May 10, 2007

Visionary ideas turn blight into green

Images courtesy of Stantec Architects

The team’s concept calls for keeping most of the old warehouses, but adding a “living skin” to upgrade their energy performance. Planting trees would create a forest and clean up the contaminated soil.

When a recent design competition asked for visionary green building ideas, Jay Hiscox of Stantec Architects said his team decided to take the worst site they could find and see how they could use it to improve the neighborhood.

Stantec Architects' Vancouver, B.C., office designed a project called Main and Terminal for the Living Future Design Competition. It won second place in the “most visionary” building category.

The competition challenged locals in the design and construction industries to take green building to another level. It was open to architects, engineers, design professionals, students and green builders. Nineteen proposals were submitted.

All entries were designed to meet the standards of the Living Building Challenge, a new green design concept written by Jason McLennan of the Cascadia Region U.S. Green Building Council. The challenge has 16 requirements that range from producing all the energy a building needs to being located on a site that won't negatively affect wetlands, wildlife habitat or farmland.

The judges were McLennan, Tom Paladino of Paladino & Co. and Susan Jones of atelierjones. The entries were divided into two categories: realizable projects and visionary projects.

“It's a very visionary project,” Jones said. “It deals with food and how do you create, out of an urban building site, a really product-enriched food site while cutting down the travel times that food goes through.”

Main and Terminal would have an on-site public market selling produce grown on the rooftops and in hot houses, as well as produce from local farms.

Main and Terminal is located on seven acres on the edge of Vancouver in an area that is currently home to derelict warehouses, muffler shops and gas stations. The site is next to a railroad and across the street from a light rail station. The concept calls for refurbishing 11 buildings and constructing five new ones. The complex would house clean light industrial businesses, a public market, live/work units and other commercial uses.

Hiscox said Main and Terminal is just a concept, but because the land is owned by the city of Vancouver he said it could someday become a reality.

The team took a unique approach, he said, by focusing on what the property could give back to the community, instead of seeing how much they could fit on the site.

“The solution looks at the downtown and says what are the issues facing downtown that this site can remediate?” he said. “You try to take the worst possible site and see what you can do with it.”

To do that, the team looked at how the project could be integrated into the city and how it would actually function.

Organic waste became a focus point for the team. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 60 percent of U.S. municipal solid waste is compostable. Food waste is the single-largest component in the waste stream by weight.

Main and Terminal was designed to turn organic waste — meaning food and yard trimmings — into heat, electricity and biogas.

Waste from Vancouver or surrounding agricultural areas could be placed on a train and shipped straight to the project, eliminating the need for trucks. The waste would be anaerobically digested to produce biogas to feed a fuel cell co-generation system that would heat and power the buildings. Twenty van-sized loads of waste per day would provide enough electricity for all of Main and Terminal's needs as well as some of the neighboring buildings.

Hiscox said the team wanted to create a model that could easily be replicated in other metropolitan areas.

“It's all possible. It's not as Buzz Lightyear as one might think,” Hiscox said. “We think in a way almost any downtown could look at that solution.”

The team also examined ways they could save many of the old warehouses while still making them energy-efficient spaces. They decided to keep all of the large structures, but add a “living skin” to upgrade their energy performance.

Hiscox said the skin could be made of photovoltaic panels, recycled glass or plastic recycled from bottles. The skin would function as a water collector and an intelligent ventilator, Hiscox said, responding to changes in airflow, humidity and temperature through centrally controlled or manually operated louvers.

Eleven of the old buildings would receive the living skin, while smaller buildings would be deconstructed and recycled to construct new buildings.

The proposal also includes an on-site public market that would sell produce grown on the rooftops and in hot houses at Main and Terminal as well as produce from local farms.

Along the edge of the property trees would be planted to clean up toxic soil left over from the old warehouses and gas stations. Hiscox said alder and birch trees would naturally remediate soil while creating a park.

“It would go from muffler shops to forest.”