Green Building Award winner

The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) has won the RAIC (Royal Architectural Institute of Canada) Green Building Award. The Vancouver research institute, which is designed to be one of the most sustainable buildings in North America, will receive the Green Building Award at a special ceremony.

The award, given by the RAIC and the Canada Green Building Council, recognises outstanding achievement in buildings that are environmentally responsible and promote the health and wellbeing of users.

The CIRS at the University of British Columbia (UBC) was completed in 2011. The architect is Peter Busby of Perkins and Will, a global architecture firm with offices in Canada. Conceived by Nobel laureate and UBC environmental scientist John Robinson, the CIRS is an internationally recognised research institution whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of sustainable building and urban development.

The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum-certified building houses 200 people from private, public, and non-government organisation sectors who work together to advance innovation and implementation in sustainable technology and building practices.

The 5,675-square-metre structure is one of the few buildings worldwide that is considered regenerative. It achieves net-positive energy, net-zero water, and net-zero carbon in construction and operations.

Pursuing the Living Building Challenge, the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard, the CIRS harvests sunlight, captures waste heat from a nearby building, and exchanges heating and cooling with the ground. It returns 600-megawatt-hours of surplus energy back to campus while removing 170 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

Peter, the architect, originally from Vancouver and now based in San Francisco, said that the award reaffirmed the distinct position that advanced and sustainable design holds in the pantheon of design excellence in Canada.