Living Building Challenge (LBC)
The Living Building Challenge from the Living Future Institute is a building performance standard that hints towards what harmonodes can look like.
The LBC uses these seven criteria, which it calls "the 7 petals", and which you can read more about on this architect's blog if you want.
- Place
- Water
- Energy
- Health and Happiness
- Materials
- Equity
- Beauty
Consider this (7petals) as another matrix to compliment those in the chart on ecological design principles.
Not harmonodes…
Building standards like LBC, PassiveHaus, and LEED certifications can be applied to any kind of dystopian commercial space to make it less bad. These are not harmonodes.
These are commercial spaces for participating in the activities of your enslavement to money. They only hint at what remaking the world must be.
Harmonodes must be liberatory!
These LBC buildings and spaces don't qualify in that regard.
Food cultivation. Medicine and textile cultivation. Housing. Therapeutic spaces for healing. These must be created, designed into our built environment in ways that "green" commercial buildings don't do.
If "Living Buildings" are not literally eliminating homelessness, healing people with PTSD, and similar such things, then they by default are guilty of the status quo money-worshipping complex of imperialism.
It's important to be explicit and unmistakably clear about what's needed for remaking the world.
Living Buildings as described by LBC are indeed worth mentioning here, but as stated, they only hint towards what civilization will look like.