We spoke again today with Brian Walsh, CEO of The Collage Companies, the design build firm overseeing First Green Bank's Living Building Challenge project.  We talked about what looked like a setback for the project that occurred after the first charrette on August 26—First Green Bank and the developer of the Clermont, Florida, property that would have housed the proposed site for the Living Building had parted ways. 

​​There are, of course, lessons to be learned from this turn of events.  “First we learned that we need to ask the right questions about a site before we begin to design,” Brian reports.  Meanwhile, however, the exceptional synergy among the project team assembled for the first charrette—Collage, Little Architects, Tri3 Civil Engineering Design Studio,  TLC Engineering, and Magley Design, Landscape Architects—bodes well for the future of the project.   “There was a lot of energy, some things came out of the process we felt were good," he notes. "These are people willing to go out on the edge and do something that hasn’t been done before."  For example, acknowledging the project's small footprint as a significant constraint in meeting the social criteria of the Living Building Challenge,  the team discussed  expanding it from 2500 square feet to 4000 square feet to create additional lease space for a café for community activation.  Brian was also excited about repurposing wood for the bank's Living Building, sourced from an old chapel that was being demolished as part of another Collage project.  The difficulty now—not insurmountable, however--will be to find a warehouse to store the wood since the timeline for the project has been disrupted.  We wondered if perhaps a First Green Bank customer might have spare warehouse space that will provide the solution?  Collage will be exploring this possibility.

The bank and the project team is optimistic that a better site will be found, one that will provide the setting for a more visible and ambitious project to come to fruition. “The message I have given to the team," Brian reports, "is that we are on hold, but we expect and hope it is temporary.” 

How Living Building Challenge Illumines The Principles of Regenerative Design 

In June 2015, Capital Institute’s  Year in the Life project visited First Green Bank  headquarters in Mount Dora, Florida, with Stuart Cowan, principal of Autopoiesis. Stuart is  a consultant to Seattle’s renowned Bullitt Center, the first commercial building in the world to achieve Living Building certification. The Living Building Challenge™ is a building certification program whose rigorous standards are defined by seven performance categories called “petals”:  Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity and Beauty—all going well beyond LEED Platinum requirements. Currently only eight buildings worldwide have fully met Living Building standards.  
 
During our June visit Stuart spoke inspiringly about his experience with the Bullitt Center and we later sat down with him, First Green Bank CEO Ken LaRoe, and Brian Walsh, president of The Collage Companies, to talk about the possibility of the bank’s constructing its new Clermont branch to meet Living Building standards.  At the conclusion of our visit Ken had not only committed the bank to the challenge, but was hoping to do so at a cost that would be replicable by others who are also aspired to move beyond LEED.

Just prior to the projects first charrette with its construction collaborators on August 26, we touched base again with Collage’s Brian Walsh.  As he describes the project he slips naturally into the language of regenerative design.  He notes, for example, that this project is to be about architecture and construction operating in [right] relationship to the environment— not just taking from it, but giving back as well. 

One of the critical challenges, says Brian, will be to strive for a balance between “cost” and “cool,” ensuring that the project is built with a reasonable, replicable price tag attached.  “We won’t have an open-ended budget where we are trying to be cool and creative and find a way to pay for it later,” he reports.   This is the very same counsel he offered at our initial meeting, after which both Ken and Stuart began to talk about a not-to-distant future when a Class A office building would be defined, not in terms of marble and so-called prestige material, but in terms of what it gave back to the community and place in which it was situated.

Constructing the building within the bank's targeted budget will be additionally challenging because of the building’s small footprint, Brian reports. “If you have 250,000 square feet you have economies of scale you can work with,” he explains, “but with the 2,500 square foot space we will be working with, everything we do increases the costs significantly.”   

Then there are the constraints of existing building code, which require another kind of balancing act as well as resourcefulness, innovativeness, and adaptability to real world constraints. . “Lake County doesn’t allow composting toilets and purifying your own water system on site,” he reports. “They consider that a health hazard. So one of the imperatives will be to spend time and money talking to the state to get them to understand the broader spectrum of what we are trying to do in creating structures that give back.  That is the yin and yang of regenerative design.  We physically can’t do certain things because code prohibits it. So what do we do about it? The alternative is to lobby for better understanding and for change.”

Another imperative is to get the project done not just at a reasonable cost but also in a reasonable time frame. “We don’t want to do a project that takes four times as long because it is a Living Building,” Brian maintains.  “It won’t help persuade others to do it. “  The hope is the permitting process will begin in early 2016 and that construction will follow shortly thereafter in the second quarter. 

The Living Building challenge is also aligned with two other Regenerative Design principles: it is about intentionally creating the conditions for the edge effect to work its magic, and, out of that condition, the empowered participation of the broadest spectrum of stakeholders in the project.   

Brian notes that two firms Collage has worked with in the past and that have experience with aspects of the Living Building challenge will be involved in the Clermont Branch project   North Carolina-based Little Diversified Architecture Consulting and Florida-based TLC Engineering --and that will be a huge advantage.  

But this project is not going to be one where everyone is operating in his or her comfort zone, in familiar ways, with time-tested collaborators. Indeed, the Living Building Challenge virtually requires bringing building subcontractors into the process in a meaningful way early on.  “Historically these people are not even brought to the table during the design process,” Brain reports, “but as soon as we have a pretty reasonable conceptual direction, we will get them involved to see how we practically do the stuff we think we can do.  We expect them to say to us, ‘this is a great idea but it costs too much money,’ or ‘we can’t get that product to do that’ or, ‘what you are thinking won’t meet the requirements of the Living Building challenge.’”  “There will be a lot of start and stop,” he predicts. .“I anticipate it won’t all be smooth going.”    

But, as noted above, in that “starting and stopping “and “not so smooth” defines the messiness and exhilaration of the edge effect where the most exciting innovation is likely to happen.  Brian seems to think so too:: “I always like collaboration and this project by its very nature will push that to the limit. We will be orchestrating the project together in real time, practicing the music before we perform the piece.”

All team members will participate in the orchestration of honoring community and place— truly regenerating the site both literally and figuratively. The architectural team will be working on the building’s form and the structure and how they serve desired operational and programmatic elements.  The mechanical and electrical engineering firm will be addressing systematic elements—the dynamics of how the building functions and breathes. Civil engineers will need to  be both sensitive to the building site and its grounds and creative about how they enliven it. “In this case it is not like we are out in a forest and cutting down trees,” says Brian. “It is in a suburban environment off a major thoroughfare and the ground is flat.  So we have to figure out how to reenergize the site.”   

Brian admits that perhaps the biggest challenges will be to create a building that becomes a real community asset, that boldly demonstrates that the bank is committed to its regenerative, values-based mission.  Given the projects small footprint, that will not be easy.  One proposal on the table is to create a community garden on the site.   

Could the bank think bigger, and perhaps partner with a not for profit that is closely aligned with its values, creating a second story that would literally house their joint missions above the banks day-to-day operations below and link them in a meaningful way?   This is just one of many ideas we hope First Green Bank will entertain.  It is still early days for this cutting edge project. Stay tuned for the continuing story.

Our first visit to First Green Bank, with Year in the Life mentor Stuart Cowan, exceeded our expectations in every way imaginable. At the conclusion of our visit, CEO Ken LaRoe had committed to building Florida’s first commercial, beyond LEED, Living Building and, hopefully, to building it without a premium over conventional construction.  What's more, we all came away with the seeds of an idea for how the  Living Building Challenge could be a catalyst for the regeneration of the local Central Florida economy

On June 16 and 17th The Year in the Life project paid a visit to First Green Bank with mentor Stuart Cowan. Stuart is founder of the regenerative design consulting firm Autopoiesis and a financial advisor to Seattle's Bullitt Center, the first commercial building in the world to achieve certified Living Building (beyond LEED) status.  We had introduced Ken and Stuart via a phone conversation in late 2014. (You can hear the podcast of that dialog here.)  Ken was intrigued with the idea of the Living Building Challenge, and wanted to learn more about it and Stuart’s approach to regenerative design.

Upon our arrival at First Green Bank’s LEED Platinum Mt. Dora headquarter’s branch we were immediately immersed in a regenerative environment—the solar-paneled building features electric vehicle charging stations in the parking lot, a soaring entryway flanked by carp ponds and a living wall. We were escorted into a meeting room where we sat at a conference table constructed of repurposed wood from a tree felled in the construction of the branch. We looked out over an expanse of native plantings where gekkos warmed themselves in the sunlight.  Everything about this building signaled that First Green was serious about radically redefining what it means to be a bank. 

First Green Bank’s headquarters in Mt Dora is currently only the seventh privately owned commercial building in the state of Florida to achieve LEED Platinum certification.  The branch is sited on over 37,000 square feet of forested open space exceeding LEED standards by almost 400 percent, and features 100 percent recyclable structured steel studs. Reflective roofing materials and vegetation along with light-colored,  permeable paving in the parking lot reduce the heat island effect. The parking area and vegetated roof were constructed to ensure that no storm water runoff carrying nonpoint source pollution escapes into ground water or waterways. LED parking lot lights are designed not to compete with the night sky and with respect for the habits of nocturnal animals.  Rooftop solar provides 17 percent of operating energy.   Free electric charging stations are installed in the parking lot, and carpools and alternative fuel vehicles get preferred parking spaces.   The employee gym houses reclaimed exercise equipment. 

When First Green Bank renovated the interior of its Winter Park Branch to LEED Gold standards, it chose many of the Mt. Dora branch’s green building design enhancements.  In addition, oak trees from the original site were milled and installed as flooring and ceiling accents, and solar power provides for 69 percent of the building’s energy needs.  Green renovations to First Green Bank’s Orlando branch now meet LEED Silver standards.

In December 2014, The Year in the Life project connected Stuart Cowan, a Partner of Autopoiesis LLC, and a provider of strategy, modeling, and sustainable financing for restorative design projects with  Ken La Roe, CEO of First Green Bank, to talk about a challenge Ken was facing.  Ken wanted to support his lending officers in their goal to meet the ambitious targets the bank had set for them in 2015 to increase the bank’s green building loan portfolio.  Stuart thought he could help.  

"It would be really exciting to look practically at what you are doing with your building portfolio, dig in, and just together try to figure out what could these projects be worth in the deepest sense, in the triple bottom line sense,” Stuart said. “How can we begin to solve for the gap between what appraisers can and cannot value today in these projects, versus what that underlying deeper sense of value might be? Can we see if there are bridges to be built to at least acknowledge some of the extra value that green projects are creating?” 

Stuart thought it might be possible to show one of First Green Bank’s real estate development borrowers that by investing a bit more upfront to get, say, that LEED Silver designation, that they would be saving considerably more in the long run.

Stuart wanted to raise the bar further. What if, he wondered, one of First Green Bank’s developers could be persuaded to build a “living building” like Seattle’s Bullitt Building, a building even "greener" than LEED? Stuart had been on the team that helped prove out the longer-term financial value of that ambitious, deeply green commercial building project and he was eager to see other developers across the country replicate the Bullitt model. 

Stuart understood that First Green Bank was not likely to have a lot of projects coming through the door that were designed to be green. “So it will not so much be an underwriting challenge as helping developers who  might be open to tweak their projects,” Stuart mused. “If you are seeing them even a few months before construction, there might still be time to influence the design process and kind of mentor them along.”