Seattle's Super-Green Bullitt Center Opened on Earth Day

Yesterday, on Earth Day, Seattle's latest green building celebrated its grand opening: The Bullitt Center, a super-efficient office space at 1501 East Madison Street, was designed to become the world’s largest functioning, commercial Living Building, using an estimated 83 percent less energy than a typical Seattle office building and achieving Net Zero Energy and Net Zero Water.

The building reaches these goals through a variety of systems such as:

• A high performance building envelope.
• A layout designed to optimize natural light, an estimated 82 percent of the Center’s spaces will be lit by natural sunlight.
• Careful coordination with tenants to reduce their “plug loads” by over 75 percent through the use of high-efficiency monitors, copiers, laptops, zero clients and cloud based servers.
• 26-bore, 400 foot-deep geoexchange HVAC system that will harvest energy from the earth to provide efficient heating and cooling.
• Radiant floor system will efficiently heat and cool office spaces.
• 242 KW roof-top photovoltaic array will provide all the net energy needed for the building.
• Rainwater and greywater reclamation systems including a 56,000-gallon cistern to capture rainwater and a constructed wetland to treat greywater.
• Foam flush, composting toilets reduce toilet water consumption by 96 percent.

The west coast engineering firm PAE, which specializes in sustainable design, provided energy modeling, and mechanical and electrical engineering for the building, as well as lighting design services through its Luma Lighting division.

“Everyone at PAE is elated about the completion of this truly significant project,” said Paul Schwer, president of PAE. “The Bullitt Center will pave the way for future Living Building facilities of its size, a movement we feel passionate about and are certain will continue to grow as the industry looks to design more net zero energy and water buildings.”