The Epitome of Green

by Jonathan McGaha | March 31, 2013 12:00 am

When it celebrates its official grand opening on Monday, April 22, Earth Day, the Bullitt Center in Seattle will be the greenest, most energy-efficient commercial building in the world. Situated in the heart of the city’s Central District, the 50,000-square-foot, six-story building will achieve net zero energy and water, and is designed to meet the goals of the Living Building Challenge
(LBC).

Placing Seattle at the forefront of the green building movement, the Bullitt Center is the brainchild of Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to safeguard the natural environment by promoting responsible human activities and sustainable communities in the Pacific Northwest.

Walking the Talk

The Bullitt Foundation spent 50 years being engaged in environmental issues, and recently changed its emphasis toward focusing on making the three big cities in the Pacific Northwest-Seattle, Portland and Vancouver-models of urban sustainability. With this change, Denis Hayes, president and chief executive of the Bullitt Foundation, notes that it became important for the foundation to walk the talk that they were talking in terms of how cities should be designed and how buildings should be built. After looking round for a green office in Seattle, and not finding exactly what they were looking for, the board decided to build their own office.

While making the decision to build its own building was a tough decision, Hayes says that it was the right one for the Foundation. “What we do believe though, is that by building for quality and for durability and for sustainability, we will have a building that 10 years from now may be the best producing asset in our portfolio, and is still going be around as a significant asset 250 years from now,” he says.

Designed by The Miller Hull Partnership, Seattle, the Bullitt Center’s goal is to change the way buildings are designed, built and operated to improve long-term environmental performance and promote broader implementation of energy efficiency, renewable energy and other green building technologies in the Northwest.

Pushing the Boundaries of Green

To be certified as a Living Building, the Bullitt Center will have to be self-sufficient for energy and water for at least 12 continuous months, in addition to meeting rigorous standards for green materials and indoor environment quality. Currently there are only three LBC certified buildings worldwide, all of them in the U.S., with an additional 140 projects in eight countries currently trying for certification. “During the design process, we had to simultaneously develop all these requirements and found them to be co-dependent on each other,” Miller Hull explains. “It was a continual balancing act that required full engagement by the entire project team.”

LBC requires projects to meet 20 specific imperatives within seven performance areas, or petals: site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. The Bullitt Center meets the Challenge’s imperatives by being located in a pedestrian-, bicycle- and transit-friendly area. Rainwater will be collected on the building’s roof, stored in an underground 50,000-gallon cistern before being used throughout the building. The 14,303-square-foot photovoltaic roof with a 230,000-kilowatt-hour solar array from SunPower Corp., San Jose, Calif., will help the building generate as much electricity as it will use. To promote health for its occupants, the center has inviting stairways, operable windows and features to promote walking and resource sharing. It will also not contain any “red list” hazardous materials, such as PVC, cadmium, lead, mercury and hormone-mimicking substances commonly found in building components. To support the LBC’s requirements of using local products, Bielefeld, Germany-based Schüco worked with a local supplier, Goldfinch Brothers in Everett, Wash., to manufacture its large floor-to-ceiling operable windows that will offer fresh air and daylight to all workers. Additionally, the building’s architecture, photovoltaic array, 500-square-foot green roof, native plantings, large structural timbers and a revitalized neighboring pocket park will add beauty to the surrounding streetscape.

Hayes notes that the Bullitt Center is the first commercial building in the U.S. to earn Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) project certification by using all of the wood sourced from FSC-certified sources “There are lots of buildings that have FSC wood in them under USGBC standards, but that requires a percentage of a value of the materials in the building,” Hayes notes. “But for ours, it was 100 percent.”

Metal Sales Manufacturing Corp., Louisville, Ky., supplied 18,000 square feet of its 20-gauge TLC-1 metal wall panels in Galvalume for the building. The panels have a long life span, are 100 percent recyclable and contain a high percentage of recycled material. The metal wall panels fill the space between the windows, and are installed vertically to create a clean, angular aesthetic. The windows and wall panels work together to create vertical lines, giving the building additional perceived height.

 

With its steel brace frame, heavy timber frame, concrete columns and floors, the Bullitt Center is designed to be a 250-year building. The state-of-the-art building uses 26, 400-foot-deep geothermal heat pumps with in-floor radiant heating and cooling system. “A primary consideration and major accomplishment was designing the building so that its energy needs-including plug loads-could be met entirely by the PV array on its roof in the cloudy Northwest,” explains Muller Hull. “That constraint also opened up design opportunities like creating an ‘irresistible stair’ to entice occupants away from the elevator to walk between floors on a beautifully designed stairway with a dramatic view to the Seattle skyline and mountains beyond. It also required highly efficient ground source heat and radiant heating/cooling systems.”

“Given the significant sustainability goals, almost every design decision had impact elsewhere,” adds Miller Hull. “A change here affected another aspect of the building there-lots of modeling and testing was involved.” 

Measures of Success

“This is a building that is really designed to work well if it’s built with a very high degree of craftsmanship,” says Hayes. To create a real sense of pride and craftsmanship in the subcontractors, in their first meeting together, Hayes pulled out iconic photographs of workers sitting and having lunch during the construction of the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. He described the photos, saying the workers were grinning because they knew that they were doing something that had never been done before, something that was really important, and something that they cared about. “And, I said, that’s exactly what we’re trying to get from everyone that works for you is a sense that quality matters on this building a lot and people need to come in here proud of what they can do and doing the best job possible,” Hayes describes. “And I think in some very large measure, that was successful.”

“This is by far the most complex design challenge we have ever undertaken as a firm,” continues Miller Hull. “It was definitely an integrated team effort among all the project partners to accomplish the client’s aggressive sustainability objectives for the building to meet all of its own energy, water and waste needs. It was also designed as a regional center for urban sustainability and energy efficiency education, with the process to both design this landmark structure and to monitor its performance once up and running made public-adding a layer of responsibility to the entire design process and projected performance outcomes.”

“I suppose the real measure of success is if you’re looking back 25 years from now, will be how widespread these principles have become?” Hayes asks. Noting that they’ve proved that you can power a six-story building in Seattle with the sunlight that falls on its roof, Hayes asks how many others like it there will be, especially in places where it’s easier, like California or Hawaii.

“Arguably, this is the toughest place in the United States to do this because we have very little sunlight and we’ve got incredibly cheap electricity,” he says. “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. And if we’ve only done it in one building here, and it’s not replicated broadly elsewhere, then it was a fun exercise, but it was irrelevant. We view this as a part of our program as a Foundation, not just as an investment in real estate, but as a means of trying to change the world.”

*Photos by John Stamets

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