At
an event sponsored by the
Portland Development Commission yesterday, GGLO's Dave Cutler presented the firm's concept proposal for the repurposing of Portland's
Memorial Coliseum. GGLO's concept was one of 20 out of some 95 submissions that were selected to be exhibited to the
Stakeholder's Advisory Committee and the general public.
GGLO's conceptual framework grew out of the desire to look beyond the building itself, and to explore how the building could benefit the entire City and region, both in the near and long term. Surprisingly perhaps, the design team was drawn to a scheme that would tranform the Coliseum into a colossal robotic parking garage, which would serve as a mode-transfer "mobility hub," thereby reducing the number of cars entering the Portland downtown core.
In the near term, transferring parking out of downtown would facilitiate densification without the burden and expense of providing parking, and would free up more urban land people-oriented uses. In the long term--say, half a century from now--when the need for cars as we now know them has vastly diminished, the scheme called for the return of the Coliseum to a civic use:
The Memorial Car Museum, for which the robotic parking infrastructure would be used to store and display the museum "specimens."
For more information on GGLO's concept proposal, please see
this Insight article. The proposal was also covered
here,
here,
here, and
here.
GGLO is part of a team comprised of some of the Seattle area's leading green building professionals that have formed The Restorative Design Collective to build a cutting-edge green science building for the Bertschi School, an independent elementary school on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Working pro bono, the team is designing the new science building to meet the standards of the Living Building Challenge, a "deep-green" building program which encourages projects to achieve self-sufficiency by generating all of their own energy with renewable resources, harvesting and treating all of their own water on site, and operating at maximum levels of efficiency with a healthy indoor environment.
The team has just entered the construction document phase of the design process. A building permit is expected in March, and the completion of construction is projected for November 2010.
For more information on this ground-breaking project, please visit GGLO's Insight pages.
GGLO and the non-profit advocacy organizations Futurewise and Transportation Choices Coalition have just released a new urban design and policy report entitled Transit-Oriented Communities: A Blueprint for Washington State.
The Blueprint is a vision and action plan for promoting transit-oriented communites (TOC)—neighborhoods that give people greater access to housing, jobs, shopping, and recreation without relying on a personal vehicle—a land use pattern leads to lower cost of living and higher quality of life for people, and long-term sustainability for the planet.
The Blueprint was launched at an October event that featured King County Executive-elect Dow Constantine, State Representative Sharon Nelson, former director of the Puget Sound Regional Council Mary McCumber, and GGLO's own Alan Grainger.
The report is the culmination of a year-long partnership between GGLO and Futurewise that included a series of seven workshops on TOC held at "GGLO Space at the Steps," GGLO's event venue off Harbor Steps at First and University in downtown Seattle. Additional info on the TOC workshop series is presented in this GGLO Insight article.
For more details on the purpose and content of the final report, Transit-Oriented Communities: A Blueprint for Washington State, please see this GGLO Insight article.
The complete Blueprint document is available for free by download in pdf format here. To purchase a printed copy of the Blueprint, please contact Futurewise.
Responses to Transit-Oriented Communities...
“Rarely is a call to action and a well documented proof of concept so concisely
brought together. This is both a powerful summary of the state of the art in
sustainable growth and a clear headed blueprint for Washington.”
—Peter Calthorpe, Principal, Calthorpe Associates
“This report makes the case for investing in transit that promotes the kind of development that will grow our economy while saving our planet. It’s a great resource for Washington State and for states and communities across the nation.”
—William Millar, President, American Public Transportation Association
“Our region has a choice: either we can mitigate and adapt to global warming by protecting our rural and resource lands and creating strong cities, or we can lock ourselves into land use patterns that diminish our water and air quality and limit our economic competitiveness for generations to come. We can do better, and political leaders at every level of government need to work to this end. The TOC Blueprint moves us down that essential path.”
—The Honorable Dow Constantine, King County Executive
The City of Burien was given the 2009 Implementation Award by the American Planning Association--Washington Chapter (APA) and the Planning Association of Washington (PAW). The jury recognized Burien Town Square as "an outstanding example of a planning process 'staying the course' over time...Inspiring, daring and obviously creates a new identity for Burien’s Town Center.” Burien Community Development Director and APA Washington Chapter President, Scott Greenberg, received the award at the APA Washington Chapter Conference in Vancouver, WA last week, along with GGLO's own Bill Gaylord. Bill, who is GGLO's Principal in Charge for Burien Town Square, is excited for the national recognition that the project is getting as a model for downtown redevelopment and revitalization.
The plan for Burien Town Square creates a new heart for the community with the development of vibrant city park space, featuring an interactive water feature, a performance lawn and stage, and sustainable demonstration gardens, surrounded by a mixture of civic, retail and residential uses.
David Sarasohn's review of Jory is in today's Oregonian. Sarasohn calls the new restaurant in Oregon's wine country "a successful, inviting, creative restaurant, with a range new to the Oregon wine country, a scope that allows it not only to reflect but also express the region and the Northwest."
Go read the review for yourself here. A word of advice though: don't read hungry.
The Cobb Building was one of only three projects selected by both Professional and Public Juries to highlight as "new models for progressive urban living". Eleven projects, total, were selected from among over 70 entries.
GGLO worked with the management company, Unico, in redeveloping and repurposing the historic structure. Built in 1910, the 11-story Cobb Building made history as one of the first commercial buildings in the United States to exclusively offer medical and dental offices. Nearly 100 years later, The Cobb leads the market again by joining a select group of historic renovations awarded LEED certification.
The location of the Cobb in Seattle's core reduces strain on habitat and preserves natural resources while being close to work, recreation and public transportation options. 22% of the site area converted rooftops to vegetation to exceed the open space requirements and to provide habitat and respite for residents and their pets in the middle of Seattle.
Low-flow showerheads, faucets, dual flush toilets and high efficiency appliances were installed and a hybrid heat pump system heats & cools units. Heat rejected during the cooling mode preheats domestic hot water system to save about 5% a year over typical water source heat pump.
The Cobb is a participant in GGLO’s ongoing Building Performance Evaluation of multifamily projects in the Seattle area in order to assess building performance relative to design intention.
Read more about FutureShack and the Cobb here:
On August 30 The New York Times featured an article by Mireya Navarro that looked at building performance post LEED certification and found that many LEED certified buildings are not living up to expectation. Why? Most often to blame were low efficiency mechanical systems and design that did not focus on energy-saving measures. Audits of post occupancy energy use showed poorly for energy efficiency. In fact, the USGBC found that possibly "a quarter of the new buildings that have been certified do not save as much energy as their designs predicted and that most do not track energy consumption once in use."
The USGBC is considering measures to combat this issue. The article states that, "starting this year, the program also is requiring all newly constructed buildings to provide energy and water bills for the first five years of operation as a condition for certification." There has also been discussion of overturning certification or withholding it until energy efficiency in the occupied building can be proven.
All of this points to the importance of designing for energy efficiency in the pursuit of truly sustainable buildings and neighborhoods. It was this realization that drove GGLO to begin tracking building performance a while back and develop our Building Performance Evaluation program and services. Read about GGLO's building performance evaluation services (BPE) here.
Read the article here. (Subscription required)
