Green by design

NRU
Juoly 11, 2018
Rob Jowett

York Region is officially home to Canada’s greenest building.
The Bill Fisch Forest Stewardship and Education Centre is the first building in Canada, and the 21st worldwide, to receive Living Building Challenge certification. It is considered the most rigorous sustainability standard in the world.

The 370 m2 single-storey building replaces an older facility built in the 1940s. Considered a living laboratory, the building is used to provide sustainability education programming to the public and serves as a training site for regional staff. The centre is located just off Highway 48 and south of Vivian Road in the Municipality of Whitchurch-Stouffville.

“It’s very much a fit with the regional forest. It’s very much a fit in terms of innovative thinking about innovative design and sustainability,” York Region natural heritage and forestry manager Ian Buchanan told NRU. “That perfect fit of a living building within a living forest is just a tremendous opportunity for York Region… to be able to show what could be possible.”

The building has attracted a lot of attention for its approach sustainable development, says DIALOG principal Craig Applegath. The centre was designed by a development team led by DIALOG.

“People from all over the world are calling [Buchanan] and saying, ‘can we see your building?’ He wanted the greenest building in Canada and it’s… one of the greenest buildings in the world.”

The centre is constructed out of cross-laminated timber. It has solar panels on the roof and an internal well and rainwater collection system to achieve net zero energy and water use. It makes use of strategically placed windows to take advantage of the sunlight and provide fresh air to users, while strong insulation further increases its energy efficiency. The materials and site design mirror the surrounding environment.

The Living Building Challenge certification by the International Living Future Institute sets a goal for buildings to be self-sufficient and regenerative. It requires that buildings have net positive water and energy use, be built on brownfield or greenfield land, retain natural elements of the site, and be built with safe and environmentally friendly materials. The institute keeps a “red list” of 22 completely banned materials such as asbestos and cadmium.

“A living building is one that is very much rooted in place and operates in harmony with all of the natural systems, the ecosystem, and also the human community within which it’s located,” says institute vice president Kathleen Smith. She says the challenge compares buildings to flowers because a flower is intrinsically connected to its surrounding environment and has to be completely self-sufficient.

The Living Building Challenge certification has seven “petals,” or categories of requirements. The petals contain a total of 20 imperatives that are all needed to achieve certification, rather than a checklist of requirements such as what is found in LEED and BREEAM certifications. How those imperatives are achieved is up to the development team.

“All of the requirements are performance-based,” says Smith. “We’re not telling you how to do it, but rather telling you the level of performance to meet, and then it’s up to the design team and project team to get there based on the circumstances of the project and the climate and the location and the program and the people.”

Another difference between the Living Building Challenge and other certification programs is the way achievement of the requirements is determined. With the challenge, actual performance is measured over a 12-month period of a building’s operation rather than through anticipated performance.

Applegath says the red list was the hardest part of the challenge, since so many of the chemicals on the list are contained in most products.

“You have to call up the manufacturer and say, ‘do you have any material… that is not covered in [banned substances]?’”

He says he would eventually consider trying to achieve Living Building Challenge certification again, but for now he wants to apply what he has learned from completing the centre.

“I think half of the purpose of this is to teach those that are sponsoring the building and then those that are designing it all about what’s going on in the industry. That’s why it’s called a challenge.”

Buchanan says he agrees, and adds that the region has learned as much as the development team.

“I think the real takeaway is the lessons learned from having built this first in Canada living building itself. The region has learned so much about improvements in performance of buildings.”