Innovation-July-August-2023

Third Space Commons, built with near-zero embodied carbon, is now a living data collector for sustainable buildings. P hoto : W endy D P hotography

W hen a team of 60 construct a building using a near net-zero carbon process, they knew what they were doing—conceptually. After all, the group, UBC's first green building design team called Third Quadrant Design (TQD), won top prizes in their first two eco-friendly build concepts entered in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition in 2020 and 2021. Then, in a 2022 competition, they moved from conception to construction to build a zero-embodied carbon building on UBC’s Vancouver campus. “We came up with this vision of this really sustainable building on campus with all of these amazing goals and we thought: we want to change the industry. We're going to make this happen,” said team co-captain Agustina Flores Pitton, a civil engineering student at UBC. University of British Columbia (UBC) students set out to design and “But once we actually got to the construction phase, we realized there's a reason why buildings aren't built like this, even if research and investigation is done into more sustainable methods.” They persevered by finding creative solutions to finish the project and, in April 2023, TQD unveiled Third Space Commons, a near-zero embodied carbon teaching and learning space. The 2,400-square-foot wood-frame building at UBC is one of Canada's first institutional spaces to achieve such low carbon emissions during construction.

I N N O V A T I O N

J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 3

2 7