Upcoming LBC Projects

The Living Building Challenge (LBC) standard is a performance-based building standard designed to help any type of building—whether new or existing, residential or commercial—to achieve a rigorous level of environmental and social sustainability. The standard is different from other green building efforts that attempt to reduce the impact of new construction or existing buildings. The Living Building Challenge standard aims to create buildings that add more to their environment then they take, and that serve as healthy, beautiful places that connect occupants to nature. Like other standards, LBC is performance-based, so data on actual building performance in energy, water, and waste are collected to affirm that the building has achieved the rigorous goals. Currently in the process of rolling out version 4.0, LBC has over 650 projects globally, and two certified projects in the mid-Atlantic region.

Photo by the Alice Ferguson Foundation. The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Environmental Center, a full LBC certified building.

Living Building Challenge provides Flywheel an ambitious standard against which we can measure our goals for each project. The standard embodies many of the core philosophies that Flywheel Development tries to bring to our real estate development and other sustainability work; We seek to create buildings and communities that are healthy, regenerative, and provide positive benefits to residents and the surrounding community.

LBC also compliments the other standards that are core to our company’s mission, especially Passivhaus. All of our real estate projects are designed to achieve net zero energy performance, with the goal of promoting a carbon-free future that puts residents in control of their own energy usage by dramatically reducing energy bills. Our net zero goal is achieved with the rigorous Passivhaus standard, which sets minimum performance levels in areas such as insulation and air-tightness – and reduces energy consumption by 75-80% before solar is added to the roof, to ensure the projects hit net zero performance. The LBC standard actually goes beyond net zero — requiring net-positive performance— where the site’s renewables must produce 5% more energy than the site consumes over a 12-month period.

Photo by Amberli Young of one of Flywheel Development’s solar installations.

Beyond the ambitious energy performance requirements, the LBC 4.0 standard incorporates a comprehensive list of requirements, called “Imperatives” which cover a variety of aspects of a building program, and are organized into seven “Petals.” Each Petal represents an important part of a building’s contribution to the world around it, and they include energy, water, materials, health and happiness, beauty, place, and equity. Quantifying those attributes is hard – but LBC signals our commitment to these ideas and focuses our efforts. Meeting the requirements of the full Living Building Challenge involves meeting the high-level goals of all 20 Imperatives of the Challenge. There is also a Petal option of the Challenge where building teams can achieve ten core Imperatives across the seven Petals, and then full Petal compliance by achieving one of the following rigorous technical goals: net zero energy, net zero water, or the materials petal.

LBC sets high standards for indoor air quality, which is consistent with our efforts to encourage use of high-quality building materials inside our projects and out, and to create healthy and safe environments for our residents. Under LBC, projects must monitor indoor air quality and provide feedback to residents. On full Living Building Challenge-certified projects, projects must exclude products that contain compounds on the LBC-published ‘Red List’ – a list of known carcinogens and other harmful chemicals that are pervasive in conventional construction. The materials petal is a challenge, and while we strive to dramatically reduce these chemicals, but have not been able to build a red-list free building to date. By contrast, on projects such as our upcoming Stack Eight project in the District of Columbia’s Congress Heights neighborhood, we will achieve LBC “Petal” certification – where we achieve net positive energy performance and the Place and Beauty petals because Flywheel seeks to create projects that are beautiful, and that reflect the community that surrounds them.

Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash.

In pursuing Living Building Challenge Petal certification for Flywheel’s Stack Eight, we hope to demonstrate our commitment to its rigorous and aspirational approach to buildings, and we are excited about the potential for applying the full Challenge to future projects, especially the challenging materials petal and net-zero water, an equally lofty technical challenge.