
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.
