Just when you think the 43-year-old Earth Day is sputtering on the fumes of its hippie origins, something entirely new springs forth. Case in point: the new Bullitt Center, headquarters for the environmentally focused Bullitt Foundation, which opens to the public on Capitol Hill this month. Built to the most stringent green-building standards in the world—with plans to generate all its own energy and to collect and treat rainwater to meet all its water needs, and built entirely from local, sustainably sourced and nontoxic materials—the airy, glass-and-timber structure stands as a rejection of incremental change and aims to do no less than reinvent how resource-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-producing buildings are conceived, designed and constructed. Part classroom, part inspiration, the Bullitt Center embodies an ambition, pragmatism and urgency that puts Seattle at the center of the brave, new green future.

Developer: Point32
Architects: Miller Hull Partnership
Builder: Schuchart

Learn more on a public tour (daily, meets at the education center on the ground floor); bullittcenter.org