Moving Beyond LEED

The Cascadia Region Green Building Council (covering Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia) is already attempting to push beyond the LEED envelope by issuing its Living Building Challenge.

This challenge sets a new standard for what it means to be green. Its icon is a vibrant orange flower, meant to suggest elegance and efficiency; the flower, like a pie graph, is broken into parts, or petals. The 6 petals correspond to performance measures in the built environment:

• Site
• Materials
• Energy
• Indoor Quality
• Water
• Beauty and Inspiration

• » See also: Dune Architect Transforms Desert Sand into Dwellings for the Green Wall Sahara Shelterbelt
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Building professionals throughout the world are invited to take up the challenge. Projects can strive to fulfill the criteria for a single petal, or go for Living Building status by satisfying requirements for all six categories. It is the hope of the Cascadia Green Building Council that this challenge will help encourage even greater innovation in environmental design, and that these new innovations will act as a model for the building industry worldwide.

In November, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council and the U.S. Green Building Council announced the winners of their Green Build 2007 Living Building Competition. Winners of this competition exhibit some of the most progressive environmental building strategies in the United States. Look for some of them to be highlighted in my upcoming weekly posts…

Image: Cascadiagbc.org

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