| HIGH PERFORMANCE |
Cassil admits living buildings are
expensive. “The existing [material] in-
dustries that support the building in-
dustry are built around doing things the
old way,” he says, but there is a learning
curve, and the more zero net energy and
living buildings that get built, the more
the industry will adapt.
“The Living Building Challenge at its
core is about shifting those industries
toward something that is more regener-
ative,” Cassil says. “And every time a liv-
ing building is done, the material vetting,
that material is uploaded to the ILFI’s da-
tabase and made available for the next
project,” making future projects easier
and more accessible.
Put simply, says Docous, “Experience
informs the next generation.”
While development like Architectur-
al Nexus’ is still expensive, “green” build-
ing proved long ago to be profitable.
In 2000, Craig Sheehy, now president
and CEO of Envision Realty Services,
was with Thomas Properties Group and
worked on the CalEPA building at 10th
and I streets.
“As the building was completed and
I was running operations, and as the
months started going by, and financials
were coming out, we were saving close
to a million dollars a year in operating
expenses,” says Sheehy. “I thought, ‘My
gosh, I’ve found the holy grail of property
management. This is not just good for the
environment. This is good for business.’”
That was nearly two decades ago, be-
fore technologies and devices like ther-
mal and light sensors, which increase
energy efficiency and performance, were
readily available.
These buildings are just more market-
able, experts say. When tenants consider
two buildings, one “brown” and the other
“green,” that’s the tiebreaker, says Sheehy.
Docous agrees, adding it’s partly a
generational shift. “What people expect
in the workplace is a different style of
working,” he says, “and the workplace is
starting to accommodate that.”
Industries are adapting to new de-
mands by creating new technologies. For
example, says Sheehy, tall buildings have
larger footprints but less surface area for
solar panels, so companies are starting
to make solar glass. “It’s new technology,
so the costs are high, but we know that
they will come down over time,” he says.
Another strategy is rethinking cur-
rent spaces and available resources, says
Sheehy, “like applying solar on surface
parking. Also, every building I’ve ever
done, whenever we dig into the earth, we
always hit groundwater, which is typical-
ly pumped into a storm drain.” But now
companies are engineering ways to use
groundwater for landscape irrigation or
other practical purposes.
And while innovation and com-
mon-sense strategies stand to help the
environment, energy efficient structures
save, on average, about 20 percent from
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