Designing Portland's Sustainability Center of Excellence

Several construction projects now underway in Portland will attempt to meet the Living Building Challenge, which shoots past LEED standards for sustainable design to achieve a building with net-zero energy and water use, among other goals. The problem is, even the best architects in the greenest city in America aren’t quite sure yet how they’ll get there. I wrote about some of the initial ideas Portland designers have for the city's Sustainability Center of Excellence today on the NYTimes Green Inc. blog:

Some of Portland’s most celebrated thinkers in green design gathered last week with city and state officials at the Gerding Edlen Development Co. offices to dream up features for the city’s proposed Sustainability Center of Excellence - a state-of-the-art high rise that would function both as an emblem of hyper-green design, and a locus for green-building research and education in the region...

One popular idea was the “aware chair,” which would recognize the distinct print of each users’ backside and automatically adjust the lighting, temperature and other features of an office environment to a collection pre-set preferences. Also discussed: electricity-generating revolving doors attached to a “macho-meter” that instantly displays the entrants’ push power (and presumably, his or her contribution to the building’s zero-energy profile.)

See the full article here.