LBC Projects Get Head Start on WELL Certification

There is no shortage of different tools, initiatives, and certification programs available to guide building professionals in the design and construction of healthy, sustainable buildings. Rather than creating competition, however, organizations like International Living Future Institute (ILFI) are creating partnerships and collaborating with other initiatives to transform the built environment. Recent examples of this include the relaunch of ILFI’s Reveal label to align with Architecture 2030’s new Zero Tool, and the organization’s just-announced partnership with New Buildings Institute (NBI) to streamline the tracking and certification of zero-energy (ZE) buildings.

In the same spirit, ILFI has partnered with International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) to create a new crosswalk document explaining how WELL “features” and Living Building Challenge “imperatives” align.

The goal, as with similar crosswalk documents describing equivalencies between rating systems (see New Report Helps Leverage the Overlap between WELL and LEED), is to simplify the certification process by reducing the amount of documentation project teams must do to demonstrate compliance.

Project teams pursuing both WELL and LBC certification can achieve up to ten WELL features by meeting the requirements of certain LBC imperatives. Conversely, teams can use certain WELL features to contribute toward compliance with the requirements of 13 LBC imperatives.   

Though WELL and LBC intersect in several places, the guide also illustrates that there are many areas in which they do not––emphasizing why the two rating systems should be used in combination rather than interchangeably. Though LBC incorporates a number of requirements related to human health, it leaves out many things a project could do to achieve more in this area. There are more than 100 features focused on human health and wellbeing in the WELL Standard—a certified Living Building would earn only ten of these. As a system focused solely on the health of the occupant, WELL complements the more holistic sustainability concerns of systems like LBC and LEED.

For more information:

International Living Future Institute (ILFI)
living-future.org