The World's First Developer-Driven Living Building

The World's First Developer-Driven Living Building

PAE Engineers, The PAE Living Building

Interiors, Workplace

The PAE Living Building, designed to meet the world’s most rigorous sustainability standards, is the first developer-driven and largest commercial urban Living Building in the world. 

Designed and engineered to last 500 years, the building marries the scale and feel of a historic neighborhood with the highest possible energy performance and sustainability standards necessary for the future. It uses less energy, water, and material than comparable buildings while delivering superior levels of occupant comfort and productivity.

Critically, the PAE Living Building demonstrates how the built environment can achieve the deep and immediate carbon emission reductions required to mitigate the most severe impacts of climate change. It shows the world what a regenerative future can look like while providing the roadmap for how to get there.

Location

Portland, Oregon

Square Feet

58,000

Completion date

2021

Project Component

Architecture Services & Portfolio

Interior Design & Space Planning

Environmental Graphic Design

Certifications

Pursuing Full Living Building Certification

The material palette gives nod to the surrounding Old Town Historic District, where brick, cast iron and heavy timber are the predominant materials.

The durable mass timber structure, utilizing glulam and cross-laminated timber, reduces the project’s embodied emissions by 30 percent.

The dream of a Living Building as a corporate headquarters for PAE began in 2016. The engineering firm’s leadership sought an office that would not only embody their values but allow PAE employees to work in a healthy environment that improves the urban fabric of Portland.

Just six years after selecting the building site location on First and Pine in the historic Old Town/Skidmore district, The PAE Living Building is doing just that. It demonstrates how Portland buildings can achieve the city's 2050 target of 100 percent renewable energy nearly 30 years ahead of schedule - all while contributing to the revitalization and complementing the tradition of the existing neighborhood.

The façade of the PAE Living Building is, at first glance, designed to reinforce the national historic district. On closer inspection the façade achieves the seamless integration of many more responsibilities. Meeting the criteria of the seven LBC Petals—Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty—which are then subdivided into 20 Imperatives each focused on a specific sphere of influence, required every element in the building to serve multiple purposes.

All of the PAE Living Building’s needs are met via onsite water capture, and onsite and offsite solar arrays. The building uses rainwater capture, greywater treatment, nutrient recovery, and a five-story vacuum flush composting system. 

By producing liquid fertilizer and agriculture-grade compost onsite, the circular system uses no city water and offers another income source for the building owners.

Onsite and dedicated offsite solar generate 110% of the energy needed to run the building. A connection to the city grid enables the net positive energy structure to give back. It’s one of the first buildings in Portland to install a PV-powered battery storage system, allowing two-way power connection to the city’s utility network and electrical grid.

Due to historic district guidelines that dictate PV cannot be visible, the team was forced to get creative with a community-based approach to offsite solar to meet the project’s energy needs. The team funded an offsite array on a project nearby—the Renaissance Commons affordable housing project –saving the affordable housing group approximately $20,000 per year via donated electricity and supporting a valuable local asset.

The project's offsite solar donation translates to approximately $20,000 in funds that REACH Community Development would otherwise be paying annually for Renaissance Commons’ electric bills and can now devote to other services.

Drone image courtesy of Jamie Goodwick shows the PAE Living Building onsite solar array.

To address the climate crisis, we must make the use of cutting-edge technology and innovative design routine, not an exception to the rule. PAE’s Living Building work puts these principles into action and is a model for others to follow.
U.S. Congressman Earl Blumenauer

Inside the PAE Living Building, daylight, views, operable windows, filtered heat recovery ventilation, and other biophilic strategies support occupant health, comfort, and productivity

A Replicable Funding Model

The PAE Living Building set out to prove the viability of developing speculative mixed-use commercial structures that benefit their ecological and urban environments. The project was privately developed and funded through a partnership between Downtown Development Group, PAE, Edlen & Co., ZGF Architects, Walsh Construction Co., and Apex Real Estate Partners. Its success shows the private sector that meeting the highest sustainability aspirations for new buildings is truly achievable in a developer-driven model. 

The building is expected to provide a 10% internal rate of return over a 10-year hold and a 10% rent premium. Considering that the building far exceeds current code minimums and is designed to last 500 years, the projected cost savings extend out into the future. It proves that similar projects are not only technically possible on a dense urban site, but they are financially viable opportunities for private investors.

For PAE, investing in the project and committing to serve as its anchor tenant was a way to live the firm’s values. The design and investment team also saw it as a way to demonstrate to Portland – or any city, for that matter – what is possible in commercial development. 

The fifth floor “deckony" is the social heart of the PAE Living Building. A term coined by the design team, the deckony occupies 1,500 SF in the southeast corner of the top floor, giving users year-round access to an open-air lounge.

Designing for Inherent Resilience

For the PAE Living Building to accomplish its mission of being a self-sufficient, biomimicking, 500-year structure, it needed inherent resilience. The team wanted the PAE Living Building to stand as a durable symbol of strength in the heart of city, not only for the benefit of its owners and occupants but also to help it serve as a lasting community asset.

As a result, the PAE Living Building is one of the very few speculative office buildings and the only Living Building engineered beyond code minimums for seismic resilience. The building was designed to a Category IV of seismic resilience for the structure, the same level required by hospitals and fire stations.

The building can operate in a low energy mode completely disconnected from the grid for up to 100 days over the summer. This means it has the capacity to function under its own power for an entire season regardless of the municipal utility’s brownouts and blackouts that will likely become increasingly common in the coming decades.

The new headquarters will serve as an example of energy independence for any urban building designed to endure the extremes of a changing climate.

Over the next 12 months, the PAE Living Building will track and report its performance data in accordance with the Living Building Challenge requirements. It is expected to earn a full Living Building Challenge certification in the summer of 2023.

The world needs real stories that show us the path to a healthy, thriving, and equitable future…I look forward to witnessing the incredible impact that this work has on the next generation of Living Buildings around the world.
Lindsay Baker, CEO, International Living Future Institute