A true story about decomposing silos, recomposing intelligence, and what’s coming to Vegas in 2026.
What happens when a “living building” is alive in every way except its intelligence?
The PAE Living Building in Portland is one of the most energy-efficient, forward-looking projects in the world. But, like so many modern buildings, its operational data lived in silos, glued inside proprietary dashboards, hidden behind vendor systems, and inaccessible to the engineers and owners who need it.
To explain what happened, toy blocks are used as a metaphor. This is a true story of how a coalition decomposed the glue, recomposed the digital twin, and made an open-control playbook for buildings and cities.
What happens when intelligence, trapped in a living building, is discovered? Armed with open source blocks and a cloud full of heroes, it gets decomposed and recomposed for the future.
At the center of the narrative, the Coalition for Smarter Buildings – a project series of the Linux Foundation – takes on the biggest villain: Over Control.
Scene 1, The Living Building… Trapped
The PAE Living Building stands proudly on a Portland street. It is a model of low energy use and sustainable design.
But far away, in a bunker, a handful of vendor dashboards quietly hoard the building’s intelligence. Solar, battery, utility, and elevator data all flow there, out of the owner’s sight.
Scene 2, From the Cloud, a Coalition Descends
A cloud appears above the building.
The Coalition for Smarter Buildings (C4SB), underpinning modern interoperability, breaks the over-control without breaking the building. The group of owners, engineers, integrators, open-source advocates, and a penguin (symbolizing the Linux & open-source ecosystem) are on a mission.
Scene 3, One Box. One Cable. A New Path Opens.
Inside the control room, the coalition does not rip anything out; instead, it places a small box emitting blinking rainbow-colored lights to serve as the conductor. This blinking rainbow box connects to the building’s existing systems.
Speaking both on-prem BACnet and cloud-native APIs, the blinking rainbow box creates an open path for the data without replacing the building controls.
Scene 4, Decompose the Glue. Free the Data.
With a safe, open path in place, the coalition decomposes the existing digital twin.
Without affecting the physical building, the over-controlled digital version, siloed in systems and proprietary dashboards, are being decomposed, freeing the PV arrays, battery systems, elevator controls, and utility interfaces that are fused together in vendor glue.
Piece by piece, the glue of over-control is rerouted, and the signals move to the cloud and back to the owner.
Scene 5, Recompose: The Open-Control Graph
Once the pieces are free, the next step is understanding how they connect.
The team builds a graph model and a semantic map showing relationships among the PV system, battery storage, the electric utility, and elevator load in the PAE Living Building.
This graph is guided by emerging standards like ASHRAE 223P, which help systems talk in a common language.
The graph becomes a blueprint for recomposing the digital twin, this time with open studs rather than glue.
Scene 6, Intelligence Starts to Flow
Now the recomposed systems start to show their colors.
Solar panels feed the battery.
The battery interacts with the grid.
And for the first time, on one open dashboard, information about the building is aggregated:
- PV output (green)
- Battery state of charge (fuchsia)
- Utility draw (orange)
- Elevator demand (red)
When battery levels drop below 15%, an automatic work order is triggered, sending this information to a technician’s phone, making the digital twin come to life.
And here’s the twist:
When data was locked in silos, humans made things up, and AI hallucinated because it lacked access to data. Now that the Coalition has freed the data, AI doesn’t daydream.
It knows.
Scene 7: Viva Las Vegas
The coalition will present this at AHR Expo 2026 in Las Vegas with three days of free education hosted by AutomatedBuildings.com.
Learn these repeatable patterns for buildings, campuses, and cities:
A: Decomposing the silos.
B: Recomposing the intelligence.C: Freeing the digital twin.
Scene 8: From One Building to Every City
The coalition started with a simple but high-impact loop: PV → battery → utility → load.
The open-control pathway created serves as a template for dozens of other systems — HVAC, IAQ, lighting, occupancy, metering, and resilience systems — all waiting to be decomposed and recomposed.
The PAE Living Building is the prototype technical foundation for intelligence in all buildings.
Join the Coalition
Join Here to Use the Easy Path for the Digital Twin Maze
A GitHub repository is being populated with examples, diagrams, and sample models.
Decompose. Recompose. Open-Control.
A true story based on the PAE Living Building.
Media Sponsor: AutomatedBuildings.com
Directed by: PAE
Produced by: Coalition for Smarter Buildings
Open Source by: Linux Foundation
Governance: Asset Leadership Network
Disclaimers
No physical buildings were harmed in the making of this digital twin.
Only the glue in the data was broken.
And thanks to that, the physical and digital are finally starting to align.
While every block in this story clicks together like LEGO®, this movie was not produced, approved, or funded by The LEGO Group.
Join the Coalition for Smarter Buildings. Whether plastic or digital, there are many building blocks in the world, and connectivity works best when they all snap together.
This is not a pitch for the next LEGO Movie.
Officially.
Unofficially… the storyboard is on GitHub, fully forkable, remixable, and ready for Hollywood.
Graphical Content Created Using:
• ChatGPT
• Sora
• Gemini
• Nano Banana
