Living Building Challenge wins the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge
International Living Future Institute receives "Socially-Responsible Design's Highest Award" for its commitment to transforming the built environment.
 
 
[New York, 6 June 2012]- The Living Building Challenge™, the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard, has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the prestigious annual design science competition named "Socially-Responsible Design's Highest Award" by Metropolis Magazine. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a holistic, systems-based solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.
 
The Living Building Challenge is administered by the International Living Future Institute and was created by Institute CEO, Jason F. McLennan. It calls for the creation of building projects at all scales (from single-room renovations to whole communities) that operate as cleanly, beautifully and efficiently as nature's architecture. To achieve certification, a project must meet 20 rigorous Imperatives (including net-zero energy, waste and water) over a minimum of 12 months of continuous occupancy.  The Institute certified the first projects to fully achieve the Living Building Challenge in October 2010, proving that the Challenge is attainable now, using existing technology. Approximately 140 more projects, spread across eight countries and twenty-eight U.S. states, are currently in progress. Living Building Challenge Ambassadors, skilled volunteers dedicated to advancing the Challenge in their home communities, are active in twenty-one countries.
 
“Winning the Buckminster Fuller Prize is a huge honor for us,” says McLennan. “When we first launched the Living Building Challenge in late 2006, we really went out on a limb. We didn't know how the building industry would respond to such an ambitious, performance-based building standard. Less than six years later, our Challenge is changing the way buildings worldwide are created, renovated and operated. Our current focus is bringing the Challenge up to the community and city scales, and the recognition offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute with this award will help accelerate the international adoption of the strategies embodied by the Living Building Challenge at all scales. 
 
After a rigorous vetting process by the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s multi-disciplinary review team, which included an in-depth interview followed by a review by a distinguished jury, the Living Building Challenge was chosen from a pool of 122 of entries from around the world.
 
In their official statement, the jurors noted that the “Living Building Challenge successfully shows how humans and their built environment can be harmoniously, benignly integrated within ecosystems. Above all, its rigorous standards and daringly innovative, revolutionary approach to building are already having a considerable impact on the thinking of designers and architects around the world, influencing all levels of design and technological approaches, radically pushing forward the field.”
 
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is the premier global competition recognizing initiatives that take a comprehensive, anticipatory, design approach to radically advance human well being and the health of our planet’s ecosystems. The Challenge is a program of The Buckminster Fuller Institute, which aims to deeply influence the ascendance of a new generation of design-science pioneers who are leading the creation of an abundant and restorative world economy that benefits all humanity.
 

 
About International Living Future Institute:
 
The Institute is dedicated to leading a transformation toward a civilization that is socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. It acts as a hub for visionary programs including the Living Building Challenge and Cascadia Green Building Council and Ecotone Publishing. The Institute moves across scales, offering global strategies for lasting sustainability, partnering with local communities to create grounded and relevant solutions and reaching out to individuals to unleash their imagination and innovation.
 
www.livingbuildingchallenge.org  www.cascadiagbc.org  www.ecotonedesign.com