Emerging Global LEEDers
Portland’s Fore Solutions, led by CEO Gunnar Hubbard, helps clients build green, in Maine and across the globe.
Gunnar Hubbard moved his family to Portland in 2002 to set up a green-building consulting office for a large, London-based firm. Eight months and three signed contracts later, the job disappeared, a victim of the post-9/11 economic slowdown. Hubbard faced a few questions as he mulled starting his own company.
“I wondered if I needed to be in Boston, or New York, or some large, metropolitan area,” Hubbard says. “I wondered what kind of projects I’d be working on here, and if I could find enough. And I wondered if I could do the kind of work I wanted to do.”
Today, all of those questions have been answered. Starting with those three contracts—including Portland’s East End School—Fore Solutions, Hubbard’s six-employee, Fore Street-based firm, has worked on an endless variety of projects from Boston to Dubai (and from Sanford to Bangor)—capped by the 18-million-square-foot, $9.4 billion MGM Mirage CityCenter in Las Vegas, one of the largest sustainable developments in the world.
Fore Solutions assists people with the construction of green projects, and much of its business surrounds meeting LEED standards. Ideally, Hubbard says, Fore Solutions gets involved early on, refining the goals for a project. Other times, the company is hired by the architect or design firm, or the contractor later in the process. The goal, Hubbard says, is to “help clients build buildings that make sense environmentally, make for a better work environment, and make sense financially.”
More and more, companies want to do just that, and are willing to spend extra time and money during the design process—with Hubbard’s assurance that they’ll get a return on that investment in energy savings, maintenance, and even worker productivity.
Success from a Portland base to distant work sites such as Las Vegas, Hubbard says, has “been about relationships, and about showing we can do the work.”
Before he came to Maine, Hubbard was on the ground floor of the development of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which created the now internationally recognized LEED standards. It started in 1993, when one of the USGBC’s founding fathers invited Hubbard to participate in President Clinton’s “greening of the White House.” Hubbard was later director of the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont; a research scholar at Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado environmental think tank; and cofounder of a green architecture consulting firm in San Francisco.
“Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve met a lot of people who are at the core of this movement to green buildings, and that’s helped us along the way,” Hubbard says.
When Hannaford opened the first-ever Platinum LEED-certified grocery store in Augusta in October, U.S. Green Building Council founding chair Rick Fedrizzi was in attendance, thanks to his friendship with Hubbard, who worked on the project and continues to consult with Hannaford on others.
Of course, Fore Solutions’ ability to impress clients has also helped land projects that would have been unthinkable in 2002. The company landed a gig with one of
CityCenter’s eight architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox, to work on the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, after the two had teamed up on a New York project. That led to work on three other CityCenter buildings—another huge hotel, a mixed-use development, and high-rise residential towers—with other partners. Fore Solutions has also spread its wings internationally, often by partnering with other firms to build the skill sets and scale to win major jobs.
Long-term, Hubbard hopes to grow the business in a variety of ways, from continuing to work with “starchitects” such as Daniel Libeskind (one of the CityCenter partners), to building out an educational component to teach LEED and green building, and growing the business oversees—all while pursuing jobs in Maine.
The company’s latest project is close to home. Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay has contracted the firm to help build a 6,500-square-foot LEED Platinum education center. It will be a net-zero building, meaning it will produce more energy than it uses, which has Hubbard especially excited.
“I do see a lot of potential in Maine,” Hubbard says, noting Portland’s and Bangor’s LEED certification requirements for all city-owned and -financed building projects, and a 2003 executive order from Governor Baldacci encouraging the same across Maine.
“We’re challenged by our climate, obviously,” he adds. “It’s cold. We have a lot of cloud cover. But I see the Maine attitude as the right one—concerned about the environment, with deep roots in investing properly and doing a project the right way, being smart about resources. I could
see us being a green-building incubator of sorts.”
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