A Replicable Path for Living Buildings: The PAE Living Building

The PAE Living Building in Portland is the world's first developer-driven Living Building, a 5-story, office and retail project that proves deep sustainability can pencil out on a commercial budget. Its lessons aren't limited to Oregon. In this session, PAE will translate the building's key strategies (net-positive energy, on-site water reuse, and healthy, low-carbon materials) to California's climate, codes, and challenges, from drought and wildfire smoke to seismic resilience and Title 24. Architects will leave with practical, cost-effective approaches they can apply to their own projects, plus insight into removing the financial, regulatory, and design barriers that keep highly sustainable buildings from getting built.

2 LU's:

1. Learn how to leverage a developer model while creating highly sustainable buildings.
2. Learn about Net Zero Energy and Net Zero Water in a historic downtown core.
3. Understand best practice for resilient design in commercial, urban buildings.
4. Explore the life-cycle carbon of a Living Building.

Speakers:

Claire Maxfield

Principal, Sustainability

Claire Maxfield is a nationally recognized leader in sustainable and regenerative design, with a career built around a simple but hard question: how do we make truly sustainable buildings the norm, not the exception? As leader of PAE's Regenerative Design Group, she works at the intersection of architecture, building systems, and landscape, with deep expertise in façade optimization, thermal comfort, energy and water efficiency, embodied carbon, and green building rating systems.

Claire's project experience runs from the LEED Gold San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Expansion to the Salesforce Transit Center, the largest mass transit development in the West, giving her firsthand insight into what it actually takes to deliver high-performance buildings at very different scales. With a dual background in architecture and environmental studies, she brings a systems-level view to design decisions that too often get treated in isolation.

Claire will draw on this experience to unpack what made this project's Living Building certification achievable and replicable: the design choices, trade-offs, and lessons that other developers and project teams can apply to remove barriers to entry for their own highly sustainable projects.

Marco Alves

Principal

Marco Alves brings 26 years of experience in mechanical systems design to the conversation, the kind of hands-on, in-the-weeds expertise that turns an ambitious sustainability goal into a building that actually works. He has led the mechanical design for numerous energy-efficient and LEED-certified projects, with deep experience in the systems that make deep decarbonization possible.

Marco has applied this expertise across commercial office, laboratory, hospital, educational, and government projects, giving him a close-up view of how the same core strategies can be adapted, and repeated, across very different building types and constraints.

For this session, Marco will get into the mechanical systems that made this Living Building's performance possible and speak candidly to the practical, cost-effective choices other project teams can replicate to bring similarly high-performing systems into their own projects.