History
A Trailblazer
O’Brien360 began as O’Brien & Company in 1991, at the vanguard of an emerging green building movement, helping Puget Sound to build more sustainably. The company remained a trailblazer in a rapidly evolving industry through informed consulting work and educational outreach.
Shaping an Industry
In 1993, O'Brien & Company organized "Building with Value," the first conference on green building practices in the Pacific Northwest. Since then, we have helped launch numerous events in the Northwest, Hawaii, and elsewhere, and we remain active participants and presenters at national professional conferences. In the late '90s, we helped develop the Build a Better Kitsap program, one of the first market-based green building programs. Soon afterward, we developed "Built Green" in King and Snohomish counties, a program that has resulted in tens of thousands of homes with a Built Green® certification. We've since helped many local, regional, and national organizations craft programs to transform the green building marketplace in their communities.
A LEED® Pioneer
When the LEED rating system was first developed, O'Brien & Company helped certify some of the region's first LEED projects, including at the University of Washington and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute – the first LEED Silver project in the US. Other distinguished projects include Group Health's Puyallup Medical Center and the Bertschi School Living Science Classroom building, the fourth building ever to meet all the requirements of the Living Building Challenge.
@ 2011 Benjamin Benschneider
A Change in Leadership
In 2006 the firm added two principals: Elizabeth A. D. Powers and Alistair Jackson. At the firm’s 20th anniversary in 2011, O'Brien & Company founder, Kathleen O’Brien, stepped back from ownership, allowing Elizabeth, Alistair, and Donna Trost to guide the firm into its third decade of sustainable success.
A Focus on High Performance
David Reddy and Lukas Hovee founded 360 Analytics in 2010. They quickly distinguished themselves as a leading building performance firm with a clear passion for leveraging energy modeling and analysis in the "real world" to inform design and evaluate performance. In 10 years of operation, they established a loyal clientele of building owners and designers that looked to them as trusted partners providing a broad range of modeling and evaluation services and recommendations on the latest efficiency strategies. Their diverse project background, from energy modeling to software development, encompassed a building portfolio of new and existing construction, single-family, multifamily, mixed-use, and commercial developments. They were especially passionate about helping nonprofits and affordable housing developers achieve their efficiency goals, work that would eventually bring them into contact with O'Brien & Company. The two companies collaborated on several projects, including Smith and Burns, the H20 Apartments, and Seattle Public Libraries, among others.
Photo Credit: Dale Lang
Becoming O'Brien360
For some years, O'Brien & Company had partnered with 360 Analytics, a leading building performance analysis firm established by Principals David Reddy and Luke Hovee. During its decade in business, 360 Analytics had established a loyal core clientele, much of which overlapped with O'Brien & Company's. Not only did the firms share a client list, but they also shared a passion for delivering value to clients through sustainable, high-performing buildings, most notably in the affordable housing sector. This alignment of interests and values made 360 Analytics and O'Brien & Company a natural match, and on January 2019, both firms decided to expand their capabilities and join forces as O'Brien360.
Today, O'Brien360 consists of a rapidly growing multi-disciplinary team of twenty dedicated professionals with the technical and sustainability expertise to add value across the entire project arc.