Jason F. McLennan

Jason F. McLennan is known as an international thought leader in the green architecture movement and has lectured on sustainability across the United States and Canada. He has won numerous awards, including a national Canadian Green Building Champion award, and was a finalist for the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Award.

McLennan serves as the chief executive officer of the Cascadia Green Building Council, the Pacific Northwest’s leading organization in the field of green building and sustainable development, and is also the chief executive officer of the International Living Building Institute. He is the founder and creator of the Living Building Challenge, an international green building program and cocreator of Pharos, the most advanced building material rating system in North America.

His work in the sustainable design field has been published or reviewed in dozens of journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and books, including Architecture, Architectural Record, the New York Times, and the Globe and Mail. He is author of four books The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, The Dumb Architect’s Guide to Glazing Selection, The Ecological Engineer, and Zugunruhe. The Philosophy of Sustainable Design is currently used as a textbook in over 60 universities and colleges and is distributed widely throughout Europe and North America.

McLennan is a former principal at BNIM Architects, one of the founders of the green design movement in the United States, where he worked on many of the leading high-performance projects in the country, including LEED Platinum and zero energy projects. At BNIM, he created the building science team known as Elements, which set new standards for energy and resource efficiency on many of its projects in various building types. He is also the founder and chief executive officer of Ecotone Publishing, the only dedicated green building publisher in North America.