(120a) Eco-Laboratory: Pushing Boundaries

Eco-Laboratory, conceptually designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, won the 2008 Natural Talent Design Competition, awarded at GreenBuild (the U.S Green Building Council's annual national conference). The design team affirmed that ?there is no silver bullet for sustainability, no one solution for net-zero consumptive environments.? Recognizing a living building's dependence on multiple systems, Eco-Laboratory is a synergy of economy, culture and environment working together in harmony. It is more than a building; its parts are inspired by a self-sustaining, diverse ecological system.

The Living Building Challenge was developed by Jason McLennan, director of Cascadia USGBC, to push the boundaries of sustainable design and create projects that meet the highest level of sustainability and act as models for the industry to follow. Eco-Laboratory used this document as a benchmark for everything from energy strategies to material choices. Programmatically, the building includes dwelling units, a work and training program, urban agriculture, green houses and public education facilities. It mitigates the impact of the activities and demands on site. The designers thought of ?harvesting? in various interpretations, looking for all opportunities to create overlapping symbiotic relationships. Eco-Laboratory is designed to grow its own food, generate electricity, clean its air and water, and provide a place and purpose for the less fortunate in society. These systems bring home, work, shopping, gathering, food production, energy production, and waste disposal under one roof.

While this project is conceptual by nature, its integrated design processes and building systems are 100% feasible and transferable. This cutting edge design was conceived with a healthy dose of realism, making Eco-Laboratory pertinent to current architecture, landscape, and sustainability discussions.

In this presentation we will cover:

- Innovative relationships between living spaces, growing spaces, and exterior spaces within the building.

- The symbiotic relationship between building systems, focusing on passive ventilation, indoor environmental quality, and the functional role of the greenhouses.

- A new archetype: living units with circulation/growing spaces on south and west facades.

- The team's integrative design process within the Living Building framework to create a carbon neutral, water-efficient building prototype.