If you (like me) are busy thinking about Greenbuild, the Cascadia Chapter of the USGBC is way ahead of you: they’re thinking of next May’s Living Future Conference and they want your presentation submissions. Now.

For those of you that have never been, Living Future is an “unconference,” meaning that it is presented in a

Photo Credit : A. Zucca / Roger-Viollet as seen on Fashion Nation

Living Future is a lot like these ladies. A little odd but very chic.

unique, somewhat non-traditional way (while still being a conference by definition of course). Living Future is a bit like your eclectic cousin - the one that wears vintage shirts from the 1960s, pants from the 1980s, fancy modern shoes and weird jewelry from who knows when. They might look a little odd but they always say interesting things. In comparison, Greenbuild is the buttoned up family patriarch.

Anyway, if you have something to share that’s innovative, creative or a bit off center, Living Future is looking for conference submissions. Entries are due by Oct. 30 and priority will be given to localized, community level efforts to solve “the problems we face.” Examples may be urban food production, decentralized water and energy production, eco-districts and local economies.

This year’s conference will be held in Seattle (the conference alternates every three years from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C., to Portland) and I’m excited for it to be back in my home town. It runs from May 5-7. This year’s theme is “Building Hope, Revaluing Community.”

To learn more, click here.  If you want to speak with a person about this opportunity, contact Jon Gordon at JGordon@brn-engineering.com.

Speaking of Living Future, I have attended all three so far. If you have been to multiple Living Future Conferences, which one was your favorite?

Apparently, Living Future has a theme of people taking their shirts off. Last year it was Sim Van der Ryn. This year it’s the people introducing the 15 Minutes of Brilliance (though to be fair they said they were just getting more casual and only stripped to their t-shirts under dress shirts).

(By the way, the audience is whoot-whooting like in the Arsenio Hall show….)

So 15 minutes of Brilliance lets a few pre-chosen teams to get up and share their brilliant ideas in 10 minutes or less. Excuse me if the below information is a tad fragmented. 

The first item was presented by Geof Syphers, chief sustainability officer of Codding

The Sonoma Mountain Village site plan

Enterprises and Greg Searle of BioRegional. Syphers is helping to redevelop Sonoma Mountain Village, a 200-acre factory site in California into an urban neighborhood that will be leed nd, leed platinum and will meet the OnePlanet sustainable criteria. The project is 100 percent solar powered. The team is regrinding 40,000 tons of asphalt to recreate roads. It has a biodiesel factory. What’s brilliant, Sypher said is looking at the impacts of a project through this tool,  we have to set impact design goals for projects, and we have to measure the end impacts of projects. “Leed platinum isn’t always better than LEED silver,” he said… but this tool will help get projects greener.

Aurora Mahassine of Habitile The Hanging Gardens went second. She said we need to re-think what our home is, what we value as a society and our connectivity with the Earth systems we evolved with. She said we need more curves, holes and places for life to happen in our landscape. Quote of the day? “fertility begins with a hole.” If we keep telling ourselves stories of an apocaypse, she said, we will get there but if we re-embrace gardens with our hands, touch life and reinsert ourselves into the natural lifecycle, our future won’t be an apocalypse. Reintegrating ourselves. Habitile itself create vertical modular living systems that become a living wall. 

Jim Estes of Inhabitability dicussed the Greensburg Living Building Challenge Competition. Two years ago, a tornado decimated Greensburg, Kansas. As they recovered they

Greensburg after the tornado

decided there had to be a better way, so each new structure is being developed to LEED platinum. The city has a new sustinable recovery plan to make the city into a sustainable pioneering center. Greensburg Green Town is developing a series of green houses so people can test drive them. Greensburg is currently forming a new partnership with Cascadia to create affordable homes. It will host a contest for teens to design, build and create affordable homes that meet the Living Building Challenge. Greensburg is offering no ordinance roadblocks for water, netzero energy etc. Teens from different locales can enter.  They hope to launch the competition in the fall. At every item this will be presented to the media (ahem).

The fourth idea was presented by Bryony Schwan, executive director of the Biomimicry Guild. Scwan said if we could use biomimicry to create change in the built environment, we could effect real change to help prevent climate change. Animals, she said, do more with less while humans problem solve in a completely different way. For example, she said, we thought until recently that flat surfaces were easier to clean. But we looked at lotuses, which had tiny rivets that allowed water to roll off the leaf and clean it. The guild is hosting the Green Building Design Challenge, to look at the connections between design and nature. There are three parts to this challenge: on Wednseday, the guild hosted a design charette to tackle the problem. Now, the challenge will be available online for comment and the third part will be taking designs to market. The challenge will be at asknature.org.

Sara Garrett, director of the Motivespace Coalition spoke about community asset funds and growing community space. Motivespace asks how space can motivate change through community asset funds. The first step in developing a fund is is to stay positive. The second is to support each other. The third is to know your value. The fourth is to cooperate. No one person or gorup could build a thriving community asset fund alone, Garrett said. Because time is money, neighbors can work together to get projects done, bank extra hours and use the extra time they’ve banked for yard work, neighborhood massages or other work. In this system, any person can seed a project and the best projects will rise to the top and draw the neighbor’s assets and skills. 

….. and that’s it!

This morning, the Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council announced the birth of the International Living Building Institute. The institute will oversee the global development of the Living Building Challenge.

Cascadia launched the challenge, developed by Cascadia CEO Jason McLennan, three years ago. Since then, the idea has spread around the world with 60 proposed living buidlings in different stages of design or development in the U.S. and Canada. The furthest along of these is the Omega Center for Sustainable Living in Rhinebeck, NY, which is nearing completion. A living building works like a natural system, is designed to go further than LEED platinum and must meet a rigorous set of requirements. For more info on it, click the living building tag below.

For the time being, Cascadia will continue to oversee the Living Building Challenge. But the institute is in the process of becoming a formal nonprofit, and will soon have its own board of directors.

Some keynote speakers leave you satisfied, some leave you disappointed and some leave you angry that you just wasted two hours of your time. Then, there are keynote speakers like Janine Benyus that leave you wanting more.

Benyus spoke last night at the Living Future Conference in Portland. Her talk was warm, personal, funny

and informative. Having never heard Benyus speak before, I now understand why she’s considered such a big deal. The talk was pretty amazing.

Janine Benyus

The talk began with Sam Adams, Portland’s mayor (who is funny!!!), welcoming people to Portland. He was pretty straightforward about the general fear that you can’t make any money being green. Not true, he said: “If you take nothing else away from your trip to Portland, take this away: you can make money being very, very green.” Portland, he said, keeps millions in its economy because of its public transportation and green business.

Jason McLennan, Cascadia’s CEO then glowingly introduced Benyus, saying “I think you’re one of the most important figures in the planet today, period… I think you represent our species really well.” Not every day you hear that!

Then Benyus took the stage. She said the uncertainty in today’s financial markets can be used to the benefit of biomimicry, building design and creating a better world. When cultural certainties disappear, she said, so does arrogance. She said the recession is creating a similar attitude that happened after the World Trade Center attacks – where “the world is open to listening to the next question … As long as they’re listening, let’s make the vision as big as we can.”

What can we learn fro, this luna moth?

In this same vein, she said building models for a place can be created by looking at how natural organisms in a location treat things like fire, wind etc. “Our buildings could have general organisms as their models.”

Benyus said she hopes we will be able to fly over cities in the future, and have them be functionally indistinguishable from the natural environment. That, she said, would be sustainability.

Benyus also plugged a tool she has been working on for the past year called asknature.org. The tool, she said, allows designers to ask how nature would fix a problem and learn from it. She also discussed how future areas of technology can be inspired by animal organisms. She and Paul Hawken, for example, are working on a new solar cell that is inspired by photosynthesis.

But in the end, she said, new technology or new laws aren’t going to save us from ourselves. She said the only thing that can save us is “a change of heart and a change of stance towards the rest of the world.”

These are just a few of the items she discussed. For more, stay tuned to a future story in the DJC. If you attended the talk, please comment below and tell me what you thought of it – or what you’ve thought about Benyus’ previous talks. If you didn’t attend the talk, I’d love to hear your comments. Is mimicking nature the future of building? How important is it compared to meeting netzero energy or netting zero water?

Bright and early this morning (7:30 a.m.) I boarded a Seattle train bound for Portland so I could attend Wednesday’s Living Future site tour (the first official part of the Living Future Conference) and share the results with you. Though I may be hitting the sack a little early tonight, the results did not disappoint.

There were three tours being held. I attended the one at Portland State University’s Shattuck Hall, a building that was originally built in 1915 and recently underwent a ginormous renovation, both functionally and sustainably.

The building itself houses the school’s architecture program, so one of the goals of the renovation was to make the building itself a teaching tool. Hence it features things like exposed piping and systems and exposed radiant ceiling panels. The visibility of systems changes from floor to floor, with the top being the most obvious and open.

Having written about the Vance Building earlier this week for the DJC, I noticed a lot of similarities. Both were built early in the century, and both recently underwent massive improvements on tight budgets. The differences in what the two decided to concentrate on though, especially having toured both buildings, were really interesting.

I took some amazing photos, which my (old) computer is unfortunately not letting me load. I promise to post them as soon as I feasibly can. I’ll also try to add more information about Shattuck Hall at a later date.

Stay tuned: tonight’s keynote speaker is Janine Benyus!

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be in Portland at Cascadia’s Living Future Conference and whenever I have a chance, I’ll be live blogging it! Stay tuned…..

If there are green rock stars in the national sustainability movement, three of them are coming to Seattle/the Pacific Northwest in April. 

On guitar, there’s Amory Lovins, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who will speak about profitable solutions to oil, climate and proliferation at Seattle’s Green Festival on April 12-13. Lovins’ talk is at 3 p.m. on April 12.

On vocals, there’s Paul Hawken,  who will speak about “how the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world.” Hawken, basically the U.S.’s guru of green guru’s, will headline Cascadia’s Living Future Unconference in Vancouver, B.C., April 16-18. His talk on April 16 is FREE! And open to the public.

And on drums,  there’s Ed Begley Jr.(of HGTV series Living with Ed-fame), who is the keynote speaker at the AIA’s Regeneration 2008 conference. (P.S. check out the picture of him on his Web site!)

These conferences (and others) feature a whole host of other well known backup singers and knowledgeable speakers, but these three are the ones that will draw the crowds.

I for one will be at all three. Will you? Who are you most excited to hear speak, and what do you hope to learn?