Salt Lake City’s Architectural Nexus was also honored by Engineering News-Record (ENR) for a project it built in Sacramento, California. The company’s new office in the California capital, dubbed Arch Nexus SAC, received the magazine’s Best of the Best Green Project award.
Architectural Nexus bought a dilapidated downtown Sacramento building and turned it into a sustainable facility that helped revitalize its neighborhood.
“In aspiring to create the first structure in California to meet the Living Building Challenge — and become one of only a handful of such projects around the globe — the team behind the Sacramento offices for Architectural Nexus confronted a steep learning curve. Yet among all the project participants, only net-positive water systems designer 2020 Engineering had worked on a living building before,” ENR editors said about the project.
The Living Building Challenge is a worldwide certification process by the International Living Future Institute to encourage the repurposing of old structures to sustainable facilities. If certified, Architectural Nexus’ project will become the world’s first reuse of an existing building to achieve the Living Building Challenge.
To rapidly get up to speed, the team came together at a “level of integrated and collaborative design that was far higher on this project than any other that we’ve ever done,” said Brian Cassil, principal with Architectural Nexus. “The contractor, engineers and architects were there from the very beginning, from the time the land was purchased, and we met onsite before pencil went to paper. All stakeholders were there to vet ideas, brainstorm and look out at the far horizon for challenges that we may incur.”
At 8,200 square feet, the project was dwarfed by some of the other contenders in the Green Project category. But its lack of size didn’t deter judges from pointing out how much the project moves the needle forward on sustainable construction. One ENR judge said that “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.”