Ecotone’s fall 2020 release Regenerative Retrofit: California’s First Living Building is out now! Check out this Trim Tab post to learn more about Arch Nexus’ journey to retrofit their Sacramento office. And, to take an in-depth look at the Block Project, read Kim Sherman’s story about hosting a Block Home in her backyard.

Two years ago, I was in the plenary session audience at the 2017 Living Future unConference. This conference is one of my favorite places to be each year, and having read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate the year before, I was excited for the opportunity to hear her deliver the morning keynote address. Little did I know that before that presentation, I would experience what would become another in a series of transformative moments in my career.

For those that haven’t had the opportunity to attend Living Future, there is a wonderful moment before each keynote address when everyone gathers together in a big tent, so to speak, and are given a little something more than you expected. Returning attendees know it’s coming, yet it provides inevitable delight through the discovery of learning year after year.

To whoever came up with the idea of 15 Minutes of Brilliance, a short presentation acting as a prelude or warm-up act for the headliner: thank you. It is through those carefully-crafted, brief moments of learning that I have been given access to ideas that were new to me, such as Pollinator Pathways providing ecological transit corridors through cities (Sarah Bergman), I have seen community permaculture in action in the form of the Beacon Hill Food Forest (Jackie Cramer), and I have been enlightened by new solutions to old problems, such as the notion of Urban Lumber, which considers the city as the next realm for forest stewardship (David Barmon, Fiddlehead LLC). What is powerful about these 15 minutes is that they shine a spotlight on an individual and their passion project. It is inspiring to see people in their element, sharing their story.

Flashing back to May 2017, a few months before this particular unConference, we had moved into a regenerated office in our Sacramento location, Arch|Nexus SAC. A year later, this building would become California’s first Living Building, notably the world’s first achieved through adaptive reuse of an existing building rather than new construction. I had a lot on my mind at the time as we were amidst our Performance Period. For those that have engaged in such an endeavor, you can appreciate the pressure cooker that we were in; nobody wants to come up short while pursuing the Living Building Challenge. Now imagine that your organization was the architect, owner, and operator of said endeavor. We had a lot on the line.

And then it happened. The Friday morning 15 Minutes of Brilliance session began and Rex Hohlbein and Jenn LaFreniere, the two leaders of BLOCK Architects, took the stage. If you want an idea of what this impactful presentation was like, you can check out their TEDxSeattle presentation. Rex and Jenn shared their very personal and astounding journey of bridging from simply being worried about homelessness in Seattle to doing something about it. By creating a constellation of organizations that, together, were collaborating on a solution for their community, Facing Homelessness, The BLOCK Project, and BLOCK Architects demonstrated that architecture was a tool that could solve this problem.

That was a powerful realization. As architects, we often try to tackle societal problems with our tool of choice, buildings, when really what is needed is people-driven solutions. But in this particular case, it is the absence of shelter that actually defines the state of homelessness. Any responsible solution would require skills outside the realm of architecture in order to generate durable results. Jenn and Rex saw through this complexity by choosing to help create a series of organizations which collaboratively leverage art, social media, social science, and architecture – together, all at the same time, to produce change.

I realized I was witnessing something truly unique: the answer to what had moments before seemed to be an unsolvable problem. Within minutes, the question of how Arch Nexus could help formed in my mind. I put a bookmark on this chapter of LF17 and waited for an opportunity to act to present itself. It came a little over a year later.

As I was preparing for a company-wide retreat, I considered some of the challenges that face our business: recruiting and retention, quality management, and access to meaningful experience for our younger staff. A good portion of any architectural firm’s production force has yet to achieve mastery of the profession (if that can ever truly be had). I remember when I was newly-licensed and struggled to understand what it was that I needed to draw. Ultimately this led me to design and build my own home – I, like many architects, craved the practical experience associated with building. What a crazy risk to take, especially in consideration of the market escalation that was taking place in the mid-2000s! But I survived and felt like an architect at the end of that endeavor. Reflecting back on that experience, the answer to the question of how we could connect with The BLOCK Project finally hit me.

What exists at the intersection of quality and inexperience? What exists at the intersection of Nexus’ people-driven values and our desire to increase access to meaningful experience for our staff? What exists at the intersection of our existing tools and processes and the need to help solve problems within the communities we serve?

For us, the answer is Nexus Builds. At our retreat, this nascent idea was introduced. Our Associates were asked if they would be willing to turn the idea into reality, our Principals were asked if they would give the Associates the latitude needed for leadership growth, and our staff were asked if they would support the program with their volunteering time and effort. The result has been incredible.

The Co-Chairs of Nexus Builds, Jeff Tuft (Salt Lake City) and Shannon Bolick (Sacramento), have worked closely with all of our Associates to create a robust program that is now the action arm of our firm’s philanthropic efforts. By coordinating our charitable giving and our volunteer efforts into this focused program, they have created an imageable and impactful solution that allows us to swing the hammer of architecture, literally and figuratively, to help the communities in which we work.

We have elected to start in Seattle as a thank you to Rex and Jenn and their team at BLOCK Architects. We are thrilled to have begun construction on a BLOCK home and, in partnership with the outstanding firms of Miller Hull and Herrera, are helping to ensure that the project achieves Living Certification under the Living Building Challenge (LBC).

The benefits of this work are massive: as a result, every single employee in our organization will have LBC experience by the end of 2019, and we will be the only organization in the world to have designed, owned, operated, and built an LBC project. Nexus Builds is now providing real-world construction experience to our staff in pursuit of increased professional mastery. This in turn should help to shore up recruitment and retention (though we would love to see our competitors rise to the call and match our efforts).

What’s more, is that one more person currently experiencing homelessness will have a house by the end of the year, and another city block in Seattle will receive a massive infusion of connection and social equity.All other benefits are secondary to this, the primary purpose of the BLOCK Project.

The process of determining our 2020 Nexus Builds recipient begins this month. As we speak, Co-Chairs Jeff and Shannon are publishing an internal ‘call for proposals’ to our staff in order to begin the search for next year’s community partner. For our second iteration, we will bring the program home – most likely to Sacramento. The Camp Fire that recently devastated Paradise, California created a smoke plume that spread far and wide, leaving Sacramento in an apocalyptic state of air quality for several weeks. It devastated the natural and built environment and left many homeless. Climate change-induced homelessness is an issue intensely local to California – our team understands the important of creating temporary housing to alleviate this problem for our communities. We know, too, that this issue is not unique; climate change-induced homelessness will have global undertones worthy of all of our immediate attention and action.

At Arch Nexus, we are people-driven in pursuit of meaningful experience. You normally don’t get to have them both every day, but through the collaborative spirit of Nexus Builds, we are doing just that.

The Arch Nexus design firm’s Sacramento office (Arch|Nexus SAC) is not only the world’s first Living Building to be an adaptive reuse of an existing building, but also the first to receive LBC 3.0 certification, the first Living Building in California, the first Living Building to be owned and operated by a design firm, and the first LEED v4 Double-Platinum building (BD+C & O+M) on the planet.

In 2008, just after the onset of the Great Recession, we realized that the best thing we could do for our business was to move from leasing space to owning it. Real estate deals were abundant, and we were fortunate to be able to find an existing building to adaptively reuse that was a little larger than we needed for a reasonable price. Ultimately, we created Arch|Nexus SLC (aka the Architectural Nexus Design Center) which earned LEED v3 BD+C Platinum in 2011.

The decision to own our own building rather than lease was based on several factors. Owning increases our assets and builds share value. It also stabilizes long-term costs as compared to fluctuating (and increasing) rent costs. In addition to these direct financial advantages, owning also allows us an opportunity to create a physical manifestation of our core values.

The process of owning and operating our own building was a crucible for sure. We experienced several months of service calls and comfort issues. The requisite systems training and building commissioning were weak at best, and we were left with the realization that it was up to us to get the building operating properly.

In the end, the result was transformative. The process of designing and building a high-performance office that earns LEED Platinum but wasn’t performing up to our expectations was actually an enormous learning opportunity. We began to tackle the operational challenges one by one. Through this process, we discovered that the greatest disparity between predicted and actual performance was with the occupants themselves. With some effort, the building and the occupants were on the same page and the project earned LEED v3 O+M Platinum in 2014. Since then our Energy Star score has continued to climb through thoughtful occupant engagement strategies.

Key Element #1

As operations in our Salt Lake City office fell into alignment with its design, a few additional key elements fell into place that would set the stage for Arch|Nexus SAC. First, there was a client tour right after we moved in that went awry when someone asked about water reuse. We hadn’t addressed it at all and I had no good answer beyond a lack of understanding as to the status of regulation on the topic. Another local design firm had dipped their foot into water reuse, so to speak, and the State Legislature had brought down the hammer by capping the size of rainwater storage systems throughout the State of Utah as a result.

In order to both better understand and answer the water reuse question, I attended a seminar at GreenBuild 2011 on the topic. The group that was working on the Oregon Sustainability Center presented a transformative document they had put together entitled Achieving Water Independence in Buildings. This document included the Oregon Roadmap, a graphic description of water reuse paths and the regulatory obstacles, or lack thereof, for each.

This was the spark that ignited my imagination. While I knew of the International Living Future Institute and the Living Building Challenge before, this is when I began to understand regenerative design. I put together a small group of like-minded individuals to create the Utah Roadmap and in 2012 I became an Ambassador for ILFI. I like to think that this is when I started the second half of my career.

Key Element #2

Still in the midst of the Great Recession, Anova Architects, an incredible group of folks with deep roots in Sacramento, the Central Valley, and throughout the foothills of the Sierra joined our family through a merger in 2011. We quickly got to know each other and then we patiently waited for the economy in California’s Central Valley to turn around. We were largely buoyed up by large federal projects at the time, but as those ended our experience of the Recession deepened. It was during this time that I became the President of Arch Nexus in 2014.

As President, my first task was to address our identity and our culture. This process was introspective at the individual and firm level. As a company that developed by merger, Arch Nexus was a diverse partnership of 20+ Principals in a variety of markets that, like most business enterprises, hadn’t really come together around a common purpose other than the business itself. Over the course of several retreats, we rebranded the firm, launched a new graphic identity and website, and developed an understanding of our common goals. Through a series of leadership meetings, we identified three core values that we believe are the purpose for our business:

Arch Nexus Values:

1. Inspiration
2. Stewardship
3. Regeneration

By early 2015 we were doing well financially, had plenty of backlog in both offices, and were growing again. Coincidentally our lease space in Sacramento was down to a handful of open workstations due to modest growth. As an employee-owned company, we had been looking for strategies to reinvest in ourselves in order to build share value without focusing on artificial growth through mergers and acquisitions.

All of this was occurring within the context of global climate change and the final key element that made Arch|Nexus SAC possible presented itself. The Spring of 2015 represented the point at which the nation was becoming aware of the dire situation in California. Our collective consciousness was beginning to recognize just how much things had changed as a result of the water and energy decisions we were making as a society. Decisions that we, as architects, were fueling as an industry.

Sensing that the real estate market in Sacramento was starting to bounce back, I asked our firm to do something audacious. I suggested that the timing was right to buy another building for us to regenerate and operate. But this time, we needed to do something truly bold; LEED Double-Platinum was no longer enough. I suggested that the following three factors guide our decision-making on the topic:

1. Capacity
2. Equity
3. Identity

By increasing our presence in Sacramento, by providing equivalent resources and amenities to those provided at Arch|Nexus SLC, and by creating another physical manifestation of our stated values, we were poised to break barriers. As a firm, we decided to pursue ILFI’s Living Building Challenge certification with Zero Energy certification as our minimum expectation.

Achieving Living Building Certification is a testament to the grit that makes us who we are at Arch Nexus. The road was fraught with challenges and many people rose to the occasion. This story, however, is about how we made the opportunity for those heroics to happen, not the heroes themselves.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir [the] blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our [progeny] are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. 

-Daniel Burham

Architectural Nexus is a multi-disciplinary, people-driven design firm practicing throughout the western United States. This focus on people rather than buildings is manifest through projects that not only work well, but also inspire those who are in and around them to be more active stewards and to regenerate our world.