For decades, a dilapidated eyesore sat on Phipps’ lush urban campus. Where others may have torn the building down, the public garden saw an exciting challenge—if they transformed it into one of the greenest buildings in the world, it would prove that any building can become green and could showcase to the garden’s half a million annual guests learn that they are beautiful and comfortable places to live, learn, work and play.
In 2019, Phipps opened an adaptive reuse of the original building as the Exhibit Staging Center (ESC) with a dynamic, modernized design and the ambitious goal of achieving three of the world’s most rigorous building standards: Living Building Challenge, LEED® and WELL Platinum. The former dilapidated 1960s windowless public works building now showcases the latest green building technology, transforming a degraded space on a former brownfield into a place dedicated to the well-being of its occupants and visitors, the site’s ecology and the habitat of native species. The net-positive ESC serves to demonstrate that with the right priorities, even the least healthy spaces can become ones that enhance the health of people and the ecosystem in which they are nested.
