The PAE Living Building: Developer-Led, Nature-Inspired

The PAE Living Building: Developer-Led, Nature-Inspired explores what it took to create the world’s largest for-profit commercial Living Building. Author Mary Adam Thomas walks readers through each step of this audacious journey, blending technical details with first-person accounts from the developers, engineers, designers, builders, and others who helped bring the 500-year PAE Living Building to Portland, Oregon. 

The book begins with an introduction to PAE, including its groundbreaking work in sustainable engineering design and its desire to plant a regenerative seed in downtown Portland for its new headquarters. Subsequent chapters delve into the process of selecting the team to undertake such a project and then examine how those talented professionals collaborated to accomplish the Living Building Challenge’s seven performance area Petals. 

A mix of narrative descriptions and anecdotal recollections help tell the full story of the PAE Living Building, including the complex strategies employed to achieve its many notable features: a profitable pro forma, net positive energy and water, seismic resilience, minimal embodied and operational carbon, a historically complementary design, an innovative mass timber structure, a unique energy partnership that delivers solar power to a local affordable housing community, and more.  

Like the structure it celebrates, The PAE Living Building: Developer-Led, Nature-Inspired is a valuable resource for building professionals, students, or anyone interested in regenerative built environments that can be economically and ecologically sustainable.