Last week I attended the Portland Sustainability Institute’s EcoDistricts Summit and Portland State University. Over its two days I got to hear from many people who have been down in the trenches actually building in both physical form and in organizations, Ecodistricts. As an architecture student what I mostly see, and my often my final goal, is a polished final design. I got to see some of that at the Summit in the beautiful presentation boards of a University of Oregon design studio on the Gateway EcoDistrict but what became abundantly clear during this conference was that Ecodistricts aren’t a sexy finished product but the result of years of work on many different projects and coordinating many different organizations and is never really done.
The Summit covered the broad range of topics relevant to EcoDistricts; from the nitty gritty engineering of district scale power plants and power infrastructure to using social media to find financing for projects in lower income neighborhoods. What was most relevant to my interests though were the descriptions of two different district wide projects; Mountain View California, home of Google, and their plans to make an EcoDistrict in Silicon Valley and the work of Biohabitats, a company based in Baltimore, Maryland whose work is in the field of Urban Ecology. The purpose of this blog post is ultimately to comment on what makes a compelling visual and verbal project story.
The Mountain View project was presented by a panel of speakers representing the different interests on the project such as the design firm which acted as a mediator, the city’s representative, Google’s facilities manager, and the engineers on some of the projects. The goal of the Mountain View project is to create, in their words, a new city on Google’s suburban campus. Currently the employees of Google are spread out all over the San Francisco Bay area and commute, mostly by car, to Google’s suburban office park. As a result the highways in Mountain View have incredible traffic jams and employees spend a large amount of their day in an automobile. The presentation by the architects showed renderings of the new “city” in Google’s office park with a green parkway surrounded by mixed use buildings; unfortunately the city’s council did not approve a zoning change to allow housing to be built on the campus so the underlying problem of segregated uses will perpetuate the existing transportation problems. The media used to describe this project, final perspective renderings and abstract traffic congestion maps, did very little to tell the story of the existing urban areas. Through my own prior knowledge of Silicon Valley’s development I realized that this project was only going to “green” the existing suburban model instead of attempting to actualize urbanize it.
The presentation I found most inspirational was that of Keith Bowers, president of Biohabitats. He described many of his company’s projects and a their philosophy of Regenerative Design and the principles of restoring ecosystems not to their previous state after a disturbance but to the state that ecosystem would presently be in if left on its natural trajectory. For Biohabitats solutions to be effective each must be custom tailored specifically for both the natural ecosystem of the place but also the social environment. Mr. Bowers presentation reflected this well by really explaining the place of each project with images and diagrams of the community and ecosystem involved. A notable project was one in which Biohabitats was commissioned to make Baltimore’s Inner Harbor “sustainable”. One of the projects developed were floating wetlands that were built by local children using recovered pop bottles.
Floating Wetland : Baltimore Inner Harbor
photo: Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun
The background story he gave for this project made the final design solution very convincing.
The Ecodistricts Summit proved to be a good experience in both learning about the current state of thinking on this subject and in seeing what methods of representation will best tell the story of place and a design for that place.