Eco-Laboratory Concept Living Building

This could just be one of the most innovative sustainable designs you'll see all year. Here's the background: a team from Weber Thompson designed this building for the Cascadia Natural Talent Design Competition put on by the Emerging Green Builders of the USGBC. They won the Cascadia competition and moved on to compete against about 15 other regional winners from around the country. They won there, too, and "Eco-Laboratory" was announced as the winner of the 2008 Natural Talent Design Competition at Greenbuild. Eco-Laboratory is a theoretical design set in Seattle with affordable and market-rate residential housing, a job training center, homeless shelter, hygiene station, and public farmer's market.

这将是你今年看到的的最具创新性的可持续设计之一。这是来自Weber Thompson 的设计团队为Cascadia Natural Talent Design Competition 设计的一栋建筑，Cascadia Natural Talent Design Competition 是由美国绿色建筑委员会下属的Emerging Green Builders举办的。

建在西雅图的“生态实验室”是一项理论设计，这是一个多功能建筑，它包括了一些不太昂贵的居民住房，一个职业培训中心，流浪汉之家，卫生站以及公共农夫市场。

Aesthetically speaking, Eco-Laboratory is quite slick, but the innovative symbiosis of the systems, I believe, earned them a grand prize at Greenbuild. You can enlarge the models above to see the energy (left), ventilation (center), and water (right) systems specifics.

Eco-Laboratory includes a rainwater collection system; hydroponic garden to grown food for the community; biological wastewater treatment system to convert black water to greywater and potable water; earth tubes to funnel clean, natural air into the building through underground ducts; vertical axis wind turbines and solar panels for on-site green energy; and hydrogen fuel cells powered by methane, a byproduct of the wastewater treatment system.