By now, it should come as no surprise that the capital city constantly making headlines in media and the talk of many a green blog will be constructing the first large-scale "living building" to house the Oregon Sustainability Center.
The 12-story building will generate its own energy on-site, using solar photovoltaics and geothermal energy. The building will call The City of Roses home and will be located adjacent to Portland State University.
The Oregon Sustainability Center's tower combines the planning and construction efforts of the education, business, public, and nonprofit sectors, designed by Portland-based GBD Architects and SERA Architects.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) describes the building as the result of a combined effort "to create a building that adheres to the most stringent sustainability certification standard that exists, and uses several distinct design languages and systems to get there. It takes the sustainability conversation out of the design lab and into classrooms, civil servant offices, business board rooms, and nonprofit outreach centers."
The building will host offices for businesses and nonprofit organizations, university classrooms and office spaces for the seven schools in the Oregon University System and the universities in the Oregon Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center.
The building itself will be a continuously running experiment by which researchers can study the performance, life-cycle costs, and use patterns of this singularly sustainable building.
The project plans for the building by GBD and SERA began as most successful "living building" designs: orienting the building in such a way as to collect an optimal amount of day light, fresh air, and rain water.
Thirty-five percent of the high rise's surface is covered in triple-glazed vision glass, which will allow it to be day lit 50% of the time. The building's profile is a thin ellipse, a shape deliberately utilized to allow air and sunlight to penetrate into the floor plates. Once inside, thin floor plates allow occupants to be no more that 30 feet from an operable window - a requirement of the Living Building Channeling.
All of the building's energy will be generated by solar power. A garden occupies the top of an arcing crescent-shaped section that projects from the side of the building. The landscaping and thin, tall wood columns create a forest-like atmosphere under the pedestrian plaza.
The building will not use any traditional HVAC air cooling systems, but instead will be heated and cooled via radiant slab systems and geothermal wells. Its water supply will be from rain water collection and be treated for potable use in a basement collection tank.
Wastewater is cleaned and recycled on site with bioreactor digester tanks and then filtered a system called Living Machine, functioning like natural wetlands and estuaries to clean the water. These systems (which bring wastewater up to non-potable levels) will make up a 1,600-square-foot fourth-floor garden.
Ultimately, the building's success depends not so much on the teams of architects, scientists, and engineers who have seen it from inception to construction. . . Rather, the building's everyday inhabitants will denote the energy use and efficiency in the tower. The building alone cannot produce net-zero energy.
"Considering the disparate and diverse groups of users the building will bring together, this lesson on the changes required to make buildings work in harmony with their natural habitat means continuing the legacy of collaboration and interdisciplinary discovery its designers began with," the AIA commented.
And speaking of the role of the building's inhabitants, Andrea Durbin, founding board member of the Oregon Living Building Initiative, previously commented on what she believes will be the most significant aspect of what happens at the Center: the inter-relations among various tenants.
Durbin poses the question, "How do we bring the different interests together?" She went on, "The intention is to try to co-locate and build on these synergies in terms of a sustainability agenda."
The Oregon Sustainability Center is an exciting and innovative project, perhaps even more so because it is an on-going experiment in green planning, building, and living. And it seems appropriate that the first large-scale building of this kind be erected in Portland.
In the past month alone, Portland has been in the spotlight as it was awarded federal funding for the city's streetcar project; this past week, the Portland City Council passed a 70-page Climate Action Plan; Portland's own Markely family won the local ‘Drive Less, Save more" challenge in reducing car mileage the most in one week. . .
Portland is a green role model for American cities. Mayor Sam Adams attributes the city's initiative and recent progress to earlier efforts. In fact because of earlier sustainability efforts, coupled with education, Portlanders were already driving 20 percent less than residents of comparably sized cities. The city's bus ridership has doubled, and its recycling rate has tripled.
Perhaps the high rise's most important and subtle role will be to serve as an icon of sustainable urbanism for one of the nation's most progressive cities when it comes to green living.
Brigid
Comment 
Subscribe to