Guide to Well-being with Building Controls

The Living Building Challenge

Design and construction of the built environment continues to be a major contributor to the decline of air and water quality and contributions to global warming cannot be understated. Demands for building occupant health and safety has been on the rise for the past 20 years – with many building rating systems attempting to prescriptively address components of well-being such as light levels, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality – even bike racks. However, in recent years, rating systems specific to the health and well-being of occupants have arrived on scene. Next up in our series, we look at the healthy and resource related components of the world’s most ambitious rating system – the Living Building Challenge.

Introduction to the Living Building Challenge

How can we respond to the evolving challenges in the built environment from resource overuse to occupant health? Welcome the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) and The Living Building Challenge (LBC). Symbiosis is defined as an interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. To me, that describes the mission of the ILFI. Think of a building as a living, breathing organism, not causing harm but coexisting in harmony with its environment.

According to the ILFI, The LBC is not just a building or community certification system, it is a philosophy first, an advocacy tool second, and lastly a certification. It is all about transforming the way we think about every step in the design and construction process. A common metric used to measure the efficiency of a building is the Energy Usage index or EUI. When comparing a typical building to a similar LBC or Net Zero building, it enables us to curve our design thinking towards the importance of creating healthy, low energy use spaces (a typical office building might have an EUI of 76 whereas an LBC office may have an EUI of 10).

Standard Requirements and Certification

The Living Building Challenge features 7 performance categories or “petals” (listed below) and 20 performance-based imperatives split between each petal.

Place
Water
Energy
Health and Happiness
Materials
Equity
Beauty

The LBC has 10 core imperatives to achieve a lower level of certification called “Petal Certification”. A total of 20 core imperatives are needed to achieve the full Living Building Certification. Here’s a quick sampling of what the petals contain:

“Place” petal - Imperative 03, Habitat Exchange, requires all projects to set aside land equal to the project area away from the site in perpetuity through an approved land trust or the ILFI Habitat exchange Program.
“Water” petal - , Imperative 06, Net Positive Water, all projects must supply 100% of the projects water needs through captured precipitation or other closed loop water systems.

I am markedly impressed with the “Materials” Petal to help create a materials economy that does not use toxic materials by requiring product transparency documentation for construction materials.

Achieving LBC certification requires the project to achieve all 20 imperatives across all petals with exceptions made for specific scopes or typologies.

Lighting, Energy, and Control Strategies

A key component of achieving occupant health is utilizing lighting and controls to create well-lit, visually comfortable spaces. Several Living Building Challenge imperatives address lighting and controls.

Lighting and Lighting Controls

Energy is only one of the 7 petals in an LBC project, but it is often considered to be the most challenging. Not only must projects drastically reduce their energy consumption compared to a similar building (70% for new construction) but they must also be carbon neutral. Specifically, the project must procure 105% of its energy needs from non-combustible sources. The first step in ensuring optimized energy efficiency is addressing excess lighting and plug load used through a networked lighting control system. Is every space that is receiving ambient lighting from windows adjusting the lighting power down to save energy? Does the space incorporate controls and sensors beyond what is required by energy codes? Larger spaces such as open offices should be daylight harvesting not just in one zone or area, but in a minimum of three zones. By incorporating digital sensors and controls in every space, facilities are better equipped to measure and monitor lighting energy usage in specific spaces.

Part of the LBC is a requirement to submeter energy usage from different systems such as HVAC, lighting and plug loads. Statistics vary depending on the type of building but plug loads can be 20-40 % of the energy usage of a building. Utilizing a building energy management or operating system with an open protocol such as BACnet (See ASHRAE Standard 135) gives the Facility Manager the ability to manage and monitor the interplay of different systems. All of this must be done without negatively impacting the occupants’ experience.

Shading and Shade Controls

The Health + Happiness petal defines aspects of healthy interior performance that impacts occupants. Must of the requirements are around cleaning and ventilation but references to windows, views, and daylight offer opportunities for shade and shade controls. Shades help occupants control screen glare or take advantage of daylighting to save energy. Our patented motor allows for any automatically controlled shade to also be a manual shade with no impact to the motor if an occupant needs to adjust the shade to their preference. In addition to enhancing the occupant experience, shades have the potential to reduce or increase solar heat gain, depending on the temperature goals of the facility. Having automatic shading tied into the lighting and building management system can create great opportunities for energy savings.

Embodied Carbon and Waste

Of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases we put into our atmosphere every year, the creation of materials like steel, cement and plastic is the largest contributor. Each single ton of cement equals one ton of greenhouse gas emissions while every single ton of steel produces 1.8 tons of CO2. Many other products contribute with massive amounts of CO2 or CO2e (Carbon Dioxide equivalents- methane, nitrous oxide, etc.)

Projects like the Catalyst Center in Spokane, WA reduced their carbon footprint by using innovative technologies like mass timber, which has a significantly lower carbon footprint. This project is one of the largest ILFI certified Zero Carbon and Zero Energy buildings in the country. The really striking detail was this was completed “with a typical construction price tag”. See the latest edition of Buildings Magazine, May 2021 for more details.

The Time to Adapt is Now

As of the publish date of this article, there are less than 600 registered or certified Living Buildings in the world which speaks to the ambitiousness of this certification but maybe also the inertia we have in aggressively improving our buildings. Recently I was on a virtual event where the panelists were asked, “What book is currently on your nightstand?” One panelist replied, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” by Bill Gates. A few days after, while shopping at my neighborhood Costco, I found the book next to the 2-gallon containers of walnuts. After unloading my treasures at home, I sat down to start reading and found it difficult to put down.

Gates writes that 1 gallon of oil, based on 2020 pricing, is cheaper than 1 gallon of soda from Costco ($1 for oil vs. $2.85 for soda). The same for milk and orange juice. He drives home the point that to get to net zero carbon emissions, we must make an alternative, clean approach as cheap as our current technology. Bill goes on to discuss the “green premiums” on alternative technologies and the dangers of using our current sources of fuels on humankind by 2050 and the year 2100. Global warming will make the COVID pandemic seem like a 3-car fender bender on the New Jersey Turnpike. Gates mentions that one study found that the number of deaths from heat related causes (heat stroke) could be as high as 10 million by the end of this century.

Adaptation must happen now -- otherwise we run the risk of just making the world less bad, instead of embracing what good looks like.