This Isn’t a Dashboard, It’s a Nervous System.
- Intelligence Itself as the Most Sustainable Material
For decades, our industry has been chasing “Smart”: Smart buildings, Smart cities, yet most of what we’ve built has been the opposite. Systems marketed as intelligent are often intentionally disconnected, built on closed, proprietary controls that refuse to talk to each other except through expensive intermediaries. Owners, architects, and engineers have all accepted this as normal, many without realizing that their own data has been locked away from them.
This is the quiet failure we’re fixing.
In my last article, I wrote that intelligence itself may be the most sustainable material we have. The PAE Living Building in Portland is where that idea becomes real, a building that doesn’t just operate sustainably, but learns, adapts, and communicates intelligently.
Like a human body, the structure is the foundation, but the real intelligence lives in the networks that circulate data and decisions. When those systems connect; energy, air, water, light, and cost the building comes alive.
For too long, the industry has delivered dead artifacts; PDFs, BIMs, and dashboards that freeze the moment they’re published. The real shift comes when we stop treating intelligence as a lost process and start building living data ecosystems where information flows freely between systems, humans, and machines.
I’ve seen firsthand how smart buildings learns to think, and why that shift from control to connection matters more than ever.
Image courtesy of PAE
- Challenge: From Vision to Verification
The challenge we raised, that knowledge and meaning are the forgotten materials of sustainability, meets its test here. The PAE team didn’t just build a regenerative building (net-positive energy/water, resilience, and positive impact per the Living Building Challenge); they asked what happens when the building’s intelligence becomes regenerative, too.
That’s what makes the PAE Living Building pilot matter. It bridges the gap between vision and verification, from the idea of “smart” to the reality of living. PAE took on this pilot to answer a question they’d already faced firsthand: How can a Living Building remain truly alive after handover? Their goal wasn’t just to prove a concept, but to make their own building continuously smarter, more connected, and more resilient.
Image courtesy of PAE
Image courtesy of PAE – Packed with systems that enable zero waste to go back to the city system
Image courtesy of PAE
Image courtesy of PAE: Battery Room
The PAE Living Building: Is Alive! With the help of PAE, C4SB, Linux Foundation, Asset Leadership Network, Onuma System, SkyCentrics, and more. Image of live sensor data flowing from PAE Systems through SkyCentrics.
- Living Building: Opening the Black Box
The PAE Living Building (PLB) in Portland, Oregon, is a landmark in sustainable design. Completed in 2022 and certified under the Living Building Challenge, ZGF Architects designed and PAE Engineers delivered it to be net-positive, and deeply integrated with nature and community.
But the story doesn’t end with occupancy or certification.
What makes this story remarkable isn’t the technology. It’s that an owner and engineer were willing to confront the uncomfortable truth that even their high-performing building had intelligence silos. Most projects hide these challenges. PAE made them visible, and solvable.
In 2025, the PLB is entering a bold new phase, not as a finished product, but as a living platform for experimentation and an exemplar for the industry. It now serves as a living testbed; an agile, open-source transformation, a dynamic system-of-systems representation of the building, continuously updated by real-world data and capable of intelligent interaction.
And this evolution is happening fast.
This project takes the theory of Intelligence as a Material off the page and into the real world, not as metaphor, but as a working model for how knowledge, design intent, and data can stay alive inside a building.
The PAE BIM imported to the ONUMA CloudBIM, with sensor data
- From Occupancy to Interoperability
Turning a Building into a Platform
The PAE pilot began not with a blank slate but a living building, already occupied, already generating data from PV inverters, meters, and water heaters. The goal wasn’t to rip and replace, but to connect and contextualize.
In early 2025, PAE partnered with the Coalition for Smarter Buildings (C4SB), the Asset Leadership Network, ONUMA, Skycentrics, Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) and others under the Linux Foundation to turn the PAE Living Building into an open-source, grid-interactive testbed. Using the Interoperable Building Box (IBB) and shared connection processes, they’re linking real devices, BIM, and AI services through a common data language.
The project follows the “do-ocracy” mindset of the Linux Foundation: short cycles, real results, open documentation. Instead of issuing specs, engineers write code. Instead of buying apps, they build connections. Within weeks, the team was mapping devices to BIM zones, and then streaming BACnet and Modbus data, the testing AI agents that can answer natural-language questions like, “How is the east wing’s power balance today?”
Standards groups from buildingSMART to ASHRAE and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are watching, and connecting. The message is clear: this isn’t about replacing standards, but making them interoperable in a living ecosystem.
- From Competing Standards to Connected Intelligence
We’re not here to replace any standard; we’re here to show how they can all connect. Alongside pioneers like buildingSMART and the BIM standards of IFC and COBie, we’re bringing in ASHRAE’s 223P, Brick Schema, Project Haystack, RealEstateCore, and the Semantic Building Group from the Coalition for Smarter Buildings. We’re also aligning with the Open Geospatial Consortium to bridge GIS and BIM. And we’re challenging the limitations of file-based BIM with cloudBIM, because the BIM world is evolving toward cloud-native, continuous data, not static files frozen in time.
If there’s a standard or protocol out there, we’re not excluding it. We’re asking, “Where do you plug in?” This is about building a system of systems, where each piece adds value. We’re not challenging your existence; we’re inviting you to join a larger ecosystem. Let’s connect the dots together.
And within just weeks, the team had already:
- Enabled BIM in the cloud for live transactions using cloudBIM
- Extracted live BACnet and Modbus data using lightweight Python scripts
- Mapped device readings to building zones and systems using BIM and Revit models
- Integrated AI-driven workflows to now enable the building to surface insights and respond to natural-language queries like, ‘How is the east wing’s power balance today?
- Discussions about BIM Execution plans, and standards for intelligent objects
This is not a demo. It’s a real building, in production, with real results.
We’ve started by making one building intelligent, but this is just the beginning. Now we’re inviting all of you, owners, industry players, and open-source communities, to step in. If you’re willing to share your tools, your data, and your expertise, we want you with us. This isn’t for those who want to stay closed off and build new silos. It’s for those who see the value in a shared, open ecosystem. Whether you’re a forward-thinking company, a research lab, or a standards body, there’s a place for you here.
The PAE Living Building: Is Alive! With the help of PAE, C4SB, Linux Foundation, Asset Leadership Network, Onuma System, SkyCentrics, and more. Image of live sensor data flowing from PAE Systems through SkyCentrics and into the cloudBIM.
The cellular Super SkyBox connects to legacy commercial building machines (Modbus, BACNet) to become the data pipe for the applications described in this article. The SkyBox (in the middle) allows commercial building machines (Modbus, BACnet) to be OpenADR and CTA-2045 EcoPort certified for Grid-Incentives, and EcoPort modules can provide instant communication for Grid-Services such as Demand Response or Real-Time Price Response
- From Marketing Term to Measurable Intelligence
There’s a lot of noise in the industry right now, claims of “digital twins” that are really single-vendor apps, locked in proprietary ecosystems. But a digital twin is a system of systems. It’s not a single model, but a living, interoperable representation that reflects and coordinates the behavior of real-world assets across domains.
That’s only possible through open connections, the kind being developed under the C4SB and Linux Foundation IBB initiative.
At the heart of this initiative are connection processes that enable machine- and human-readable templates that define how building systems can communicate in standard, modular, vendor-neutral ways. They are the missing semantic layer that lets components plug and play, and buildings to interoperate at scale.
One example comes directly from the PAE Living Building itself. When the building’s battery charge drops below 15%, that single data signal from SkyCentrics now triggers a workflow through BIMgenie, automatically creating a digital work order that alerts the technician responsible for the energy system. Instead of waiting for someone to notice, the building detects the condition and initiates the response. It’s a simple but powerful use case: turning a live signal into intelligent action. This is how a digital twin evolves, from one data point at a time, expanding as new use cases are identified.
Just as important as the technical architecture is the contracting model that supports it. This pilot did not begin with a rigid spec or a predetermined list of apps. Instead, it launched with an agile services that allowed rapid iteration, phased progress, and involvement from the building owner and their engineers at every step. PAE engineers weren’t just recipients of a solution; they became active participants, learning to use the system, contribute data mappings, and even build their own tools and scripts to explore new use cases.
This is a critical departure from traditional procurement, where owners often chase a mythical “single solution” and issue RFPs based on outdated assumptions. These approaches misfire, prioritizing apps over architecture, features over flexibility, and branding over interoperability.
These are not just glossy dashboards.
- What you’re seeing here isn’t a vendor-branded interface or a proprietary control screen.
- Every connection shown is open, transparent, and replicable, built from shared standards, not locked code.
- The intelligence lives in the connections, not the app.
- That’s the quiet revolution: we’re proving that buildings can think without being owned by the software that measures them.
This isn’t about making every tool open source, it’s about making every connection open.
The protocols, schemas, and processes that link systems are based on open standards, not locked APIs. That means any compliant tool, proprietary or open source, can connect, exchange data, and participate. What matters isn’t who owns the app, but whether the owner controls the intelligence.
This pilot leads the way by demonstrating what’s actually possible when digital twins are treated as open platforms, not product lines. Agile agreements and shared learning enable faster results, deeper insights, and long-term resilience.
The PAE Living Building is showing that the future isn’t about buying a digital twin. It’s about building one together, piece by interoperable piece, in the spirit of a Living Building and Living Digital Twin.
Call to Action: Leadership for the Living Digital Era
The technology is ready. The connections exist. What’s missing now is leadership and governance.
Owners must start asking the right questions: Who owns our data? Who defines our standards? — and demand transparency and interoperability from every project.
Consultants and vendors must lead responsibly, guiding the industry toward open collaboration, not deeper silos.
This is where digital governance meets digital intelligence.
The future won’t be built by those who control the data, but by those who share it.
The PAE Living Building shows what’s possible when courage, curiosity, and openness replace control, complexity, and isolation.
Introductory webinar recording from the Asset Leadership Network of the PAE Living Building Project
- Where Intelligence Becomes Awareness
When Buildings Start to Think
Like a body developing a nervous system, the PAE Living Building is beginning to sense itself. Its structure is the skeleton, its systems are the organs, and now the data networks have become the nerves and brain that allow perception, memory, and response.
One example comes directly from the building itself. When its battery charge drops below 15%, that single signal from SkyCentrics triggers a workflow through BIMgenie, automatically creating a digital work order and alerting the technician responsible. The building doesn’t wait to be checked, it recognizes a need and acts.
This is the same principle that keeps a human body alive: if the brain couldn’t feel hunger in the stomach, it wouldn’t know to eat. A living building must feel its own conditions, understand them, and respond.
As more systems connect, this awareness deepens. The building begins to plan ahead, anticipating demand the way the brain anticipates hunger or weather. When AI is layered atop these open connections, the building starts to reason: analyzing live data for anomalies, predicting maintenance needs, supporting natural-language interactions, and even coordinating with grid or emergency systems.
This is where digital twins come alive, not just mirroring the physical world but augmenting it. The system no longer just reports what’s happening; it begins to suggest what should happen next, and why.
In that moment, the building stops being a static box and starts behaving like an intelligent being.
The C4SB Semantic Building and Digital Twin working group together with ONUMA, PNNL, and CDV Systems, developed workflows to extract and connect the Semantic Models of systems and specifications from BIM into apps
- Outcomes and Next Steps
Early Proof, Expanding Potential
Just a few months into the pilot, we’re already seeing tangible results:
- https://vimeo.com/1132290661/41296e2939?fl=pl&fe=shEnergy Orchestration functionality, early testing of PV-to-water-heater control logic enables solar energy to be stored and used more intelligently.
- Grid-interactive functionality, early testing of the Battery Energy Storage System being made available as a grid-resource through Open ADR 2.0b signals. .
- A living testbed, live integration of solar, metering, and plug-load data mapped spatially in ONUMA, with SkyCentrics data, creating a transparent, shareable model for future projects.
- Open-source momentum, upcoming releases will include connection processes, control logic, and supporting documentation so others can replicate and extend the approach.
- Breaking the Industry’s Silos
A Call to Action
The PAE Living Building was designed to inspire. Now it’s proving what comes after certification: a building that learns, adapts, and shares. It’s a blueprint for an open, scalable future, where intelligence itself becomes a renewable resource.
Now imagine scaling that intelligence, beyond a single building, to neighborhoods, campuses, and cities. Think of an entire neighborhood or a city where buildings aren’t just smart individually but are interconnected, sharing intelligence with each other and with the world around them. That’s the vision we’re exploring—not just a single living building, but a living, breathing city. And the more we surface that intelligence, the faster the next building, and the next city, can follow that model.
If you’re watching from the sidelines, this is your invitation to join the growing movement proving that open, intelligent buildings are not theoretical, they’re inevitable.
Links
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahzn-voAP3w
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAE_Living_Building
- https://www.pae-engineers.com/about/pae-living-building
- https://www.zgf.com/work/4194-pae-engineers-the-pae-living-building
