Design to Make the World a Better Place
The International Living Future Institute is effectively addressing the climate crisis by investing in a living future with the Living Building Challenge 4.0
The building and construction industries determine, by and large, how residents interpret their surroundings and built environment. As such, it is vital to re-engineer our cities and towns to correspond more directly to the natural landscapes they inhabit. By reconfiguring how we think of such spaces, architects, engineers, planners, and contractors can create buildings that are self sufficient, that generate their own energy and other resources and wean buildings off the fossil fuel economy.
Imagine a building designed and built with the same elegance and efficiency as a flower: a building enriched with the biological characteristics of its region, a self-sufficient building that generates - with renewable resources - all the energy you need, a building that collects and treats all its water, as well as a building that operates efficiently in its context, positively impacting the human and natural systems that interact with it achieving maximum beauty.
The Living Building Challenge 4.0 is a philosophy, a professional tool and a certification that establishes the world’s most rigorous proven performance standard for the built environment, the development of communities and cities. It offers a regenerative design framework for transformative spaces that, like a flower, give more than they take, allowing us to move towards a socially just, culturally rich and ecologically regenerative future. The Living Building Challenge 4.0 sets much more ambitious goals, than a mere reduction of our impact, and challenges to ask ourselves the question: “What would happen if each act of design and construction made the world a better place?”.
Living Buildings are conceived as:
? Regenerative buildings that connect occupants to light, air, food, nature, and community.
? Self-sufficient and remain within the resource limits of their site.
? Create a positive impact on the human and natural systems that interact with them.
1] The International Living Future Institute
The International Living Future Institute (ILFI) is a nonprofit based in Seattle, US working to build an ecologically minded, restorative world for all people. Using principles of social and environmental justice, ILFI seeks to counter climate change by pushing for an urban environment free of fossil fuels. ILFI runs the Living Building Challenge, which is the world’s most rigorous green building standard, not to mention several other programs: the Living Product Challenge, the Living Community Challenge, the Biophilic Design initiative and the Reveal, Declare and Just labels. These programs develop a green framework for living in a 21st-century world.
2] Living Future Institute Europe
As a formal step in order to ensure a stronger presence in Europe and an even better connection with the building industry and the network of Living Future ‘Collaboratives’, ILFI just established the new legal entity ‘Living Future Europe’ (LFE), a non-profit association with the mission to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone catalyzing the transformation toward communities that are socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative.
Carlo Battisti, President at Living Future Europe --– “looking ahead, Living Future Europe is following Ursula von der Leyen, new President of the European Commission’s goal ?I want Europe to become the first climate-neutral continent in the world by 2050... to make this happen, we must take bold steps together?”
LFE will play an active role in championing the International Living Future Institute programs, focusing on educating and assisting a broader audience of interested practitioners on how to build Living Building Challenge projects in Europe, where country-based ‘Collaboratives’ operate, cooperating with each other and the broader Institute.
For instance, the Spain Collaborative has set the mission to unite like-minded professionals in Spain to leverage efforts for the transformation in the built environment. Its goals are to develop an engaged, exciting, and fun collaborative that shares ideas and applies new knowledge to deliver regenerative projects. Also, to inspire building owners and professionals to apply restorative principles to the design and construction of their projects, as well as to inform building owners and professionals about restorative strategies. Practically, also to identify and resolve barriers restorative projects may encounter.
3] Living Building Challenge 4.0
The Living Building Challenge (LBC) is the world’s most rigorous standard for green buildings. LBC calls for the creation of building projects that operate as cleanly, beautifully, and efficiently as ‘nature’s architecture’. As a standard, it provides a holistic approach to high-performance building that aims to address health, community, equity, energy, water, and beyond.
Going above and beyond LEED certification, Living Buildings must demonstrate that they have achieved Net Positive Energy, Net Positive Water, and Net Positive Waste. As a result, Living Buildings generate more energy than they consume. They harvest, use, and treat all the water that they require without burdening our aging municipal infrastructure. They actively seek not only to divert materials from the waste stream, but also to remove and salvage materials that would otherwise be destined for the landfill. Buildings are free of toxic chemicals and lower their energy footprint many times below the generic commercial structure. In other words, Living Buildings are regenerative; in that they generate sufficient benefits to the building’s site, to the project’s community, and to the environment at large to offset any negative impacts that the project may incur.
To be certified under the Challenge, projects must meet a series of ambitious performance requirements over a minimum of 12 months of continuous occupancy. There are 3 types of certification under the Challenge: Living Building Certification, Petal Certification or Net Zero Energy Building Certification.
The LBC 4.0 is the next step in the evolution of the Living Building Challenge that continues the standard’s mission of visionary but attainable building goals while also recognizing that not all projects face the same challenges or share in the same opportunities. LBC 4.0 provides a streamlined approach focused on maximizing a project’s positive impacts specific to the place, community, and culture.
How many Living Building Challenge Projects have been certified to date?
118, out of a total of 658 registered.
Current information about LBC certified projects is available on ILFI Case Study page.
As an example, the Bullitt Center was designed to meet the rigorous requirements of the Living Building Challenge Standard. Here is the Bullitt Center ecosystem services report, which quantifies the impacts of the project.
The Living Product Challenge (LPC) takes the robust concepts of the Living Building Challenge and applies them to manufactured goods. Living Products are informed by biomimicry and biophilia, manufactured by processes powered only by renewable energy and within the water balance of the places they are made.
The Living Community Challenge (LCC) creates a new era for community building and a new vision for urban design. It provides a holistic philosophy, advocacy tool and certification process for the vision plan or concept design, master plan, detailed design, construction and evolution of a Living Community. The LCC scales up the innovations made by Living Buildings and Living Products, and envisions entire cities and regions as living entities. There are 3 levels of certification: Net Zero Energy, Petal and Living; and there are 7 performance areas: Place, Water, Energy, Health and Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty.
“The time for restorative buildings is NOW and the Living Building Challenge is the tool to make it happen.” – Emmanuel Pauwels, Green Living Projects Barcelona Ambassador.
5] ILFI and LBC at COP25
COP25 is the annual meeting where the world governments meet to forge a global response towards the climate emergency. Sandra Martin, Carlos Sánchez Candenas, William Gagnon and Anjanette Green are ILFI Ambassadors who participated to COP25 in Madrid in December 2019, by presenting the Living Building Challenge 4.0 through a side event (see photo below).
Sandra Martin, Funder at CIRKLO and SMARTINCIRCLES said: “Indeed, it is time to act –as COP25 motto said-– but we also need to be much more ambitious in our goals, from minimizing our negative impacts to maximizing our positive ones –from a ‘less harm’ approach towards a regenerative one-– and here’s where Living Future visionary programs come to place as a crucial and effective framework to inspire and empower cities, business, organizations and people to real action. I think we were all very happy with the result as it really inspired and awakened the interest of all attendees and also paved the path for future events like this, as in Spain this regenerative approach is still quite unknown. Collaboration is key to act effectively and I think that Living Future Collaboratives are fruitful spaces around to join and take action under this common regenerative approach and programmes. This event was an example of this”.
6] Biophilic Design Initiative
Biophilic Design is the practice of connecting people and nature within their built environments and communities. Biophilic design is a conscious discipline, and has the potential to intentionally reconnect people and nature through buildings. The opportunity of biophilic design is to connect to the particular ecology of the place, to its culture, history and beauty and to create a building that will regenerate life. The International Living Future Institute has seen a demonstrated need among the Living Building Challenge community for Biophilic Design resources that can take the practice from theory to reality. This initiative aims to achieve the goal of broad adoption of Biophilic Design among the design community, building owners, and cities.
“There is no easy checklist to bring biophilic design into mainstream design practice, no single guidebook, no rules and regulations that can be put into code language. It is a philosophy that requires a shift in thinking. But more profoundly, it requires each individual to draw on the instinct that guides us to pay more for a home with a view of a park, the mountains, or the water, or to live on a street lined with trees. If we were to listen to that instinct we would not need research that proves we are more productive, happier, and healthier when our buildings connect us to nature. That research is available, but research alone will not alone lead to adoption. If we are looking for proof—waiting for the doctor to prescribe that we take inspiration from nature—then we are missing the point and will miss the opportunity” – Amanda Sturgeon, Former CEO of ILFI.
The Biophilic Design Initiative encompasses an online platform to file, archive, and offer resources for public and network access. It is also a network of project teams, design, research scientists, sponsors and members collaborating on projects and events or conferences.
7] Get Involved: join a global community that dares to challenge the norm!
If you’re inspired by the International Living Future Institute and would like to help spread the word in your local community, please visit the “Get Involved” section of ILFI website (https://living-future.org/). Here you can find over 700 Ambassadors in well over 40 nation states. These individuals make up the Living Future Network, which meets monthly online as a group to continue to create change, and locally in-person in groups (i.e., ‘Collaboratives’ as said before, there are currently more than 130 of them). If you’re interested in exposing new audiences in your area to the restorative principles of the Living Future Challenge programs, please consider volunteering as a trained Ambassador Presenter or a Collaborative Facilitator of a local Collaborative.
Join Living Future subscribing to ILFI newsletter and visit the page for information on ILFI scheduled appearances around the world.
Consider also to the opportunity to attend a leading event in regenerative design with the Living Future unConference 2020: Sustaining Hope Within Crisis. Originally intended to reflect our climate emergency, is even more relevant in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This will be a game-changing platform for the green building movement’s most innovative leaders to come together to ideate and exchange expertise (Online, May, 7-8 2020).
In addressing the climate crisis the main barrier is ourselves: our behaviour, our habitual patterns of thinking of nature as “something other than us” to be dominated and ignored. Together we can make a systemic change to the design of the built environment and create a future that is healthy and resilient for everyone!
Rita Trombin
Environmental Psychologist and Living Future Member*
*A membership at the Institute supports your professional development and announces your commitment to creating a Living Future. Together, we are advancing critical knowledge, strengthening the local green building community and supporting the transformation to a Living Future.
UniverCity Childcare Centre, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Etsy headquarters, Brooklyn (NYC)
Etsy headquarters, Brooklyn (NYC)
Desert Rain, Bend (Oregon)
Sustainable Buildings Research Centre, University of Wollongong (UOW)
West Berkeley Public Library, Berkeley (CA)
Photo courtesy ? The International Living Future Institute; The University of Wollongong; Chandler Photography; David Wakely for Berkeley Public Library.