The Bullitt Center, a new Seattle office building opening today, Earth Day, is completely green and self-sustaining and automatically receives external data to help it operate in an optimal state. From Wendy Kaufman at NPR:

“‘In a building this size, any place else in Seattle it would have two elevators, and that’s what would face you as you walked in the front door. Here, the stairway is obvious and it’s attractive,’ says Denis Hayes, president and CEO of the foundation.

He explains there is an elevator, but it’s tucked away. The staircase encourages exercise and the concept saves money both in energy use and construction costs.

This is one of dozens of decisions and trade-offs that went into this building — a building Hayes describes as a living organism.

‘It has eyes, it has ears, it has a nervous system, it has a brain and it responds to its environment in a way that seeks to optimize things,’ he says.

He points across the street to a mini weather station. It sends data to the building so it can decide what it should do to maximize comfort and conserve energy.

Hayes says the building customizes windows and external shutter positions so natural lighting can be maximized to its potential and ‘give you day lighting at your desk.’

Just about everything in this building is off-the-shelf technology — from composting toilets to photovoltaic cells, which create electricity from sunlight, on the roof. But never before has all this technology been integrated into a single building quite this way.