‘A wave of the future’: Catalyst Building earns prestigious architectural award for innovation

The bar was set high: build “the smartest building ever built.”

That’s what Dean Allen, CEO of McKinstry, told a crowd of a people would happen on an unlikely parcel perched above a highly active rail bed and along East Sprague Avenue in a light-industrial area east of downtown Spokane. 

It was Aug. 8, 2018, and the first, ceremonial shovelfuls of dirt had just been turned to begin construction of the 150,000-square-foot, ultra-high-tech Catalyst Building. 

Two years later, it seems that ambitious aim may actually have been approached, if not attained, at least according to the American Institute of Architects, which last week awarded the project an Innovation Award in the Holistic Design category last week. 

In granting the prestigious prize for “the exemplary use and implementation of innovative technologies and progressive practices,” the AIA cited the Catalyst Building’s novel use of wood in place of steel and concrete, its energy efficiency, its relatively low cost and the “timeless elegance” of its design. 

Kyle Elderhorst, the project’s lead designer, said the project’s ability to excel in so many different – and potentially competing – arenas was an outcome of the shared vision of the entities that collaborated from the very beginning of the project. 

There was McKinstry, a Seattle-based firm that focuses on designing, building and operating energy-efficient buildings and which has a Spokane office. There was Katerra, a California-based construction company that operates a cross-laminated timber plant in Spokane Valley. There was Elderhort’s firm, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based Michael Green Architecture. And there was Avista Corp., the Spokane-based utility.

Avista owned the 5.5-acre parcel the Catalyst now partially occupies and had long planned to use it as the home to a new substation, according to Heather Rosentrater, Avista’s senior vice president of energy delivery and shared services. 

But as plans came together to land the south end of the University Gateway Bridge on the parcel, the utility changed course and decided to develop the property instead. 

The plan, initially, was to create a biosciences hub housed in a six-story, 140,000-square-foot multiuse building. 

But, according to Rosentrater, Avista’s then-CEO Scott Morris also envisioned the project as an opportunity to create “the five smartest blocks in the world,” a kind of real-world laboratory for testing high-tech energy-production, energy-storage and efficient-building techniques that would help the utility meet its goals of becoming carbon neutral by 2027 and carbon free by 2045. 

For the company to eliminate carbon, Rosentrater said, Avista will “need to partner with our customers to not just work on energy-efficiency – how much energy is used – but also when energy is used.” 

Timing is key, she said, because much of the power grid exists to meet demand during peak usage periods, like when people get home from work, cook dinner, turn on the lights and otherwise use large amounts of electricity all at once. 

If the company can find ways to store renewable energy efficiently during off-peak hours, such as wind power produced overnight, it can reduce the cost of expanding and maintaining its infrastructure.

Also key, of course, is constructing and designing buildings in ways that require them to consume less energy with passive strategies for heating and cooling. 

An unusual opportunity

By coordinating from the beginning with Katerra to employ laminated-wood products and with McKinstry to employ highly efficient building systems, Avista was able to break down barriers that often exist between a utility and its users. 

That means the Catalyst building includes thermal storage and will soon include battery storage that allows it to hold Avista’s energy and deploy it as efficiently as possible. 

With that foundation laid, Elderhorst said he and his team of architects had an unusual opportunity to work on a building where environmental sustainability was baked into the project from the beginning. 

Working with typical developers, he said, the high cost of such elements are often stripped out. But in this case, he said, “Our client was also our mechanical engineer.”

Not only that, he said, but the premise of the project was to create the most forward-thinking, environmentally friendly building possible. 

Another important ground rule was that the building include Katerra’s prefabricated and novel wood products. His firm and Katerra worked together, Elderhorst said, “to come up with ideas around how we can make the construction really efficient, how we can get better performance at the end of the day. So a lot of the decisions we made were under those umbrellas.” 

One such decision was to use two-story tall prefabricated cross-laminated wood for the walls. That allowed for fast installation and an efficient way to seal the building that meant it “far exceeded” standards for passive houses. 

While all of these high-tech and sustainable flourishes do raise the price of construction, the AIA lauded the building for its cost-efficiency, noting the “five-story, high-performing building was delivered for less than $250 per square foot.” 

The building will house both a range of Eastern Washington University programs and space for private companies, making it what Elderhorst calls an “incubator hub” where “industry and academic folks mix on their way to their classroom or office.” 

The future

And Avista has more planned for the Eco-District, as it calls the site where the Catalyst sits. 

The utility recently completed construction of the adjacent Scott Morris Center for Energy Innovation, which includes office space and also houses the centralized heating, cooling and electrical system for the existing and future buildings of the Eco-District.

The center is also envisioned as a place where Avista will partner with EWU and other institutions to test and study energy technology. 

“There’s a whole bunch of layers of learning opportunity that this enables for us,” Rosentrater said. 

Asked whether his company’s vision of the “smartest building in the world” had been realized, Scot Keith, communications manager with McKinstry, said, “I think it’s a work in progress, where we continue to learn new things from the operation of the building everyday. But we’re encouraged by what we’re seeing.” 

As for the AIA award, Elderhorst said “being recognized by a very large architectural institution, a very prominent institution, for the boundaries we are pushing” is a “big deal.” 

But he said the lessons of the Catalyst extend well beyond the site on the south landing of the University Gateway Bridge. 

With housing costs skyrocketing and the effects of climate change setting in, Elderhorst said, “We’re going to have no choice but to address these issues, and we see this building as a cornerstone for how we would address these issues going forward. … I think it’s a wave of the future for sure. How far in the future is that? I’m not quite sure.”