We design buildings and cities for sustainability, daylight, and durability, yet waste the most sustainable resource of all: intelligence itself.
We usually think “sustainable” means physical stuff like recycled steel or low-emission glass. But what about intelligence? That’s a super sustainable resource we’re totally overlooking. Even ambitious frameworks like the Living Building Challenge, while pushing the boundaries of physical sustainability, underscore a deeper challenge: how we manage and leverage knowledge itself.
For years, we in the building industry, owners, architects, engineers, builders, and suppliers, defined sustainability by the materials we could touch and see: recycled steel, low-emission glass, sustainably harvested wood, and energy use. We spend years pouring our decisions and intelligence into design, meticulously planning every detail, only for that vital knowledge to get lost or become invisible once the physical materials are assembled and the building stands complete and starts to consume valuable resources. In other words, our buildings are not living.
The US Green Building Council (USGBC) and LEED have championed excellent conversations for years. But today, I’m here to declare a new kind of material, one that’s not physical, yet just as vital: intelligence. Knowledge itself is a sustainable resource we must now embrace and protect.
In a previous article, I stated that when buildings fail to offer accessible information, especially in emergencies, it’s not just a technical flaw, but an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) issue. Now, I want to extend that thought.
Just as we’ve valued physical sustainability, we must recognize that intelligence is the new material we need to build truly smart cities and buildings.
I will call it the Intelligence Material.
Kimon Onuma, FAIA
Image source: Unsplash & Pond5
I’ll be presenting these ideas at Greenbuild Los Angeles during the “AI for Sustainable Cities” session. The focus of that session is practical AI implementation, and I’ll be using the “Intelligence Material” concept to frame a sustainability that is foundational to reducing both human and AI hallucinations. This article serves as a companion piece to the presentation and offers background and a foundation for what I’ll share on stage.
This Intelligence Material aligns closely with USGBC’s RISE framework: Readiness & Impact for Sustainable Execution, offering a structured way to evaluate whether AI-powered sustainability solutions are truly impactful, implementable, and scalable. It’s a new layer for the LEED ecosystem, aligning perfectly with the idea of intelligence as a core material in sustainable design, emphasizing Readiness, Impact, and Scalability.
- Readiness: If we treat intelligence as a material, we’re building in readiness.
- Impact: Share that intelligence, and boom, you get impact!
- Scalability: Use secure, open standards, and it’s scalable.
The USGBC has always woven intelligence into its frameworks, but it’s hidden in checklists and narratives. Time to bring it front and center. We need to treat intelligence as a building material, just as important as the physical elements we’ve focused on for so long.
I’ve worked on countless projects and seen this pattern again and again: Decisions get lost in analog formats or digital formats that never make it into operations. Even leading owners, architects, and engineers who have the right materials and systems, but the knowledge didn’t flow. Now, by using open standards and open-source connections, we’ve unlocked that intelligence.
This isn’t just theory. It’s happening right now. In the next article, we’ll dive into the details of how PAE is publicly doing this, so others can follow. And to my fellow professionals, consider this an invitation. It’s time to move beyond talking about smart buildings and actually start building them. Let’s treat knowledge as the material it truly is.
We’ve wasted countless resources because knowledge was siloed or locked away in proprietary formats.
The building had lungs and skin, but no brain. It was alive, but silent. Image source: Wikimedia
A Living Building, But Not Yet Alive
The PAE Living Building in Portland is one of the largest and greenest developer-led buildings in the U.S. It is designed to achieve full Living Building Challenge certification and is Net Zero Energy, Net Zero Water, and Net Zero Carbon, engineered to last 500 years.
But when it opened, something was missing.
The building had lungs and skin; it had a brain that couldn’t quite reach its full potential.
It had sensors, but little memory.
It was alive, but the various systems were not talking to each other.
Most of the intelligence that shaped its award-winning design was trapped in Building Information Models (BIM) with missing information, PDFs, and proprietary building controls and sensors. The engineers who designed the systems couldn’t talk to them in an effective and efficient way. Facility teams were almost flying blind. “Smart” systems didn’t speak to each other in a secure, open, efficient way. It was a stitched-together marvel, but digitally, it was still on the table, waiting for the jolt.
So in 2025, a bold pilot began. Not to redesign the building, but to wake it up. To treat intelligence not as an afterthought, but as a core material to connect everything and bring the building to life. The good news? PAE is injecting it with open standards and connections. This isn’t just talk, it’s happening. The PAE Living Building is becoming alive in ways it never was before.
The PAE Living Building BIM
Bridging the Gap to Reality
Even as we spread the message through conferences and webinars, we faced a familiar reality: most building owners struggled to operationalize their models. From my vantage point in BIM and digital twins, I saw how even the most beautiful models failed to survive the leap into day-to-day operations.
It wasn’t just about connecting systems. It was about foundational gaps, like inconsistent asset naming, inaccessible data, and closed-off platforms.
The term digital twin was everywhere, but often misused. Many so-called twins were just single-vendor dashboards, closed systems that trapped data rather than unlocking it. They mirrored a slice of the building, but couldn’t scale, adapt, or integrate. They were more like digital dead ends.
A true digital twin should be something more:
- A system of systems, dynamic, open, and semantically aligned.
- A platform that grows with the building, not one that locks it in.
- We’ve seen what’s possible when the right intent is in place.
Forward-thinking owners, who were willing to share their data, challenge assumptions, and engage across disciplines, made it real. Not in theory, but in practice. With those partners, we’ve built operational digital twins that are living and scalable.
That was the purpose behind the Interoperable Building Box initiative: to move from one-off pilots to repeatable models. To prove that this doesn’t require unlimited budgets, just shared intent, open standards, and the will to connect.
Actionable Smarts with The Coalition for Smarter Buildings
A few years ago, a diverse group of building industry leaders in automation, controls, mechanical systems, BIM, and more came together out of frustration. They were all dealing with the same fundamental challenge: the existing open protocols and standards in buildings simply didn’t talk to each other. Worse yet, proprietary standards locked owners out of their own data, leaving crucial building intelligence over-controlled and scattered across disconnected systems.
That’s why they formed the Linux Foundation’s Coalition for Smarter Buildings Foundation (C4SB), to break down these silos. Their idea was simple but powerful: create open-source Interoperable Building Box piece of hardware or virtual machine to manage “Connection Profiles” that act like universal translators for smart assets and building automation systems, giving owners their data in many formats, including, charts, graphs, maps, and 3D visualizations of their assets to improve decision making – “That virtual representation of that equipment is red, we better fix or replace it.”.
C4SB is already advancing this shift. Their goal? To turn the Building Industry into a Software-defined Industry on a foundation of secure, open standards. If intelligence is a material, C4SB is building the supply chain.
As part of this mission, C4SB is working with the Linux Foundation, the largest and leading organization for open-source innovation, to make connectivity a real thing in the building industry. The Linux Foundation has transformed industries by sharing information.
To assist in transforming the Building Industry, C4SB organized a “Tiger Team”, including national labs, architects, engineers, BIM experts, ASHRAE, and other standards bodies. Together, collaboratively, we are establishing the repeatable processes that all Asset Owners can use to gain transformative improvements to their mission outcomes.
This isn’t just technical jargon. For owners, it means options. For operators, less hassle. For startups, a chance to build smarter tools faster, all powered by open, interoperable systems.
Want to know what happened next? In a follow-up article, we walk through exactly how we transformed the PAE building from a silent structure into a living digital twin, with open tools, real-time data, and a testbed for semantic interoperability.
The PAE Living Building: It’s Alive! With the help of PAE, C4SB, Linux Foundation Asset Leadership Network, Onuma System, Skycentrics, PADI, and more. Image of live sensors data flowing from PAE Systems through Skycentrics and into the cloudBIM.
For the full story of how this concept became real inside one of the most sustainable buildings in the U.S., read the companion piece: From Living Building to Living Digital Twin: Inside the PAE Pilot.
