Cascadia Center For Sustainable Design Aims To Be Most Efficient Commercial Building In The World

The Cascadia region is home to the <a href="http://inhabitat.com/living-building-challenge-2-0-unveiled/">Living Building Challenge</a> and will soon be home to the <a href="http://cascadiacenter.info/" target="_blank">Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design and Construction</a> with a goal to become the greenest building in North America and most efficient commercial building in the world. Aiming to set a new standard in urban sustainability, the Cascadia Center in Seattle will be a living building and generate all its own energy, provide its own water and manage all of its own waste. One of the main features will be an extensive rooftop solar system that will provide 100% of the building's electricity. <a href="http://inhabitat.com/elegant-lott-clean-water-alliance-building-shows-the-sexier-side-to-water-treatment/">Miller Hull Partnership</a> is lead designer on the project, which is expected to start this year with completion targeted by <a href="http://inhabitat.com/6-earth-day-activities-that-will-actually-make-a-difference/">Earth Day</a>, April 22nd, 2012.

The Cascadia Center will be a mixed-use commercial and office building and will eventually serve as the future headquarters of the Bullitt Foundation.

The center is aiming for complete self-sufficiency and is promised to achieve a Living Building certification under the2.0 standards.

This includes meeting requirements under seven performance areas: Site, Water, Energy, Health, Materials, Equity and Beauty, which are then broken down into 20 imperatives.

Miller Hull Partnership is pulling out all the stops in the design of the center, which includes practically every sustainable strategy you can imagine.

Located at the cross roads between Seattle's Central Area and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, the center will be ideally located to promote sustainable development through education.

To minimize heating and cooling, the building will make use of high performance glass and insulation, heat recovery, ground source heat pumps, demand controlled ventilation, and radiant floors.

For lighting, the center will maximize daylighting, use efficient lighting and sensors and daylighting controls.

To minimize energy loads from tenants, the building includes an "irresistible" staircase to minimize use of elevators along with daytime office cleaning, majority use of laptops over desktops and more.

With the energy load minimized, a rooftop photovoltaic system will provide 264,000 kWh/year, which is more than enough.

Additionally, the center will include a green roof, rainwater collection, grey water treatment, and waste composting. An innovative internal cap and trade energy program will allow the different to trade unused energy from their budget.