Living Building Challenge 3.0

The Living Building Challenge is an attempt to dramatically raise the bar from a paradigm of doing less harm to one in which we view our role as steward and co-creator of a true Living Future. The Challenge defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today and acts to rapidly diminish the gap between current limits and the end-game positive solutions we seek. The Challenge aims to transform how we think about every single act of design and construction as an opportunity to positively impact the greater community of life and the cultural fabric of our human communities.

The Living Building Challenge was the 2012 winner of the Buckminster Fuller Prize, the top award in the world for socially responsible design. The Challenge is successful because it satisfies our left brain craving for order and thresholds and our right brain intuition that the focus needs to be on our relationship and understanding of the whole of life.

As such the program is a philosophy first, an advocacy tool second and a certification program third. Within the larger Living Future Challenge framework that covers the creation of all human artifacts and edifices, the Living Building Challenge focuses on the largest creations of humanity, its buildings. It is in essence a unified tool for transformative thought, allowing us to envision a future that is Socially Just, Culturally Rich and Ecologically Restorative.