Environmental Communication

ISSN: 1752-4032 (Print) 1752-4040 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/renc20

Architectural Advocacy: The Bullitt Center and

Environmental Design

Julie Homchick Crowe

To cite this article: Julie Homchick Crowe (2020) Architectural Advocacy: The Bullitt
Center and Environmental Design, Environmental Communication, 14:2, 236-254, DOI:
10.1080/17524032.2019.1646667

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1646667

Published online: 19 Aug 2019.

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ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION
2020, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 236–254
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1646667

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Architectural Advocacy: The Bullitt Center and Environmental

Design
Julie Homchick Crowe
Communication Department, Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In order to better understand the intersections of environmental Received 20 September 2018
communication, advocacy and materiality, this project analyzes how Accepted 15 July 2019
Seattle’s Bullitt Center embodies and enacts messages that offer
KEYWORDS
arguments in favor of changing attitudes and behaviors through its Material rhetoric; advocacy;
spatial and material design. Through a rhetorical analysis of the architecture; environmental
building’s design, media coverage of the site, and interviews with the design
designers, the author offers a case study that illuminates the importance
of architecture and materiality in environmental discourse. By
encouraging behavior-change in tenants, shaping industry practices and
standards, persuading manufacturers to reformulate products, and
challenging existing municipal policies, the building reacts to the
environment, humans and policies in ways that underscore its agentic
capacity and its durability as a material environmental argument.
Ultimately the Bullitt Center modifies our understanding of the
persuasive power of architecture and the role of advocacy in campaigns
for sustainability.

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it
be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to
come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they
look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our father did for us.” – John Ruskin (1902)

Introduction
Situated on the border of Seattle’s Capitol Hill and First Hill neighborhoods, the Bullitt Center
opened its doors in April of 2013. Funded primarily by the Bullitt Foundation – a nonprofit organ-
ization committed to sustainability in the Pacific Northwest – the building functions as a 6-story,
52,000 square foot commercial building for small businesses and firms in the area. Beyond its prac-
tical function, though, the Bullitt Center has a larger story and purpose. In meeting the standards of
the Living Building Challenge – a rigorous certification process that requires buildings to put more
energy back into the environment than they take – the designers of the Bullitt Center designed this
space to function as “the greenest office building in the world.” With 575 solar panels, an on-site
wetland, a 56,000 gallon cistern for rain water, and an expected lifespan of 250 years, among
other things, the site is a modern marvel of environmentally-conscious architecture. The Bullitt
Foundation did not create this masterpiece simply for recognition’s sake, though, but in a concerted

CONTACT Julie Homchick Crowe homchick@seattleu.edu Communication Department, Seattle University, 901 12th
Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122, USA
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 237

effort to embody the possibilities of thinking about building design and construction in new, envir-
onmentally-conscious ways.
In this paper, I illustrate how the building not only embodies some of the most impressive
environmental feats in the world of architecture, but more specifically how it does so in a way
that functions as a form of advocacy, ultimately illuminating how the very materiality of this
space physically reacts to and promotes different decision-making among different constituents con-
nected to the Bullitt Center in distinctive ways. Arguments for and about the natural world are inevi-
tably and inherently material ones – the very subjects with which they deal are the oceans, forests,
animals, and more. To understand environmental arguments, one must take what scholars refer to as
an “ecological” approach to criticism, wherein scholars attend to not just proposals for policy or pol-
itical speeches, but to the world around us as well. Such ecologies involve both the built and natural,
emerge from the interrelatedness of things, bodies, and places, and disrupt the traditional notions of
“text” by showing us the dynamic flexibility of rhetoric, language and meaning in and among all
things. In viewing the Bullitt Center from an ecological model with webbed connections between
groups of people, the environment, and its material nature, I illustrate how its animate, reactive
and durable qualities augment our understanding of the persuasive power of architecture and the
forms of advocacy in campaigns for sustainability.

Literature review
Material culture, materiality and the agency of things
Thinking about buildings and architecture as persuasive is not a new pursuit. Scholars have shown us
how architecture, in particular, can be seen not just as an enterprise of creating structures, but as a
form of communication that uses style and design to induce responses and behaviors. In a seminal
Saussurean analysis of the signs inherent in architecture, Hattenhauer (1984) rightly argues how
architecture functions linguistically through not only denotative signs of a site’s utility (e.g. a
door), but also through connotative signs that are interpreted by users as well: “ … architecture is
rhetorical not only in its effect, but in the way it is put together. Like an oratorical discourse, archi-
tecture is structured for maximum rhetorical effectiveness: to communicate the denotation clearly
and the connotation agreeably” (p. 74). Prelli (2006) underscores the rhetorical elements of all
types of material culture – not just the landmark buildings of famous architects – but of the everyday
places and things in our life as well:
Of course, the rhetoric of places also is manifested in the workplace, the home, or other ordinary places since
they, too, are arranged and adorned in ways that redispose and regulate the inclinations of those who dwell
within them. All constructed and designed places can be considered as material embodiments of preferred atti-
tudes, feelings, and valuings. Thus, an important dimension of the rhetoric manifested in display in the sym-
bolic resonance of material places that inclines those who occupy them to experience social meaning from
particular, selectively structured vantage points or perspectives (pp. 13–14).

Both Hattenhauer and Prelli point to the richness of material culture – whether in architectural form
or in the display or objects. The Bullitt Center offers an example that extends what these two authors
identify – how do spaces, particularly ones that are meant to shape behaviors and actions, connote
meaning? Prelli’s attention to the everyday – particularly the workspace – points to the importance of
better understanding sites like the Bullitt Center that we inhabit daily and whose design shapes and
controls our experiences and actions within them, particularly since Prelli’s collection largely focuses
more on the display of objects. In the case of the Bullitt Center, objects surround, react, and dictate in
ways that augment how we can think about their display and presence in such places.
Understanding the rhetorical elements of architecture, though, must further be grounded in the
rich body of work in material culture studies where scholars have explored and contested the reach
and limits of the agency of materiality, of things, and of spaces and places and their ecological inter-
relatedness. In Turkle’s (2007) Evocative Objects, the editor assembles a series of engagements with
238 J. H. CROWE

things, wherein the authors’ “focus is not on the object’s instrumental power … but on the object as a
companion in life experience” (p. 5), reflecting a similar impulse by Iovino and Opperman (2014) to
“shed light on the way bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction” (p. 2). Bennett’s
(2010) attention to “the active role of nonhuman materials in public life,” or “thing-power” as she
calls it (p. 2) anchors much of the work in the last decade in material culture studies. In many
ways, Bennett’s “thing-power” recalls, as she notes (9), Latour’s (2008) actor-network theory,
wherein all of the people and objects of laboratories embody a type of agency that render them
actants in the experiment process, helping us see the ways in which materiality shapes events and
meaning. Scholars have extended this attention to the power of materiality to urban environments
as well, which is particularly salient for this project given the Bullitt Center’s metropolitan location.
Schliephake (2014) in particular, shows us how urban life “is conditioned by the interaction with
nonhuman life forms and agents – interactions that are themselves subject to public debate and cul-
tural imagination” (p. 10). This growing body of research offers useful perspectives for this project in
thinking about the agentic abilities of spaces like the Bullitt Center – by conceiving of such a space as
not dead, inert matter, but instead as, in Bennett’s term, a “vibrant” agent of messaging and change,
we can see the ways in which materiality carries its own meaningful and deeply ecological rhetorical
import. But, importantly, the rhetoric of the Bullitt Center does more than reaffirm these authors’
arguments about materiality. Rather, we see an ecology of signs, things and actions that do not
just exert rhetorical force, but are precisely reactive to their conditions. Maps may act to guide
our feet, but they do not react if we go the wrong way. The Bullitt Center, however, does react –
whether by pushing against old policies to create new ones or shifting the position of the window
blinds in response to the weather, the building senses and lives in ways unlike other spaces. But
at the same time, the building possesses a durability and longevity that makes it unique – part nature,
part built-environment, part-robot and part advocate, the Bullitt Center’s materiality buzzes with a
vibrant multiplicity of meanings and abilities.

Materiality and environmental communication

Our environment at its essence is inescapably material – and as such, the richness of work on materi-
ality and rhetoric has not gone unnoticed by scholars in environmental communication. In 2013,
Environmental Communication ran a special issue on visual communication in environmental dis-
course. The large majority of work featured here specifically looks at two-dimensional represen-
tations of the environment, from the imagery of brochures that promote tourism in Vermont’s
forests (Derrien & Stokowski, 2017) or the place branding of the Blue Mountains in Australia (Porter,
2013) and Alberta, Canada (Takach, 2013), to environmental images and symbols in consumer cul-
ture (Ferrari, 2013), media representations of climate change (Meisner & Takahashi, 2013) and toxic
chemicals (Peeples, 2013). Other scholars have looked at the powerful impact of visuals in localized
contexts specifically, particularly when they are interactive (Herring, VanDyke, Cummins, & Melton,
2017; Schroth, Angel, Sheppard, & Dulic, 2014). We even see scholarship that highlights how visuals
can aid in advocacy work, from the use of images for watershed cleanup (Schwarz, 2013) to the acti-
vist art of the Canary Project (Cozen, 2013). Two-dimensional images function powerfully within the
space of the Bullitt Center as well – without them, visitors could not see the building process in the
wall of photographs in the lobby. And while such flat representations are often signs of the “real”
material (e.g. the actual forests or mountains pictured in the brochures), most exist as abstract ico-
nographs of data or the natural world. With the Bullitt Center, the 2-D visuals function to illuminate
the conception and growth of the building, underscoring its animate and almost-organic nature
which plays out in some of the metaphorical language I focus on later in the analysis.
Other scholars have attended to what we might call three-dimensional rhetoric, or the spaces and
places of environmental communication and action. Scholars in museum studies have offered a var-
iety of ways of thinking about materiality and Brady (2011) shows us how to think about that in con-
nection to environmental communication. In a thoughtful analysis of the representations of the
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 239

indigenous voices and their connections with the environment in US museums like the National
Museum of the American Indian, she illustrates how some museums focus on a contemporary Indi-
genous voice while others utilize a third-person, scientific and historical voice that looks at the past.
And in a critique of the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, DeLuca and Slawter-Volkening (2009) find that
the zoo ambiguously represents nature in a hyperreal space that reinforces historical modes of think-
ing about human dominion over nature. Other scholars focus on the liminal spaces that span both
nature and human-built environments. Wolfe and Russell (2010) illustrate how an exhibit at the
South Carolina Botanical Garden (SCBG) blended nature and art in ways that functions “to blur dis-
tinctions between nature and culture, and disrupt the presuppositions attached to public spaces,
natural spaces, and artistic expression” (p. 242), which echoes some of the work by Zagacki and Gal-
lagher (2009) on the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The authors here illustrate
how the space and objects within this park embody tensions of human/nature intersections, ulti-
mately showing us how such polarities “can function rhetorically to invoke a collective sense of
civic and cultural understanding” (p. 172). The focus on community and shared identity is a large
part of the work done in Clark’s (2004) analysis of American landscapes where he illuminates
how both the natural and built sites of tourism in the US function to create a shared identity and
experience for visitors as well – in particular, his attention to natural sites like Yellowstone illustrates
how when visitors “encounter each wonder of the place as the symbol of a shared identity,” their
differences recede into the background (p. 70). This community-building can be found in other
types of parks, particularly the urban one, as Rosenfield (1989) illustrates in an analysis of the devel-
opment of Central Park as a site of community and civic virtue. Given that the environment is inher-
ently a material artifact, such work on its face might not be surprising – but, like we see in these case
studies and the Bullitt Center, the environment is always entangled in a web of other material objects
and beings. In these cases, it includes the bodies of indigenous voices, shared identities or the hyper-
reality of man-made habitats in zoos, among other things. As we see with the Bullitt Center, the
blending of natural and built environments augment the ways in which we can think about how
such webs of materiality function persuasively.
Other scholars have shown us the ways in which things, bodies, spaces, and places can be used
disruptively as a means of challenging the accepted practices of the industrialized world. Pezzullo
(2004) shows us how environmental discourse can employ a rhetoric of blame in the dramatic
power of toxic tours, a method of activism that focuses on blaming our industrialized and unregu-
lated practices by walking visitors to unsightly locations impacted by corporations. And DeLuca
(1999) shows us how bodies in the Earth First! movement function as embodied forms of environ-
mental protest that encapsulate “arguments challenging the anthropocentric position” of humans
“and implicitly advocate[e] ecocentrism as an alternative” (p. 14). Additionally, Endres, Senda-
Cook, and Cozen’s (2014) piece on the spatial arguments of the PARK(ing) movement, wherein indi-
viduals temporarily transform parking spaces into parks, offers a clear example of how space and
place function argumentatively and how they can offer challenges to taken-for-granted assumptions
about the function and utility of space. Perhaps most significant to the present study, Endres and
Senda-Cook’s (2011) analysis of the rhetoric of place in protests and social movements illuminates
how “bodies, words, and places all interact in rhetoric” through their critical lens that they call “place
in protest” (p. 258). They highlight the multiple ways in which “place functions along with other
rhetorical performances in social movement discourse” (p. 258) through an analysis of climate
change protest (among other things), emphasizing the ways in which the actual site of a protest is
itself a “rhetorical performance that is part of the message of the movement” (p. 258). Such sites
give protest messages particular meaning, often imbuing them with historical or cultural significance
as well as transforming the meaning of particular places. Interestingly, the Bullitt Center inverts this
notion of place – rather than a site becoming imbued with new rhetorical force through human
bodies and protest, the Bullitt Center invites new action and behavior. In the Endres and Senda-
Cook piece, action provides a place with new meaning; in the Bullitt Center, its place and materiality
compels new action.
240 J. H. CROWE

While such research is imperative for better understanding how the public sees and understands
the environment in our increasingly mediated landscape, more attention to the ways in which the
materiality shows us how we can think of, in the words of Rai and Gottschalk-Druschke (2018),
“rhetoric as a three-dimensional, situated force” (p. 1) within environmental communication. It
includes networks of more-than-human things – and while their work attends to fieldwork specifi-
cally, this idea easily extends to the world of architecture and built environments and would help
bridge a gap in discussions about how to connect material culture and arguments of advocacy in
the world of environmental communication. Given that much of the work above underscores the
ephemerality of material rhetoric, what does it look like when you have a spatial argument for the
environment that is built to last for 250 years? With the Bullitt Center, its endurance and durability
is part of the very argument for sustainability. In this sense, the Bullitt Center embodies tensions we
don’t commonly see in environmental rhetoric. It is a materiality that is living in the ways that many
authors note about other things and places (in the sense of both its connection to nature and by its
connection to the Living Building Challenge), but because of its durability, it will outlive by gener-
ations its builders and inhabitants, making it more akin to the mountains and forests than to our-
selves. Zoo animals die, seasons change, nature regenerates, tours end, people disperse. Even as the
legacy of material arguments and events tied to celebrations of nature as well as forms of resistance
and protest often persist, their ephemerality shapes their rhetorical import. While the Bullitt Center
is not immortal, its durability brings a force of permanence to its presence and meaning. As some-
thing both man-made and natural, Haraway (1991) would likely call it a cyborg of sort – designed
and given agency by its very creators. This results in an interesting tension between its durability –
which implies almost a inertness – and the ways in which it acts as a living rhetorical agent. The
uniqueness of this space, then, offers an exceptional case for thinking about environmental advocacy
and the myriad ways in which it exerts persuasive force on other actants. In this project, I further
explore the deliberative, action-inducing elements of material culture by showing the ways in
which it can exist not just as part of an event or movement, but on multiple levels as it animates
and reacts in ways that shape behaviors, industry and public action.

Analysis
The claim of being the “world’s greenest office building” is not mere hyperbole. The builders of the
Bullitt Center have embarked on a green building certification program known as The Living Build-
ing Challenge, an initiative started in 2006 that is much more rigorous than the longer-established
LEED certificates that the public is more familiar with, particularly due to its requirement of build-
ings giving more energy and resources back into the environment than they use. The Living Building
Challenge requires that once a structure has completed a series of benchmarks, it is evaluated on its
use of water, energy, and materials, its contributions to environmental and public health, its ability
to foster citizenship, and its aesthetic beauty. On the homepage of the Bullitt Center’s website,
the authors plainly state that the center’s objective is not to simply create revenue, but instead to:
“… drive change in the marketplace faster and further by showing what’s possible today. The era
of harm reduction, half steps, and lesser evils is behind us. As a society, we need to be bold in
ways that were once unimaginable” (The Bullitt Center, 2018). Lead Architect Jim Hanford from
The Miller Hull Partnership underscored the idea of how the building shows “people what’s poss-
ible” with a hope of changing dialogue (Hanford & Court, 2016). With these goals in mind, the center
has successfully met the Living Building Challenge requirements with the broader hope of effecting
change in nature and the world of built environments.
Approaching the Bullitt Center (Figure 1), one is first struck by the unique roof design which is
composed of 570 photovoltaic SunPower solar panels and is tilted at angle reminiscent of “the flat
mortar boards worn at graduation ceremonies” as a means of maximizing solar exposure (The Bullitt
Center, 2013b, p. 5). The body of the building is light-colored concrete which is overshadowed by the
large number of windows on each floor. Its interior evokes connections between the natural world
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 241

Figure 1. The Bullitt Center. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

and human-built environments through the light-filled spaces mixed of concrete, wood and glass.
The building is Net-Positive in terms of its energy, which is achieved through on-site conservation
and renewable creation of energy at the building to heat, cool and power the space as well as put
energy back into the grid (the building nets about $50,000 annually from selling energy back to
the city). Such an intimate yet progressive design offers several messages to those who encounter
the building. We might stand in awe of it and desire to celebrate humankind’s achievements, but
the building asks for a response that moves beyond appreciation to one that calls for behavior change
and action in multiple ways. While the building could in some senses be conceived of as a rhetorical
place within a social movement in the way that Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) analyze place in pro-
test, the durability of the building makes it function differently. The building is visual, but not icono-
graphic; it is a place, but not one with the kind of pre-existing meaning that sites of history carry; it is
a protest in the sense that it resists older modes of architectural action, but it is not ephemeral in the
way that protests are. Different from other forms of visual, material and advocacy arguments within
environmental communication, the Bullitt Center functions as a durable embodiment and force of
change on multiple audiences, each of which I unpack below.

Changing behavior
Tenants for the Bullitt Center are somewhat harder to come by for a normal office space. There are
no parking spaces – for employees or clients – and there are strict codes on plug, water and bathroom
use. Nonetheless, the Bullitt Center currently has all five of its leasable floors rented to businesses that
embrace the goals of the building. While the architects of the building note that the demands of the
space result in a “self-selecting list of tenants” who share “mission alignment” with the Bullitt
242 J. H. CROWE

Foundation (Hanford & Court, 2016), the building’s design nonetheless reacts to and changes the
behaviors of its tenants so that they behave in ways that promote environmental sustainability.
We can first explore the ways in which the design of the building shapes how visitors and employ-
ees physically – and by extension, mentally – arrive at this location. As anyone familiar with Seattle’s
landscape knows, the city is fraught with hills that often make bicycling to work more than challen-
ging – and the geography combined with the contentious and piecemeal attempts at creating infra-
structure supportive of biking around the city often discourages people from choosing this mode of
transportation. While the Bullitt Center has not eliminated the hilly terrain or streamlined a system
of bike lanes, its design does nonetheless invite this environmentally-friendly mode of commuting
much more than other office spaces. Rather than asking employees to arrive at work and remain
in sweaty business attire, the Bullitt Center has state-of-the-art rain water showers that make the pro-
spect of showering after a long ride easy and the task of biking to work more doable. Workers are
incentivized to bike by the design of the building – they can get exercise, avoid trying to park
(since there is no parking lot on site; only a bike garage and bike racks), eliminate their need for
fuel, and shower once they arrive (Figure 2). If biking is not in the cards for some employees, the
lack of parking still shapes the choices of employees – in nearly eliminating the option of driving
to work, it supports the use of public transit, particularly one of the 21 bus routes within one-half
mile of the building.
However employees arrive at the building, once they are there the day-to-day experience inside
diverges from most other office experiences due to the very design of the building. As a point of con-
trast, the modern-day office building is not usually known for its inspiring design. They generally
close off people from interacting with and sometimes even seeing the outdoors, are commonly lit
by stark fluorescent lights, and present no real sense of regional location. Buchanan (2005) describes
the problems this type of building design can create:

Figure 2. Bike parking garage. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 243

Deep-plan air-conditioned buildings, hermetically sealed with tinted glass skins, suppress any sort of sensual
contact between their occupants and the natural world outside. Such buildings also tend to be isolated from
each other physically and aesthetically, and suppress any form of community life, both within them and in
their surroundings. In alienating people from nature, each other and place, they alienate us also from such
essential aspects of human nature and a sense of rootedness and connection. Thus these commonplace build-
ings, which are almost the contemporary American vernacular, not only mirror but also help entrench the
mind-set that has perpetuated, or at least tolerated, the destruction of the natural world (13).

The Bullitt Center, on the other hand, strives for the opposite effect. As University of Washington
designer Meek (2016) described it, workers in the building should nearly feel like they are outside
when seated at their desks – and they often do given that 80% of the light in the building is naturally-
derived and that the building is naturally-ventilated as well (Figure 3). In blurring the boundaries between
nature and workspace through lighting, space, ventilation and more, the design recalls what Zagacki and
Gallagher refer to as the “inside/outside” (p. 173) fluidity of moving between and among nature and built
environments that allow us to question and inhabit this dichotomy in new ways. These different decisions
in design ultimately change the experiences and thus the behaviors of the tenants there.
On the interior of the building, other habits are encouraged as well through what architects
commonly refer to as “way finding” (Arthur & Passini, 2002). The staircase – often described
as the most beautiful part of the building – is a space that workers are invited to enjoy (Figure
4). Miller Hull listened to Bullitt Foundation President Dennis Hayes closely on this, who really
wanted to make the staircase “irresistible.” The design is simple and natural – the slats of local
fir allow natural light to filter through the three walls of windows that surround the six-story stair-
case. And, by design, most visitors and workers literally forget that there is an elevator buried in
the dark center of the building (which is there primarily for accessibility and moving things like
AV carts), underscoring what Endres and Senda-Cook argue about how materiality “includes
embodied experiences in place” that affect the “feeling of a place” (p. 262). The stairs of the build-
ing invite the visitors to move throughout their workday and minimize the need to use what devel-
opers called “the elevator of shame.” Like the encouragement to bike, the subtle encouragement to

Figure 3. Workspace. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

244 J. H. CROWE

Figure 4. The “Irresistible Stairway”. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

walk up and down the stairs makes workers healthier while decreasing energy use. The encourage-
ment is not merely idealistic, either. A pilot study on health impacts of built environments and the
Bullitt Center showed that 70% of trips from the first to sixth floor were taken via the stairs and
not the elevator, with studies on other commercial office buildings reporting a 17%–23% usage of
stairs (Burpee, Beck, & Meschke, 2014, p. 4). As Hattenhauer (1984) points out, “architecture’s
communications are not totally subjective and open-ended. Rather, architects can predict what
behavior their designs will induce” (p. 73), meaning that in a space like the Bullitt Center the lay-
out and design intentionally reacts to human behavior and persuades people to take different
courses, both physically and ideologically. What’s forgotten, it seems though, that while such
design may enact a progressive environmental ideology, it also enacts an ableist one where indi-
viduals biking to work, showering there, and using stairs (rather than the “shameful” elevator)
are all taken-for-granted experiences for able-bodied workers in this context. Creswell’s (1996)
observation about the intersection of material and ideology is apt here: “Places are duplicitous
in that they cannot be reduced to the concrete or the ‘merely ideology’; rather they display an
uneasy and fluid tension between them” (p. 13).
Beyond idealizing stair use, the nature of the building also encourages other tenant engagement
with their surroundings. Since there is a limit for each tenant on the amount of energy used per the
lease terms, there is a direct incentive to get employees to be mindful of their energy use. In
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 245

traditional office buildings, 20% of energy consumption comes from what are called plug loads,
which refer to the energy taken from computers and other electronics that need electricity. In the
Bullitt Center, however, the plug load comes to 50% of the total energy consumption in the building,
indicating, first, that the energy usage for other things like lighting is dramatically lower in the Bullitt
Center and, secondly, the occupants of the building have a much greater degree of control over how
energy is used since 50% of it goes directly to their electronic devices in the office. As a way to change
plug load behavior, there are regular competitions among leasees for conserving energy, often in the
form of seeing which floor can reduce its plug load use. Tenants will sometimes track individual
device energy usage as well to see where a team can most easily cut back. In this case, the
already-green office building pushes tenants to make more sustainable decisions in their daily elec-
tronic usage. The building in this sense compels them to make better decisions since the building is
doing so much in the direction of environmental consciousness already.
Perhaps most interestingly, the building naturally discourages thoughtless bad habits by position-
ing humans as passive actors. In taking on the actions and traits that we might expect of humans, the
designers commonly use anthropomorphic, anatomical language to describe the building’s design
and actions. Through computer-automated regulation of the building’s levels of comfort and
efficiency, the designers enabled what they refer to as the building’s “neurology” – sometimes
referred to as its “brain” – as a means of regulating both passive and active systems of lighting, heat-
ing, cooling, and its “metabolic systems” (The Bullitt Center, 2013a). In most office buildings,
workers will flip the light switch on when walking into a room or if the sun goes behind a cloud.
Almost certainly, though, when the sun reemerges, those lights will stay on. In the Bullitt Center,
though, this type of energy waste is nearly impossible. Rather than workers manually controlling
these aspects of their work environment, the building does it for them. Automated stainless steel
shades – part of what is referred to as the “skin” of the building (which covers the “bones,” or the
wood, concrete and steel) – sense the movement of the sun and clouds and close or open to adjust
light and temperature (Figure 5). And, “when the building needs to breathe” (The Bullitt Center,
2013a), the windows open automatically. Employees can override what the building does, but the
activity of the building is foregrounded, making the reactions of the worker secondary. The building
in this sense does not persuade employees to make better decisions; but their inaction and passivity
allows them to avoid making wasteful choices. This recalls what Ackerman would describe as the
everyday interactions we have with nonhuman agencies that “percolat[e] well below human aware-
ness” (2018, p. 118). In changing what are commonly instinctual habits like turning on lights, the
building reacts to minimize our wasteful choices, acting as the more-than-human agent that
makes better decisions that we would on our own.
Lastly, there’s a productivity argument latent in the design of the building as well. Workspaces
have a strong psychological impact and when such spaces are over air-conditioned, lit with poor
fluorescent lights and decorated with drab colors, motivation decreases. The Environmental Protec-
tion Agency (2018) has reported that we spend 90% of our time each day inside – and when we are
surrounded by such sterile, non-natural materials, we disengage. But the Bullitt Center’s natural
materials and light makes tenants feel like they are “connected to the outside” when indoors
(Meek, 2016).
Overall, the design of the Bullitt Center creates, in the words of Halloran and Clark (2006), “ …
not just atmosphere but also influence” (p. 142). In borrowing from geographer J.B. Jackson, the
authors unpack the ways in which early American landscape functions rhetorically as it “invites
transformation of one’s sense of self” (p. 142). Similarly with the Bullitt Center, tenants and visitors
are influenced to change their behaviors – wayfinding and design create architectural pressure, but
not of the Foucauldian panopticon type. Rather, the space of the building reinvents how people think
to navigate the often-predictable paths and actions we take in an office building, creating fissures and
disruptions in our taken-for-granted assumptions about how humans arrive at and engage in their
workspaces – and, at the same time, the building’s “neurology” renders itself an actant in its own
right wherein it does not just shape behavior of humans, but it reacts to the environment around it.
246 J. H. CROWE

Figure 5. Automated windows and blinds. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

Changing development
In addition to changing the behaviors and attitudes of the tenants of the building, the site of the Bul-
litt Center also speaks to other developers as well. As Dennis Hayes, CEO of the Bullitt Foundation,
told the Seattle Post Intelligencer, “Once somebody proves something is possible, it becomes think-
able” and, he believes that the site will “help transform the way we build, here and around the world”
(Connelly, 2013). Meek (2016), the lighting expert for the Bullitt Center, echoed this sentiment, call-
ing the Bullitt Center “living proof” that tells developers they can do something similar and that it is
economically viable. He sees it as a way to change the design community as they “blaze a technical
trail” and set new standards for development. Lead architects Hanford and Court (2016) expressed a
similar sentiment remarking that the very fact of the Bullitt Center being “out there in conversation”
makes it something more mainstream that “people have to address.” This language underscores what
Bennett sees as the power of materiality:
… a political act not only disrupts, it disrupts in such a way as to change radically what people can “see”: it par-
titions the sensible; it overthrows the regime of the perceptible. Here again the political gate is opened enough for
nonhumans (dead rats, bottle caps, gadgets, fire, electricity, berries, metal) to slip through, for they also have the
power to startle and provoke a gestalt shift in perception: what was trash becomes things, what was an instrument
becomes a participant, what was foodstuff becomes agent, what was adamantine becomes intensity. We see how
an animal, plant, mineral, or artifact can sometimes catalyze a public, and we might then see how to devise more
effective (experimental) tactics for enhancing or weakening that public (pp. 106–107).
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 247

Bennett’s discussion here of how things can help us “see” is precisely how the Bullitt Center oper-
ates in the landscape of construction and development. The initial conception of the building,
while grand in its aims to become the greenest office space in the world, was not much different
than other speculative builds for offices in terms of its utility. It visibly embodied, though, the
idea that green architecture does not have to come at an excessive cost to the developer and can
have longer term payouts both financially and environmentally given the building’s exponentially
greater durability than traditional buildings. Seeing this, many developers quickly took notice of
the promise of this type of build. Political leaders, including the President of Bulgaria and the
Mayor of Copenhagen, came to tour the Bullitt Center in order to see how such green design
can be realized, and developers from countries around the world have visited as well. The Bullitt
Center breaks apart the myth that net-zero and net-positive energy buildings are too cost-prohi-
bitive to build and instead shows how they are economically viable in ways that, as Bennett
describes, “catalyze a public” (p. 107).
Domestic developers are a harder sell since the short-term gain on such development is not there
in the same way as it is in quick, cheap construction. However, for those developers who are inter-
ested in long-term property holdings, there are strong financial arguments embodied in the Bullitt
Center that show developers how they can ultimately be profitable too – in this sense, these devel-
opers not only “see” the physical manifestation of green building in the Bullitt Center, but they can
“see” the financial bottom line too. Miller Hull, the architecture firm that designed the Bullitt Center,
is currently working with places like Georgia Tech and Eastern Washington University, both of
which are interested in the long-term holding and sustainability of new buildings on their campuses.
Seattle has seen movement in the commercial world of development as well, a harder market to crack
than nonprofits who tend to have longer term plans for their buildings.
In addition to the design and presence of the building, the Bullitt Center openly shares specific
materials and systems used for construction in the hopes that other developers will use them as
an example. Part of the philosophy of the building’s design is to use what the designers call “on-
the-shelf” products, meaning that anyone – contractor or homeowner – should be able to go buy
these very materials themselves at retail outlets. Meek (2016) points out that the Bullitt Center pro-
vides what he calls a “replicable road map for efficiency” in terms of radiant heat design, system inte-
gration, and more. The developers also share their own “As Built” product and materials list on the
Bullitt Center’s website (The Bullitt Center, 2014), sharing with other developers their own time-con-
suming research on products that meet the standards of the Living Building Challenge. To comp-
lement the ability to easily learn about the construction materials within the building’s design, the
building houses a variety of displays showing how it was built and the materials used. In the middle
of the building near the elevator, the mechanical room – a space typically hidden behind a closed
door – sits behind a wall of glass windows so that visitors can see into the belly of the building (Figure
6). The Discovery Commons lobby is both grand and minimalist with its double-floor ceiling height,
concrete floors, and floor-to-ceiling triple-paned windows that let in enough light even on cloudy
days (Figure 7). Within this space, large narrow signs hang from the ceiling and share information
with visitors, each devoted to different topics relevant to the building, including energy, design,
water, materials, and “red list materials” that were prohibited from use by the Living Building Chal-
lenge. In the middle of the lobby, a few simply displays offer visitors the opportunity to see and touch
materials like a coil of wire used in the construction of the building. Opposite the windows, a full wall
of color photographs illustrates the timeline and construction of the building, offering visitors a clear
image of the process of design and construction. As noted above, such displays function in new ways
in the Bullitt Center given that they directly reveal the conception and growth of the building by
showing visitors its materials and documenting the build. These things and visuals underscore the
organic and animate nature of this space. With such transparency, the designers reject a traditional
proprietary attitude about materials and design, and rather encourage open dialogue with the public,
government, and private industries about where these materials are found and how they can be used
most efficiently.
248 J. H. CROWE

Figure 6. The mechanical room. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

With these decisions to operate transparently, the Bullitt Center performs a similar argument to what
we see in Endres, Senda-Cook and Cozen’s analysis of the PARK(ing) project. They note how these
“performances help to reveal that the seemingly fixed normative conception of place/space – that

Figure 7. The “Discovery Commons” lobby. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullitt_center/. ©Bullitt Foundation.

 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 249

urban space has taken-for-granted functions – is really a series of arguments repeated over and over
until an alternate argument is advanced” (p. 128). While the PARK(ing) project differs in its temporality,
it nonetheless disrupts traditional conceptions of what a parking space is and what it should be just in
the same way that standard building practices are disrupted by the Bullitt Center’s embodiment of new
ways of building. The building’s materials, its design and the durability of both allow us to reconceptua-
lize what development can and should be.

Changing industry
While many of these building materials serve as arguments for the ease and efficiency of green build-
ing and products, the designers were not solely attempting to persuade other builders to use similar
standards. The Bullitt Center’s use of materials that meet the Living Building Challenge not only act
to persuade other builders to use these materials, but the Bullitt Center actually persuaded manufac-
turers to make their products differently so that they could meet environmental standards.
Joe David (2016) from Stone 34 Construction Management served as an integral point person
in identifying which building products contained any of the 362 Red List ingredients that would
disqualify a building from meeting the Living Building Challenge requirements. Regulations for
labeling constructions products are generally scant, so David cold-called every manufacturer to
see if he could get access to the ingredient list and see if the product was viable for use or not.
When his team wanted to use a waterproofing product called Fastflash, David called the manufac-
turer, Prosoco, and spoke with the lead chemist Tom Schneider. Schneider let him know that their
product had a phthalate in the formulation, which rendered it ineligible for use since phthalates are
on the Living Building Challenge’s Red List. When David asked if there was another way to make
the product Schneider initially seemed uninterested, but he called David back a week later saying he
would take six months to explore an older formula that was never developed. Four months later,
Schneider had the new product to David. Initially intended to be a one-run production just for the
Bullitt Center, the owners ultimately decided that they liked the performance of the new formula
much better and reformulated the entire line, phthalate-free. Prosoco now promotes their products
in affiliation with the Living Building Challenge and provides for their customers documentation
that “serves as a verification that the products herein listed do not contain intentionally added
chemicals present on the Red List” (Prosoco, 2016). David noted the “power of dialogue” here
in the case of persuasion where simple discussions resulted in a superior product and positive
impact on the environment.
The windows of the Bullitt Center, one of its most distinctive features, have a similar story. Want-
ing the highest grade windows for light and temperature control, the designers hoped to use Schucot
windows from Germany, but because the product was manufactured so far away importing them
would have violated the rules of the Living Building Challenge, which only allows for 25% of building
materials to come from any location (20% or more must come from within 310 miles; 30% or more
must come from within 620 miles; and the remaining 25% must come from within 3,106 miles). A
local window company, Goldfinch Brothers from Everett, WA, took up the challenge of remanufac-
turing a Schucot-like window in their own facilities so that the Bullitt Center could use them. In this
case, we do not see a product transformation in the same was as Prosoco’s Fastflash, but we do see the
development of a new more environmentally-friendly product and the Bullitt Center’s ability to per-
suade and transform a local window market in the Northwest.
In these examples, we can recall Bennett’s discussion of how materials like metal and steel are
often associated with “passivity or a dead thingness” (p. 55) when in fact they carry a vibrancy
capable of more than we assume. While her analysis of the vitality of the “quivering” free atoms
within metal (p. 59) focuses our attention to the life within the material as opposed to the way in
which the materials of the Bullitt Center function as a mode of changing industry, she nonetheless
shows how “metal is always metallurgical, always an alloy of the endeavors of many bodies, always
something worked on by geological, biological, and often human agencies” (p. 60). This ecology of
250 J. H. CROWE

humans and things not only illuminates for us the multitude of actant abilities seemingly mundane
objects can have in our built worlds, but it also speaks to the ways in which humans and materials
interact in the case of the Bullitt Center to create goods and things that are better for the
environment.

Changing policy
While changes at the individual and industry-levels can have a meaningful impact on the environ-
ment, environmentalists by and large argue that change on a policy-level is imperative if we have any
hope of saving our planet. In an analysis of vitalism and spiritualism, Bennett asks, “What would
happen to our thinking about nature if we experienced materialities as actants, and how would
the direction of public policy shift if it attended more carefully to their trajectories and powers?”
(p. 62). While she doesn’t fully answer this question until later in the book, the design and construc-
tion of the Bullitt Center provides a clear case study to explore this question further as its very exist-
ence has shaped tangible policy outcomes.
In the development stage of the Bullitt Center, there was no policy in the state of Washington that
supported net-zero and net-positive buildings despite their benefit to the local environment. The cre-
ation of the Bullitt Center, though, prompted new policy that promotes sustainable design. For
example, when new buildings are constructed in King County, developers are typically required
to pay a new building capacity charge fee for sewage. For the Bullitt Center, though, such a fee served
as a penalty – given that the building never uses the sewer since it treats its own waste, a usage fee for
the sewer created unnecessary costs that would have potentially deterred other developers from try-
ing new sewage design and technology. Gradually, the developers worked with the King County
Department of Waste Water to change county policy by amending the capacity charge code for
net-zero and net-positive buildings so that they would not have to pay a fee for something they
do not use. Additionally, the city did not have a clear path for permitting the building of some envir-
onmentally-conscious systems, like the use of greywater and internal composting systems the build-
ing intended to use. In working with policymakers at the state and local levels, the Bullitt Center
created a precedent for permitting such green systems for future buildings to use (International
Future Living Institute, 2018).
The Bullitt Center is also connected to the Living Building Challenge pilot in the City of Seattle.
Started in 2010, Seattle created the first municipal program in the nation to endorse the Living Build-
ing Challenge, largely by allowing developers to “request additional departures from the Seattle Land
Use Code through Design Review” (City of Seattle, 2018) and The Bullitt Center was one of the first
to participate when it began development in 2011. Given that developers often feel bound by the
restrictions of local municipalities (just as the Bullitt Center encountered with sewage fees), offering
them flexibility in this regard pushes them in the direction of more sustainable construction. As
noted by the initiative, “The Living Building Challenge acts to close the gap between current limits
and ideal solutions” (City of Seattle, 2018). While such policy progress was a good start for this
movement, only two more buildings in Seattle have signed on to the project so things have
moved slowly. To encourage more developers to participate, Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkin has
further invested in this idea by increasing incentives for developers (like allowing them to increase
the height of floors) (Golden, 2018). Ultimately, the Bullitt Center serves as a leader, coaxing others
to follow along as it creates more need for codes better adapted to sustainable architecture. The Liv-
ing Future Institute sees much promise in what the Bullitt Center will accomplish as a political actor
in this sense: “The City will use the lessons learned from the Bullitt Center and a handful of other
projects pursuing Living Building certification to evaluate and revise current codes to achieve higher
building performance.” (International Future Living Institute, 2018). And such policy changes are
not simply about the environment “out there” – rather, building sustainably ultimately connects
back to people. For lead architects Hanford and Court (2016), such policy changes are not just an
important move in terms of environmental protection, but are about social justice as well. Hanford
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 251

remarked, “It’s about guys putting the buildings together” and avoiding “exposure to chemicals that
can have harm.” Such amendments to policy may seem minor, but they ultimately pave the way for
other developers to see net-zero or net-positive buildings as more viable options that are supported
by existing policy. In this sense, the Bullitt Center acts as both the setting for human action and a
foregrounded agent of political change.

Architecture as environmental communication

Arguments for sustainability often get lost in the political chatter that so commonly overwhelm us.
But when people can see with their eyes what is possible, perhaps more can be done. The materials
and architecture of the Bullitt Center embody a message that tells people to make changes – tenants,
developers, chemists, and policy makers alike – and it shows them that these changes are achievable.
Zagacki and Gallagher illustrate how the Museum Park “presents a blueprint for how citizens of
Raleigh in particular, and of other urban/rural places in general, might re-imagine themselves and
their relationship to the local landscapes” (p. 173) and we see the Bullitt Center doing the same
thing, but its blueprints are multiple. In creating rhetorical pressure on tenants, developers, manu-
facturers and policymakers, the Bullitt Center offers a case study where we see not just how archi-
tecture functions as a persuasive force, but we see new ways in which material and environmental
rhetoric are animated together and work reactively against behaviors and actions.
A clear ideological tension exists, though, in the embodied arguments from the Bullitt Center. As
an idealized example, it shows us how developers can disrupt presumed ways of proceeding and
make different choices about their building practices that are better for the environment. But, in
spite of the rigorous standards of the Living Building Challenge, the Bullitt Center inevitably stills
falls into the “entrapment in the material logic of fossil fuel economies and transportation systems”
(Wells, McGreavy, Senda-Cook, & McHendry et al., 2018, p. 2). Bound by a market-driven neoliber-
alism that is inherently antithetical to the environment, it presumes development will continue
rather than attempting to stop it – a paradox that shapes the trajectory of arguments from the
Green New Deal to the Paris Climate Accord. Zagacki and Gallagher express hesitancy about how
a sustainable park blueprint might get transferred to other contexts in ways that undercut the orig-
inal park’s attention to nature through a justification of “further development of natural lands”
(p. 187) – and such concerns might apply to the Bullitt Center in different ways.
Postmodern architecture itself, too, has historically embodied some of these inherently industri-
alist and capitalist values as well. Jameson’s critique of architecture commonly applies to the generic
buildings of the post-modern era, where he sees such architecture and style as largely symptomatic of
late capitalism: “Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which,
in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship” (Jameson,
1991). While the Bullitt Center rejects the cookie-cutter style that emphasizes productivity over aes-
thetics, nature and pleasure, it nonetheless exists in a continuum of market-driven thinking. Not
unlike other industries, designers interested in saving our planet must decide to either stop develop-
ing or find ways to make development better. The Bullitt Center has chosen the latter, but that ren-
ders its positionality fraught with tensions between capitalism and environmentalism. Its very nature
as an office space perpetuates a consumption-driven existence so that people work, earn, buy on
repeat. We see, too, in this space a message about the “ideal” worker too – one who is efficient
not just with their workflow, but with their energy use as well. Their ability and physical fitness is
presumed through the design of the building, perpetuating an ableist rhetoric that minimizes the
existence of those who might have different needs for navigating this space. The capitalist conception
of the worker is an ideal – a person who works efficiently with both mind and body within systems
that by their nature exclude, reject, and devalue those who don’t “fit” for whatever reason.
While the development of the Bullitt Center squarely sits within the stream of capitalism and
development, the Bullitt Foundation is realist about development and the economy. Their hope is
that in the inevitable development and building in our late capitalist society, people make different
252 J. H. CROWE

decisions that help slow environmental degradation – and offering arguments that are durable not
just in terms of argumentative force but also in their physicality, shows us how these decisions can be
realized. Better understanding how this physical site reacts to and changes behaviors, minds, and
policy within the current system helps us better understand the role of advocacy in changing beha-
viors and choices that impact the environment in the worlds of construction and consumption. If we
can better understand the ways in which spaces like the Bullitt Center enable “a polity with more
channels of communication” among humans and materials (Bennett, 2010, p. 104)—and how
such a space can effectively persuade multiple audiences to change their habits, building practices,
the ways in which they create products and public codes and policies—then we might better under-
stand how to advocate for environmental sustainability across other audiences and contexts as well.

Acknowledgements
A previous version of this project was presented at the Western States Communication Association conference in 2019.
The author wishes to acknowledge the thoughtful feedback from members of WSCA’s Environmental Communication
Interest Group as well as the generous support of this project from the Center for Environmental Justice and Sustain-
ability at Seattle University.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
Part of this research was supported by a fellowship from the Center for Environmental Justice and Sustainability at
Seattle University.

ORCID
Julie Homchick Crowe http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6005-6178

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