The Bullitt Center in Seattle has been called the greenest building in the world. Its developer, Chris Rogers of Point32, credits the Bullitt Foundation, which subscribed to the Living Building Challenge, a paradigm shifting green building process that Rogers says, "goes way beyond LEED."

Living Buildings put in to bricks and mortar (or bio-based materials) the vision that two decades ago the likes of architect Bill McDonough and futurist David Orr spun from beautiful prose in to the first generation of green buildings. The vision was always to design buildings that act like a tree, that are abundant, producing more than taking. How will the Bullitt Center, which embodies those ideals, shift the paradigm in how we build?

"I think would be great if we were the greenest building in the world—for a week," Rogers told the Building with Nature Symposium which is introducing new ideas about building for the future in to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History's rebuilding process. "What we learned can be replicated, but you need to look at local conditions to fit with your climate and culture."

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"We want a building that itself embodies how we can live in the future, in a highly sustainable way," Cleveland Museum of Natural History Director Evalyn Gates explained to 450 attendees the purpose of the museum's Building with Nature symposium, a free and open to the public event at the museum today. "Our experience with the SmartHome showed us that we want a (new) building that cost less to operate and maintain and will inspire all of us about how we live on this planet."

To inspire the museum to reach for the stars, Dr. Gates, an astrophysicist, and GreenCityBlueLake Institute Director David Beach assembled a high wattage panel—from the designer of literally the world's greenest building to the country's foremost experts on energy who figured out how to green the renovation of the Empire State Building. These are big thinkers but also the 'do-ers' -- practitioners who have faced skepticism and long odds and in the end broke new ground for all of us. That list started with Curtis Fentress whose firm is the architect of record for the Museum's proposed redevelopment and addition.

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