses and more will take place in Portland – all in the name of promoting green building practices in the local market. These events will be hosted by a wide range of design professionals and professional organizations, including the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), the U.S. Green Building Council, the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Portland Committee on the Environment, the Northwest EcoBuilding Guild, Portland State University and many others.

“I am one of those people who came here searching for sustainability,” said Reilly Loveland, a project manager with the New Buildings Institute.

Loveland came to Portland after working in Seattle and Los Angeles. Seattle actually provides a model for Portland to follow, she said.

“In LA it never felt coordinated and wasn’t hitting home,” she said. “In Portland it’s really institutionalized, but the actual execution in terms of buildings is kind of lacking. We’re passionate and invigorated here, so we thought why not bring everyone together to have a positive event and really push that.”

Terry Campbell is the director of business development for Sustainable Northwest Wood and the chairman of the International Living Future Institute’s Portland Collaborative. He played a big role in organizing the first Sustainable Building Week.

“We’re called a collaborative, yet when I took over as chair I found we didn’t collaborate with other professional organizations,” he said. “Portland’s been usurped in the ILFI realm, and for me the term collaborative meant we needed to start reaching across and building bigger momentum. In 2000 through about 2005 it was easy, it was new and it was innovative. That’s not the case anymore.”

The ILFI Portland Collaborative will present an Oct. 9 workshop geared to guide builders through the various areas of the public process through which all projects must pass. In other words, the workshop will touch on everything from legislation that affects the industry to permitting, public outreach and navigation of the local bureaucracy.

“We’re going to basically have a teach-in where we spend 45 minutes getting people connected to various things,” Campbell said.

Another unique event will be a green building slam presented by the Northwest EcoBuilding Guild on Oct. 12. This will feature 10 separate presentations, each just 10 minutes in length. They will spotlight 10 different innovative green building projects.

Sustainable Building Week is so new that organizers are still fleshing out the complete lineup.

“We’re really excited about this,” Bowles said.

To check out a lineup of events and venues, visit .

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