This home was one of the first in Oregon to permit rainwater for drinking. By pioneering a potable rainwater innovation, the owners and the design/build team helped spur Portland to become an early adopter of a city-wide rainwater harvesting code in 2004. The specialty designer on this project was landscape architect Pat Lando who himself has gone on to pioneer many advanced strategies for treating stormwater and recycling graywater and blackwater.
The Bertschi School Living Science wing is an award-winning building completed in 2011, which includes a small classroom, science lab and ethnobotanical garden. It was the first building certified under the Living Building Challenge V2.0, considered to be the most stringent green building certification in the world. The LBC’s Net-Zero Water imperative requires on-site supply, treatment and reuse of all the building’s water needs. They met this in part by installing an innovative rainwater harvesting system that uses filtration and sanitation to treat water for potable use by the school’s staff and students.