In December 2016, Feldman Architecture pledged to the AIA 2030 Commitment and created an Action Plan as a road map to designing carbon neutral buildings by the year 2030. In our Action Plan, originally published in 2018 and updated annually, our studio selected a series of goals to focus our sustainability initiatives around over the next 3-5 years, one of them being designing and building a Living Building Challenge certified project.
The Living Building Challenge is an ever-evolving certification program enacted by the International Living Future Institute. The program is considered the world’s most rigorous proven performance standard for buildings. The regenerative design framework aims to create spaces that, like a flower, give more than they take – connecting occupants to light, air, food, nature, and community. LBC certified buildings are self-sufficient and remain within the resource limits of their site and create a positive impact on the human and natural systems that interact with them.
The Living Building Challenge consists of seven performance categories, or “Petals”: place, water, energy, health + happiness, materials, equity, and beauty. Based on the building’s performance in these categories, 3 certification pathways are available to pursue, Living Building Certification, Petal Certification, and Zero Energy Certification.
Feldman Architecture is excited to announce that as of this summer, Curveball will be our first project to attempt to achieve a Living Building Challenge certification. Situated in the Santa Lucia Preserve, a 20,000 acre land trust, the design for Curveball prioritizes sustainability, flexible spaces, and connection to the outdoors, artfully placing two gently curved forms on an open pad within a grove of oaks folded into a steep site. The design respects the existing landscape, and orients public and private spaces towards both distant views, as well as intimate moments with dense tree canopies.
Prioritizing fire resiliency and sustainability, our design envelops the building in durable, low-maintenance modular weathering steel panels and aluminum windows. The eroded material aesthetic reinforces the conceptual merging of architecture and landscape, and a green roof seamlessly emerges the structure from the hillside.
With Curveball, we aim to achieve full Living Building Challenge certification, however, as this is our first attempt at working within the constraints of this rigorous program, we may pursue a Petal or CORE certification. At this point in the process, the potential challenges include access to solar energy in a densely treed site, access to water, and materials selection – the design may not include any redlist items.
We are fortunate to be embarking on this certification process with a group of extremely talented consultants, listed below. We look forward to sharing our progress along the way, highlighting our challenges and successes with our community. We hope our journey encourages others to engage with regenerative design, as well as to crowdsource best practices in the certification process.
Landscape Architect: MFLA
Structural Engineer: Daedalus Structural Engineering
General Contractor: RJL Construction
Mechanical and Energy Consultants: Positive Energy
Civil Engineer: L&S Engineering
Surveyor: Whitson Engineers
Geotechnical Engineer: Haro Kasunich & Associates
Sustainability Consultant: Corey Squire, Department of Sustainability
LBC Consultant: Phaedra Svec, McLennan Design
Water Systems Consultant: WaterSprout
Planting Advisor: RANA
This Earth Day, we are reflecting on the current state of our world and our community. As an organization, we are committed to sustainability now more than ever, and more conscious of how the rapidly changing world around us affects not only the spaces we design, but also our team that so beautifully designs them.
With COVID 19 changing the status quo, it’s a good time to reflect on our mission and our values. It also seems like a great time to highlight a few updates about our 2020 sustainability efforts, and to refresh our passion and commitment to leadership in the sustainability space.
As a milestone year in our industry’s journey towards carbon neutrality by 2030, we are happy to report our progress in a newly updated Action Plan. In December of 2016 Feldman Architecture signed onto the 2030 Challenge and AIA 2030 Commitment, two programs that are promoting a vision that calls for all new buildings, developments, and renovations to be carbon-neutral by 2030. As part of this commitment Feldman Architecture’s Sustainability AOE has crafted this Action Plan to serve as a roadmap to help us achieve our goals, as well as to encourage more sustainable practices within the firm. In it we outline short and long-term goals in areas that go beyond just sustainable design, including community outreach and office culture.
This year, we are releasing a 2020 update to our sustainability Action Plan on Earth Day– outlining our progress from the past year and highlighting both what we have achieved and where we can improve. A highlight includes our recently launched Zero Carbon Operations Plan for our office.
Secondly, this spring, Jonathan Feldman was appointed to the AIA California COTE (Committee on the Environment) which works to educate and inform the design community about environmental and preservation issues and advise the organization on policy matters affecting the practice of architecture. Jonathan is excited to be serving on the communications subcommittee, working alongside peers to drive our industry in a sustainable and responsible direction.
And lastly, we are excited to say that our newly appointed Sustainability Integration Leader, and longtime FA Associate Ben Welty, is working with AIA SF on programming for their Sustainability Symposium this fall. Stay tuned for more!
Our sustainability committee is off to a productive and eventful 2020! Last week, FA Associate Ben Welty attended the Carbon Positive ’20 conference in LA, organized by Architect Magazine and Architecture 2030, meeting with some of the top studios and professionals in the nation to discuss reducing and offsetting carbon in the design world. Below, find some nuggets of wisdom from Ben – who made sure to keep us updated back in San Francisco on lessons learned.
- The original goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 is too late. If we don’t zero out our carbon emissions by 2040 and avoid a 1.5C increase in average global temperatures, we will experience a climate change that is irreversible.
- Everybody here knows we can accomplish our goals. And we’re intent to go back to our communities with this shared knowledge and make a difference. Fortunately, the design and construction industry still has the power to affect change. We drive policy decisions, advancements in technology, and public awareness.
- The production of Cement (the binding agent in concrete) accounts for 8% of total global emissions. Steel production accounts for 7%. China has poured more concrete in the last four years than the U.S. did in the 20th century. Alternative production methods will be key to us reaching our goals.
- While we’re trying to eliminate fossil fuel use in the building industry-we’re still using fossil fuel-based products (rigid insulation) to reduce our reliance on coal and natural gas. Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) is essentially the same material we legislated out of the food packaging industry 30 years ago.
- Hemp seems poised to play a big part in reducing our CO2 emissions moving forward as states continue to loosen hemp regulations.
- Women accounted for roughly 40% of newly licensed architects in 2019. 50% of this conference’s speakers are women, and by my estimation at least 50% of the attendees are women. So while still
underrepresented in the field their contributions in battling the global climate crisis outweighs their male counterparts.
On another note, it’s been 3 years since Feldman Architecture first committed to the 2030Challenge– joining more than 1,000 firms across the nation in a pledge to create only carbon-neutral buildings by 2030. This January, our firm was the first to report our annual progress on carbon neutrality to the AIA 2030 Commitment Design Data Exchange (DDx), enabling others to learn from our work. We hope that in sharing our processes and challenges, we can encourage transparency and prioritize leadership in reducing our carbon footprint. Stay tuned for our annual detailed report on our 2030 Action Plan, to be published soon!
Sustainable Style
By Karine Monié
By Ben Welty
This past May I had the opportunity to travel to Portland, Oregon, to attend the Living Future 2018 unConference, an annual gathering, now in its 12 year, that is hosted by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The ILFI is best known as the administers of the sustainable design certification program, The Living Building Challenge (LBC), which is widely considered the most difficult green building certification to achieve. A Seattle based collaborative, they’ve emerged on the scene in recent years as a challenger to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and it’s more commonly known green building certification program, LEED.
While still somewhat considered grassroots in relative comparison to the scale of the USGBC and LEED, as interest and participation in the LBC has grown, so has the reputation of the ILFI and the conference itself. The quantity and diversity of the seminars was evidence of this, as the content avoided going stale and structured themes afforded attendees the opportunity to define their own paths without fear of getting lost in the shuffle of what can sometimes feel like convention center musical chairs. Taking this approach I chose to hone my focus on the somewhat familiar but complex topic of water conservation and policy, while also exploring the less commonly known field of Biophilic Design.
The water issue is complex. It’s the only necessity of life for which humans are in direct competition with every living organism that surrounds us. Compounding this are the difficulties we seem to face when it is made abundant, as it oftentimes remains unsuitable or insufficient for human consumption. 11% of the world’s population are currently without access to clean water while 25% do not have access to proper sanitation. Yet even in the most arid of places we’ve learned to harness it, treat it, consume it and release it back into the environment in a symbiotic relationship with land not necessarily suitable for human habitation. So why the struggle?
Simply put, we have the tools to solve the issue of water scarcity but our policies and practices do not currently support this. These points were made clear as one after another passionate speakers made their cases for water conservation, policy and equity, each noble in cause and abundant in information. However, there did seem to be a lack of a common thread between the extremes of the spectrum to tie it all together. For instance, I could not help but feel a disconnect between the conversations surrounding the obstacles of building modern, private residences in arid climates and the struggles of the city of Detroit as they deal with a public water crisis in their marginalized communities. This underscored a social chasm that is the widening gap of privilege vs. poverty, an issue that is manifesting itself at local, national and global levels. But this in no way diminishes the importance of the individual conversations themselves, because as world populations continue to grow and climate change tightens its grip, water scarcity is quickly becoming one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century.
One possible design solution to this growing problem could be found in the concepts of biophilic design, whose modern incarnation is still somewhat emerging in the broader field of sustainable design. I found Living Future ‘18 to be a great platform for these concepts, as I imagine this group is far too often passed off as hippies-cum-scientists selling the idea of nautilus shell living as a means to saving the planet. But that would be cliché, as its core tenets that combine nature and design in order replicate natural processes in the built environment have shaped a movement that, for the most part, has avoided its mission coming off too literal (Read more about biophilic design and the ILFI’s initiative HERE). This point was made clear at the beginning of nearly every seminar I attended on the subject, a sign that they’re conscious that the stigma still exists. That said, the content by and large proved otherwise and as building technology advances and sustainable living engrains itself into the social conscious, it’s predictable that these interests would be widely embraced by the design community. The results of this is a broad catalogue of well-designed, contemporary buildings whose numbers continue to grow. No longer is “good design” exempt from incorporating sustainable features. In fact, good design and sustainable design are becoming synonymous, if we’re not there already. So, moving forward, I’m anxious to see whether or not biophilic design assimilates into our contemporary design language as fluidly as sustainable design has over the past two decades.
While the breadth of the Living Future conference pales in comparison to the USGBC’s annual Greenbuild Conference, the quality, knowledge and passion of the speakers did not fail to impress. And though this year’s group of exhibiting product vendors leaves much to be desired, I trust that the list of participants will become more robust in the years to come as more manufacturers survive the strict vetting process that is a perquisite to attending. So, as the ILFI and its unConference enter its formative teenage years, I anticipate (and hope) that the next step in its growth will be largely subsidized by the design and building industries themselves, as it continues to undergo the transition from admirable ideology to established principle.
