Achieving the Living Building Challenge Certification with help from Urbanstrong
The business case for healthy buildings is growing, with certified healthy buildings gathering rental premiums over their non-certified counterparts. In fact, research from MIT found that healthy building effective rents transact between 4.4 to 7.7% more per square foot than their nearby non-certified and non-registered peers.
The availability of healthy building certification systems offers a pathway for the real estate industry to track the health impacts of assets for ESG reporting. While we’ve already highlighted how Urbanstrong solutions help achieve healthy building certifications such as the WELL Building Standard and LEED, this post outlines how our systems will help your building project achieve the Living Building Challenge certification.
What is the Living Building Challenge?
The Living Building Challenge is a healthy building certification managed by the International Living Future Institute. The Living Building Challenge is versatile and can apply to any building typology, including but not limited to new construction, existing buildings, and interior projects for all types of buildings including single and multi-family residential, commercial, institutional, and medical / laboratory.
It consists of seven performance categories, or “Petals”:
Place - Restoring a healthy interrelationship with nature
Water - Creating developments that operate within the water balance of a given place and climate
Energy - Relying only on current solar income
Health + Happiness - Creating environments that optimize physical and psychological health and wellbeing
Materials - Endorsing products that are safe for all species through time
Equity - Supporting a just and equitable world
Beauty - Celebrating design that uplifts the human spirit
Within each Petal there are Imperatives, ranging from Urban Agriculture to Responsible Water Use, Access to Nature, Responsible Sourcing, and Net Positive Waste. A full list of the 20 Imperatives for each Petal and which are required can be seen in the Summary Table below:
Summary Table for Living Building Challenge (source: Living Building ChallengeSM 4.0)
Now that you know what the Living Building Challenge healthy building certification encompasses, how do you go about achieving the various Imperatives to fulfill the Petals? Urbanstrong is here to assist you with products, services, and expertise that touch several Imperatives across the various Petals.
Urbanstrong and Living Building Challenge Imperatives
Urbanstrong's mission is to integrate nature back into the built environment in a way that efficiently promotes profitability, health, sustainability and beauty. The Urbanstrong team works with developers, property managers, and building owners looking to reduce energy expenditures, improve occupant health and wellness, reinvest in their building assets, boost property values, reduce their environmental footprint, and green their brand. Urbanstrong offers consulting, financing, and design-build-maintenance services for living garden walls and several rooftop development solutions including green, blue, solar, amenity and farming.
With that being said, here is a breakdown of how Urbanstrong’s products, services, and expertise can assist you in fulfilling several of the Living Building Challenge Imperatives:
Petal: Place
Imperative: Urban Agriculture
Urbanstrong Offering: Two of Urbanstrong’s staff are co-founders and sit on the board of a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit called the NYC Agriculture Collective. The team members are well-versed in all the ways one might integrate farming into a construction project. Whether you’re interested in exploring the feasibility of a rooftop farm atop your new building project or existing parking garage, or want to integrate indoor food production into your project, our team has the knowledge and resources to help you navigate on-site food production.
Petal: Water
Imperative: Responsible Water Use
Urbanstrong Offering: Green roofs allow you to manage stormwater right where it lands (on the roof) and reduce or eliminate the need for space-taking cisterns. Founder and Principal Alan Burchell lectures regularly on the stormwater management benefits of green roofs and blue roofs (stormwater roofs) and works with designers to encourage the implementation of innovative integrated Green-Blue-Solar roofing solutions.
The Javits Center Green Roof (which prevents approximately 6.8 million gallons of stormwater runoff annually), NYC
Petal: Energy
Imperative: Energy + Carbon Reduction
Urbanstrong Offering: Vegetation can and will regulate the ambient temperature outside and inside of a building. The growing medium and plants serve as a natural insulator, keeping the air inside the buildings cooler in the warmer months and warmer during the colder months - meaning less energy is necessary for heating and cooling of a building. Our green roof and living wall solutions can help a building project achieve a reduction in total net annual energy consumption.
Exterior Living Wall Project
Petal: Energy
Imperative: Net Positive Energy
Urbanstrong Offering: Our team is well-versed in a variety of solar technology configurations and programs, including batteries, storage, and Community Solar. We work with a variety of building owners to help them navigate tax breaks, incentives, and programs to help find the most lucrative solar options for their rooftop.
Integrated Solar Green Roof Project, NYC
Petal: Health + Happiness
Imperative: Access to Nature
Urbanstrong Offering: Our team specializes in the design, build, and ongoing maintenance of custom indoor and outdoor living garden walls. Having tried and tested the leading living wall systems on the market, the Urbanstrong team is able to work with clients to understand their needs and then recommend living wall technologies most appropriate for their budget and design goals.
Our team also offers preserved moss and folia walls, a zero-maintenance solution for integrating nature into indoor spaces. The moss wall projects are all made by hand in Brooklyn, NY using sustainably sourced moss that is 100% natural and harvested according to ecological practices.
Preserved Moss & Folia Project, Brooklyn NY
Petal: Beauty
Imperative: Beauty + Biophilia
Urbanstrong Offering: Every time Urbanstrong gives an architectural continuing education workshop, the opening section is dedicated to the benefits of integrating biophilic design principles into building projects. All of our staff have either LEED AP, WELL AP, or FitWel professional accreditations.
Along with this, our main product offerings, green roofs and green walls, are not only highly engineered responsible solutions for minimizing a building project’s disruption to the local ecology, they’re also beautiful and connect people to nature, which is a fundamental basis of biophilia.
In Conclusion
The rising demand for healthy buildings and the rental premiums they gather make healthy building certifications more enticing than ever. Let the healthy building professionals at Urbanstrong assist you in navigating the landscape of healthy building certification requirements with our green building solutions, services, and expertise.
