Jason F. McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute, on the Living Building Challenge and the future of sustainable design

摘要

Our role at the institute is to push the industry as far as possible toward a future where every building is regenerative -where we make positive conditions for life through the act of design. So the way forward is pretty much defined, but how do we scale up? Technically, we know how to create regenerative designs. The Bullitt Center, in Seattle, is a perfect case in point and pretty close to the ideal. Even though it's not as big as a lot of buildings in Lower Manhattan, it's still larger than 90 percent of the buildings in the United States. We've proved that you don't need a sewer connection; that you can treat all of the waste from a multistory building through composting; that you can live off the water that falls from the roof of the building; that you can generate all of your energy from the sun, even in the cloudiest and rainiest of cities. And we accomplished this economically with a small up-front premium that will pay off in a much shorter time frame than we originally thought.