What if every single act of design made the world a better place? Imagine building projects at all scales that operate as cleanly, beautifully and efficiently as a flower. This is the Living Building Challenge.

The Living Building Challenge™ is the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard. It is a building certification program, advocacy tool and philosophy that defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today and acts to rapidly diminish the gap between current limits and the positive solutions we seek.

Watch as Jason F. McLennan, visionary change agent and creator of the challenge, describes this inspirational new movement.

The Living Building Challenge | David Henderson-Hean & Todd Brooks from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

To be certified under the Challenge, projects must meet a series of ambitious performance requirements over a minimum of 12 months of continuous occupancy.

The Challenge is comprised of seven performance categories called Petals: Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity and Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of twenty Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. This compilation of Imperatives can be applied to almost every conceivable building project, of any scale and any location—be it a new building or an existing structure.

Learn more by downloading the Living Building Challenge Standard 3.0 (PDF) and visiting Living-Future.org.

Featured image is of The Brock Environmental Center in Virginia Beach, VA courtesy Jwallace72 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Jason F. McLennan – Considered one of the most influential individuals in the green building movement today and the recipient of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize, Jason F. McLennan’s work has made a pivotal impact on the shape and direction of green building in the United States and Canada and he is a much sought after presenter and consultant on a wide variety of green building and sustainability topics around the world. McLennan serves as the CEO of the International Living Future Institute – a leading NGO that focuses on the transformation to a world that is socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative. An Ashoka Fellow, Jason is the founder and creator of the Living Building Challenge, widely considered the world’s most progressive and stringent green building program. He is the author of five books; The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, The Dumb Architect’s Guide to Glazing Selection, The Ecological Engineer, Zugunruhe and Transformational Thought.