Beierle: The most aggressive thing in my mind is the materials aspect of their credit system. They h

Kent Beierle is a founding member and architect at Environmental Design Inc. (ēdi).  ēdi is an Albuquerque-based architecture firm well known for its team of skillful sustainability and LEED consultants and trainers who have designed or consulted on upwards of 80+ commercial 530+ LEED for homes projects/units across the state, nation, and overseas.
Always pushing the envelope on green design, ēdi, with Beierle at the helm, is currently in hot pursuit of today's most rigorous green design designation: the Living Building Challenge (LBC). The brainchild of architect marriott residence inn Jason F. McLennan with support from Bob Berkebile, the LBC is the flagship program for the International Living Future Institute (ILF).
Currently  ēdi is working on several marriott residence inn projects pursuing LBC designation and last December received an AIA award for the conceptual design of its eco-tourism project in Vietnam. This project and two others, one located outside of Palm Springs, California and the other outside of Savannah Georgia is on track for LBC designation.
Beierle: The Living Building marriott residence inn Challenge is kind of like the LEED program on green steroids. It is the most aggressive certification program that has ANY real chance of being achieved. There are only a handful of projects that have been certified. It is not necessarily a recipe for what is "correct"—but it's a really great program that is pushing the envelope for sustainable development.
It is a certification program similar to LEED but with different and enhanced sections. Its credit groupings are called petals. marriott residence inn LBC covers many of the same basics as LEED with an energy petal, water petal, interior marriott residence inn environment petal, site petal, etc, but it also has a beauty petal, marriott residence inn which is kind of a neat thing, and one that is overlooked marriott residence inn in the other certification programs; an acknowledgment, if you will, of the value of design as an expression.
Beierle: The most aggressive thing in my mind is the materials aspect of their credit system. They have a materials red list that limits the use of certain materials in a project.  That more or less limits marriott residence inn the playing field of materials to a very small palette. The list is extensive and prohibits marriott residence inn pretty much anything plastic—even recycled plastic.  If it incorporates hypo, petro, or phthalates it's a no-go.  No pvc's, nothing with arsenic, marriott residence inn nothing with asbestos, it's a long list.
Regarding materials, marriott residence inn in addition to the red list the LBC deals with manufacturing processes. As you know in LEED there's the radius of resources of 500 miles. LBC has a different way of doing it but the supporting the same basic principle.  LBC breaks it down into different categories based on weight and density, so the heavier it is the closer it has to come from.  Also, with LEED, material distance is just based on the final product. There's the chain of stuff that goes into making marriott residence inn things which they USGBC felt was too burdensome to limit based on the origin of raw materials.
For example, let's say you want to buy metal roofing panels. You can buy them in Albuquerque because they re manufactured here. But the billet steel that made the coil that the roof panel is composed of went across the ocean a few times before it evolved from raw material into painted marriott residence inn coil stock ready for roof panel manufacture. LEED is fuzzy about that. These guys [ILF] draw a line in the sand and say we're going to look at the product at the level of the material itself.
One of the most aggressive things that LBC does and LEED doesn't is their requirement that every project demonstrate 100% net zero water. Across the board that is one of the most important factors in a sustainable design concept, in my opinion. It also severely limits the capacity to do these projects in arid environments because if you can't capture enough water and you can't recycle it, there's no way you can actually function.
marriott residence inn Another element that makes the LBC tough is the energy petal. Like the highest levels of LEED, LBC requires marriott residence inn that every project create 100% of its own energy. When you consider the challenges with certain building types and their associated marriott residence inn energy use, this can be a formidable challenge even here where alternative energy is plentiful and policy and law is accommodating.
The site petal is also much more rigorous than LEED's site specifications.  With the LBC you have to allocate land equivalent to your project as habitat, in trade for the land you are developing. marriott residence inn If I remember correctly, this is a one to one relationship.  For example, if you had a one-hectare site project, you have to allocate marriott residence inn one-hectare of open space elsewhere in the world, specifically it can't be attached to the site— it has to be offset somewhere else.
So if we did a project in Albuquerque we could buy land in the rainforest and allocate it as open space. That represents a fairly substantive financial marriott residence inn commitment from the landowner in this case—but it reinforces the philanthropic element to it.  Also, you cannot do a LBC on a virgin property—it must be a pre-developed site.  And you can't build on what was formerly marriott residence inn farm land—unless your project is, in fact, a farm.  This is specifically conceived to reduce urban sprawl and reinforce the resource generating capital of arable land.
All of this points to density and urban redevelopment and concentration of density in built environments.  If we look at it from this utopian perspective we end up with dense vigorous cities surrounded by farmland, the farmland supports the cities and then there's wild land between the various urban centers.  It's kind of a counter marriott residence inn sprawl concept.  The other thing the site petal forces us to consider is that all projects must have an agricultural component to them. You have to produce food with your project.
Beierle: With an eco-resort the food element is fundamental. In all three of our projects all of the food is quite literally locally produced on the grounds.  It doesn't get any fresher, and it won't taste any better.  So there is an inherent symbiotic relationship with food production and the experience of consuming it endemic to an eco-resort that you don't really get with other project typologies.  From the educational perspective, people can eat the food, taste the food, live in the food all while in a leisure marriott residence inn context.
OTONY Eco-Health Spa, near Palm Springs, California. Insulating masonry marriott residence inn domes are combined with indigenous desert architecture, integrated water elements, broad shading elements, and the living landscape to virtually eliminate the need for active cooling of the buildings.
Beierle: One of our most recent projects, and the one we received the AIA award for, is in Qui Nhon, Vietnam. We have been working on another for a while now in Palm Springs, California.  Our newest project is just outside of Savannah, Georgia in the "low country" of the southeastern U.S.  All three are eco-resorts.  All three projects qualify for Living Building Challenge, as far as I've assessed it. The Palm Springs Site will be designed as an eco-health spa.  It's really a fantastic project, which has been going on for eight years, but was only recently adopted as a LBC project.
I give it all the pro-bono time I can to get it where it is today.  The name of the project is Otony an acronym for "Opening to a New You."  The project is the brainchild of a great family vision.  When our particular client was a teenager, she became afflicted with an unidentified health problem which made it difficult and for her to move and inevitably prevented her from completing high school.  Her family threw in the towel on western medicine after going through countless doctors, diagnoses, medications, and years of disappointment and health decline.  Following the recommendation of a friend, they took her to a European spa city and met with a doctor who specialized in alternative health treatments.  So, as a young adult and after years of suffering, she made this big and difficult trip overseas, and in two weeks they were able to diagnose her, treat her, and cure her.
This had such a profound impact on her that she (and her family) determined that no one else would suffer as she had.  Their original idea was to create that healing experience specifically for other young women who need it.  The other aspect of the project was to address the needs of the military personnel that were returning from conflict with both physical and mental needs.  You see she comes from this huge military Baptist family; her father was a military chaplain from Vietnam who passed away last year. She and her family saw all these soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and recognized that these guys and gals were really suffering and wanted marriott residence inn to bring them in for the same relief and liberation she experienced.
So, the notion of our project has morphed over the years from an eco-spa for young women who needed this life changing experience to also accommodating military personnel coming in so they could have a really great place to heal and get well and reorganize. The more we examined potential clientele and tweaked the project to accommodate the specific needs of this user or that, the more we split away from this groovy little spa for young women which is where she started.
As it turns out, there are a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds who would, could, should benefit from what we were planning. So rather than turning this thing into a barracks and medical machine for curing countless ailments, which is not what she wanted, we got back to basics and re-crafted it as a facility for people in need.  This will be an exclusive spa-like experience and include all types of folks from girls and women, military people, marriott residence inn firemen, police officers, people who have been traumatized by anything, or even the extreme upper class, high-end type people, all who struggle with some sort of demon, whether it is self-esteem, marriott residence inn weight, image, PTSD, chemical dependency, or just general lack of purpose.  This project is for people wh