Last night, the National Ability Center in Park City, Utah hosted a ground breaking ceremony to commemorate the beginning of construction on an expansion of their facilities. The existing Equestrian Center is being expanded to create flexible space for the arena to accommodate a wider array of events. This part of the campus will also include additional meeting, staff, and physical therapy space as well as a parent viewing area. Along with the expanded Equestrian Center, a new Recreation Center will be built. The Recreation Center includes an indoor, conditioned arena that will be able to be adapted for a variety of sports.

The National Ability Center empowers individuals of all abilities by building self-esteem, confidence and lifetime skills through sport, recreation and educational programs. We are proud to be a part of helping further the mission of such an inspirational organization.

We are happy to announce that the first registration for a Living Building in Utah has been made! Community Rebuilds, a nonprofit organization, is endeavoring to construct the first series of Living Buildings in Moab, Utah.

The mission of Community Rebuilds, is to build energy efficient housing as well as provide education on sustainability, and improve the housing conditions of the workforce through an affordable program. As a licensed general contractor in Utah and Colorado, Community Rebuilds constructs affordable and energy efficient straw bale homes, working with and training a dedicated group of student intern volunteers on each home project. These students are young emerging professionals with the desire to participate in an experiential program as they learn how to build low carbon, modern natural buildings. For more information on this amazing program please visit the Community Rebuilds website here.

Wish us luck as we begin this journey together with Community Rebuilds to create the first Living Buildings in Utah!

Last Friday, September 21 was Park(ing) Day 2018, a day when people are encouraged to take back the streets by converting parking spaces into “parklets”. Arch Nexus got involved by building out two locations; one in Sacramento and one in Salt Lake City.

In Salt Lake City, we partnered with the Utah Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects and in Sacramento we were worked with Kitchell Construction, who salvaged the material from one of their construction sites. We even got a visit from Good Day Sacramento while things were getting set up Friday morning! https://gooddaysacramento.cbslocal.com/video/category/spoken-word-good-day/3939131-sac-parking/

Thanks to everyone involved in making this event such a success.

Today, an Arch Nexus team comprised of Kenner Kingston, Peter Moyes, and Patty Karapinar will be conducting a Living Future Symposium in Moab Utah. The event will feature an overview of the Living Building Challenge, along with a case study of Arch Nexus SAC, the first certified Living Building in California. Additionally, participants will be among the first in Utah to be introduced to the Living Community Challenge. This relatively new program applies the regenerative principles of the Living Building Challenge to the community level.

Arch Nexus SAC, the adaptive reuse of a former print shop and warehouse and now home of our Sacramento office has become the first and only LEED Version 4 double Platinum certified project on the planet. This significant achievement was announced by the U.S. Green Building Council at the Green Building Hard Hat Awards hosted by Architectural Nexus, an annual USGBC celebration recognizing key policy leaders who drive forward California’s vision of healthy, efficient and high-performance buildings. 

In 2017 the Arch Nexus SAC team earned LEED Version 4 Platinum certification for New Construction and Major Renovations (LEEDv4 BD+C). This month the project team and building occupants earned LEED Version 4 Platinum certification for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance (LEEDv4 EBOM). Different from LEED for New Construction, LEED EBOM requires teams to demonstrate actual performance by providing utility bills and other documents.

Platinum is the highest certification level in the LEED green building rating system. The current LEEDv4, is appreciably more difficult to achieve than the previous versions of LEED and raises the bar for LEED certification of the design, construction and operation of high performance buildings. “What in the former LEED version 3.0 would have been a LEED Platinum building would now be a LEED Gold building under LEED version 4.0”, says Patty Karapinar, Director of Sustainability at Architectural Nexus. Arch Nexus utilized the new Arc platform for its LEEDv4 EBOM submittal, a state of the art platform for visualizing and comparing the metrics and effectiveness of green building strategies and improvements over time.

The Arch | Nexus SAC Arc Dashboard utilized for tracking and visualizing performance of various sustainable metrics.

Brian Cassil, Director of Communications for Arch Nexus notes that “Through our experience with designing and occupying our own office in Salt Lake City, we knew that occupant engagement would be a critical aspect to achieving the verifiable performance needed for LEED for Exising Buildings and Operations in our Sacramento office. It was to ensure that we achieved our performance goals that we developed and employed the InHABIT platform”. InHABIT is a training platform that Arch Nexus developed in partnership with Sustain3 that “game-ifies” sustainable practices to create a culture of stewardship within an organization. Through use of InHABIT Arch Nexus’s occupants became the high performance occupants needed to keep a high performance building operating as designed. Without engaged occupants, it would be impossible to reach and maintain the highest levels of sustainability possible over the building’s life.

In May of 2018 Arch Nexus SAC became the first Living Building in California to be certified by the International Living Future Institute. Like LEED EBOM, Living Building certification requires proven performance. Arch Nexus President Kenner Kingston comments that “Many LEED buildings under-perform as compared to the optimistic energy models that are generated during design, but the pursuit of performance-based certifications such as Living Building and LEED EBOM help to create a realistic environment in which to test high-performance design ideas. What’s more, they prove that they actually work.”

Arch Nexus prides itself on being a family-friendly organization. We believe that a family-friendly culture is not only good for families, it is also good for business. The balance between family life and business life is an essential part of a sustainable, regenerative business. Our industry is notorious for tight deadlines that can lead to long hours, late nights, high stress, and worker burn-out. For many years, Arch Nexus has espoused a culture of flexible work schedules and work-from-home opportunities to help create a better work/family balance. Time away from work is essential to re-energizing so that people can bring their best and brightest selves to their professional lives.

It is with great pleasure and in the spirit of  family-friendliness and regeneration that we announce a new benefit: Paid Family Leave. In addition to the 12 weeks of employment protected leave time provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Arch Nexus now offers all new mothers 6 weeks of paid maternity leave. Furthermore, all eligible employees at Arch Nexus will receive 2 weeks of paid parental and spousal leave. These benefits are in addition to personal paid time off.

Every person who works at Arch Nexus is highly valued. Our hope is that the benefits and policies such as Paid Family Leave will support family, health, financial security, and a balanced life that will allow employees to thrive at work as well as at home.

In 2015, we set out to find a new space for our growing business in Sacramento. As we sought a location that would provide equitable amenities as compared to our Salt Lake City office, we decided to take the opportunity to do something bold. Our aim was to rehabilitate an existing building by turning it into something that closely aligned with our own core values of inspiration, stewardship, and regeneration. For this cause, we embraced the Living Building Challenge. This challenge has lead us on a journey of discovery that has spanned the past three years. Today, it is with great pleasure that we are able to announce that Arch | Nexus SAC is Living Certified!

This represents the 19th Living Certified project in the world by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). Of those 19, Arch | Nexus SAC is the first Living Certified project in California and the first anywhere that is an adaptive re-use of an existing building. Regarding this accomplishment, Arch Nexus President Kenner Kingston stated, “This building is evidence of how the gap that has evolved between people and nature can be bridged through architecture, rather than divided by it.”

Along the road to certification we encountered many challenges. Some we had anticipated such as the heavy burden of documenting the makeup of the many materials found in the building. Given our experience with occupant engagement we were also aware of the potential challenges that existed in achieving net-positive energy in a high-performance office building dominated by plug loads. Perhaps the most daunting obstacle that the project team envisioned was the imperative to achieve net-positive water in a State dominated by recurring droughts.

There were also a few surprising challenges that we didn’t expect. We didn’t anticipate that an air test to measure particulate matter inside our naturally ventilated building would take place immediately after a series of devastating fires in the region (fueled by climate change). We also didn’t expect to form such a strong partnership with the local utility district; SMUD representatives were present at our very first design charrette and they have been a tremendously valuable partner in making this building a reality.

Through these, and many other experiences, we learned an incredible amount about how to design and operate buildings that are a part of the natural ecosystem. Buildings have, and continue to be, designed, built, and operated in ways that harm our environment. The past couple of decades have seen a gradual trend in design and construction that has moved our industry towards doing less harm, but the idea of making buildings that regenerate the environment and operate as thriving, living entities is something that remains very novel.

Being the first to do anything is not easy. It is our hope that by demonstrating how a Living Certified Building is designed, built, and operated regenerative architecture can move out of the novel and into the norm.

On Friday, April 6th, leaders from Arch Nexus and MarketOne Builders were in attendance at the Best of the Best Awards ceremony to receive the Green Project of the Year Award from Engineering News Record.

In accepting the Green Project of the Year Award, Arch Nexus President Kenner Kingston said, “these teams worked tirelessly for the last three years. This project was first conceived in 2015 and we are thankful to realize this opportunity.” He also added this challenge to the leadership in attendance by asking everyone to “consider the impact that your business has and what you can do to lift your values.”

To read ENR’s full story on Arch | Nexus SAC, please click here.

On Saturday March 17th, The Leonardo unveiled to the public a new exhibit entitled “City Blocks”. This exhibit celebrates some of Salt Lake City’s most iconic architecture built from LEGO bricks. Included in the exhibit are two models created by  Arch Nexus artist Josh Allred: The Huntsman Cancer institute and Temple Square.

The HCI model features all four phases of the treatment and research center and was painstakingly built from  48,000 individual bricks and took 250 hours to complete. On building the model, Josh said “Of course, I loved LEGO as a kid so building this model brought back some nostalgic emotions. Both my Grandmother and Aunt have received treatment at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and I have worked on the design of the facility as a visualization artist over the past decade. I feel a strong connection to the building and it is an honor to have this on display at The Leonardo.”

Of the Temple Square model, LDS Church representative Jake Olmstead said the model is an “outstanding” representation the most iconic LDS architecture.

The exhibit will be open for the next several months. For news coverage of the event please see the following links:

Salt Lake Tribune

Deseret News

KUTV

The latest edition of ENR Magazine spotlights the projects that have been honored with the Best of the Best Awards. The piece written about Arch|Nexus Sac (Best Green Project) highlights the intense level of integrated and collaborative design involved in the process. The article also describes how engagement with building occupants significantly reduced energy consumption. One Best of the Best judge is quoted saying: “we have a lot more to learn for the future from Arch Nexus than any of the other green projects. It sends a message, regardless of its scale, that this can be done in a way that is affordable, achievable and safe. The full article can be read here.