See Inside Utah’s First ‘Living Building’ — Can This Approach Help Save The World?
Sourced from The Salt Lake Tribune
Amid the all-too-many painful signs that the worldwide climate crisis is worsening, Utah’s first try at a “living building” offers a beam of hope.
Architects at Arch Nexus in Salt Lake City used their time working from home during the coronavirus pandemic to transform their office on Parleys Way, lifting it to a whole new level for health, eco-friendliness and regeneration.
The Living Building Challenge far surpasses the exacting LEED and other green building standards for sustainability, which are based on design. This is more about how a building performs.
Depending on when this next year the flat silver building at 2505 E. Parleys Way receives official certification, the Arch Nexus offices will become somewhere around the 30th living building worldwide — and Utah’s first commercial structure to attempt the program’s standards.
Backers liken its tenets to the life of a plant.
“This goes way beyond reuse into creating something that can regenerate itself and its ecosystem in the same way a tree or a flower is regenerative,” said Brian Cassil, spokesman for the firm. “It gets its food from the sun. It gathers the water that falls on it. It doesn’t produce any waste that isn’t simply food for some other element.”
From the Living Architecture Monitor
