Seattle-based team wins national award for cutting-edge sustainable design

(December 17, 2008) Seattle, WA – A Seattle-area team of young designers beat out 17 other finalists to win the national Natural Talent Design Competition at the United States Green Building Council’s (USBGC) annual conference, Greenbuild, in Boston. Their hypothetical Eco-laboratory is a self-sustaining community design with a mix of housing, green lifestyle training, and in-city farm land in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. The team of four is part of the Emerging Green Builders group of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council (Cascadia).

The team consists of Myer Harrell and Dan Albert of Weber Thompson, Brian Geller of ZGF Architects, and Christopher Dukehart, a graduate of the University of Washington’s Architecture program. Eco-laboratory is an urban, high-rise, multi-use development designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous green building standard available.

The proposed site for this design, at the corner of Elliott Avenue and Vine Street, currently houses a community garden and working-class cottages. The team designed Eco-laboratory to expand upon this urban agricultural amenity by filling in the block with an expanded garden that would grow into the new building and around the existing cottages – which would continue to house local writers-in-residence. The complete design incorporates short- and long-term low-income and market-rate housing, a public farmer’s market supplied by the p-patch harvest, and vocational training and sustainability educational facilities.

“Our project values culture, celebrates ecology, and sustains economic prosperity by designing overlapping systems where the sum is greater than its parts,” says Albert about the unique synergies of the design.

Now in its fifth year, the competition provides university students and young design professionals with an applied learning experience in the principles of integrated design, sustainability, innovation, and social consciousness. Teams compete first at a regional level through their local USGBC Chapter; winners of those competitions move on to the national competition at Greenbuild.

Living Buildings are designed to function like a living organism, generating their own energy, capturing and treating their water, and moving towards zero negative environmental impact based on what’s currently possible. There are currently more than 60 projects in the design or construction phase that are pursuing Living Building status throughout North America.

“To win a national competition using the Living Building Challenge clearly shows the leadership and talent in our region. This is further demonstration that many look to Cascadia for the skills and thought leadership needed to advance the green building movement beyond ‘best practices’ and toward living buildings and living communities,” says Ralph DiNola, principal of Green Building Services and a competition judge.

The regional 2009 Natural Talent Design Competition will take place at Cascadia’s annual conference Living Future in Portland, OR from May 6-8.