What is the Bullitt Center?
This building manifests the vision of Denis Hayes, president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation. It was his tenacious advocacy for the idea of a living building, and his conviction that the mission of the Bullitt Foundation would be served well through this large commitment of the Foundation’s resources to create a model for a completely new kind of building, one aimed at catalyzing a radical shift in our thinking about what’s possible for buildings of the 21st Century. The Bullitt Foundation chose to pursue the rigorous Living Building Challenge™(LBC) because it requires net-zero energy, which drove the entire design process. Achieving net-zero for a six-story commercial office building in Seattle means achieving energy efficiency improvements of upwards of 75% compared to a typical commercial office building (Energy Star score of 50), or 62% better than Seattle’s energy code. Other LBC requirements include net zero water and net zero waste.
How does the building perform?
The building is designed to use 16 kBtu/sf/hr - that's 82% less than the 2010 Seattle Energy Code minimum:
The design strategies employed in the Bullitt Center are relatively common in modern buildings, and use readily available technology. However, only a handful of buildings have fully integrated the state-of-the-art technologies and high-performance design strategies employed in the Bullitt Center, and none are as large and as ambitious in their performance goals.
This is an extremely ambitious goal, all the more for a building aimed to be cost-competitive with other Class A commercial office buildings in Seattle. The Bullitt Center is a work-in-progress, an experiment whose results are just beginning to emerge.
Read the full case study for more details on this evolving project.
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