If you are interested in urban agriculture and would like to share your ideas to shape the Rainier Beach Urban Farm, please join us Saturday, July 28th from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm for an open event to discuss the project!  Stay for the community picnic or just get your hands dirty during the drop-in work party every Saturday from 10 am to 3 pm.

In collaboration with Seattle Tilth, the Friends of R.B.U.F.W., and the Berger Partnership, CAST will be designing an urban farm in Seattle.  The site is a former municipal nursery in Rainier Beach--10 acres of mostly wetland with some hoop houses at the north end.  We'll be undertaking the challenge to not only make a model for urban agriculture, we'll also be greatly increasing the ecological function of the wetlands.

This project is in one of the most diverse zip codes in the nation, and we'll be involving the community to shape the design, as well as creating facilities for small scale commercial farmers, entrepreneurs, and other programs such as Seattle Youth Garden Works.  The hope is to make a community hub centered on growing and sharing food.

The first community design meeting is June 19th on site (time TBD).  Please come and share your vision with us!

In collaboration with the Berger Partnership ,Via Architecture, and Rushing, we put together a competition proposal for the replacement of Memorial Stadium and a new vision for the Center as a whole.

The design is an organic and topographic intervention that flows through the Center and surrounding neighborhoods, creating new connections, opportunities for new programs, and experiences at the Center. It creates a dense, flexible fabric stitched together with multi-modal transit to bring in new audiences, local/daily users, and new amenities for regional visitors.

Some of the important features:

Connectivity:

Right now the Center acts as an island in the city, but should be a hub linking neighborhoods rather than separating them. To that end, we're showing a linkage through the Bay to Lake trail, a transit center with bus, Rapid Ride, sub grade parking, and a new loop of the streetcar. The northern edge, bounded by Mercer will have a new lid park to bring in foot/bike traffic from Queen Anne and a plaza at the corner of Mercer and 5th. Broad Street becomes a greenway linking to SAM Sculpture Park to Lake Union. In effect, it's location makes it an ideal 'transit oriented park' to draw Seattleites to and through the Center.

Layered landscape:

The new topography defines the Center Green, an organic open space at the heart that spills out in all directions. Memorial Stadium is replaced by a field with a 'kop' style hill as seating, perfect for multi-use such as a musical performance space.  From 5th, the landscape opens up for a vista to the International Fountain. Underneath the Center Green, we have a series of public event spaces, storefronts for fringe/alternative cultural institutions to colocate and share resources, layers of parking, and finally a grid of ground source heat pumps to lessen energy use for the Center overall.

We didn't stop at the boundaries of the original 9 acre site, but extended the idea to carve out new access from Uptown and the meandering pathways that run through the Center Green terminate at a bridge to the apex of Key Arena--a great new public view point to downtown and the Sound.

Expressive Environmental Infrastructure:

Beyond Seattle 2030, the design begins to illustrate the path toward making the world's first Living Building District. The goal is to create a beneficial closed loop system for using on site resources and expressing the infrastructure so visitors can see, understand, and take the lessons of sustainability home. Floating above the landscape, there is a layer of solar canopy (about 150K SF) to generate energy for the spaces on the 9 acre site. We also did a first pass on other locations for solar throughout the Center, and could easily add twice that amount on existing roofs and walls of other center buildings. The draped landscape collects storm water and purifies it through a series of rain gardens and native landscape.

The Center as a cultural incubator:

We're also proposing a mix of new, smaller multi use spaces to support the growth of new cultural generators, like SIFF and KEXP.  Tucked under the knoll overlooking the performance/field, we are proposing a new multi-use performance/community space which can be configured like the Center's Northwest Rooms or opened up for larger events. At the corner of Mercer and 5th, we've opened up a new urban plaza that acts as both a local Queen Anne gateway and spill out space for the community space and cultural incubators.

Although we were not selected as a finalist for the competition, I think we put together a very forward looking, connective, and sustainable solution which would do the city proud.

Special thanks to Studio 216 for the help with the renderings!

Soon we'll be able to post our design concept for the revitalization of the Seattle Center, as part of the Urban Intervention competition, but here is a little sneak peak:

Once they announce the finalists, we'll be able to release the full content of our proposal, as well and give full credit to all the great collaborators we worked with.

We've been investigating what the Urban Olympic project would look like as an 27 unit apartment building.  One potentially excited twist on the building is that we have split the bulk into two volumes with a 18' wide courtyard atrium.  The atrium and circulation are exterior, so we can apply another 2000 S.F.for an extra 3 units and still come in under the FAR limit.

We also did a first run at some energy modeling, using Archicad's EcoDesigner program, and feel that given the bulk it would be fairly straight forward to achieve the Passive House standard, but the return on investment is better if we design to the envelop to Washington State Energy Code, add solar hot water, switch the lighting to LEDs, and add an ERV.

Join us tonight at Future Shack 2011 for another evening of great dialogue about houses.  Last year I participated in the 'Speed-Date'---seven minutes to lay out the project and have a design brainstorm, then on to the next architect.  It was a blast, and this year Tim will be sitting in for me. After Speed Date Design, there will be a presentation of innovative ideas in housing.

Our entry, Urban Olympic, is a nine unit townhouse complex designed to use 90% less energy that typical code compliance housing.  See our entries over the last few years : 2011, 2009

It is at Fisher Pavillion in the Seattle Center, starting at 5 pm.

One of our clients is documenting the process of transforming their bungalow with passive solar addition  (Design brief here) with a image laden blog. Check it out!

Stefan and I attended a conference put on by Passive House Northwest at Evergreen State College on Friday and I feel like we got a bit more of the nuance of the standard, understanding of more of the nerdy building science, as well as a chance to look at first hand some of new projects being brought to the US market. A little more background: Passive House is a concept developed by the PassiveHaus Institute in Germany.  They developed the tools that are used to model performance, and do the training and certification of Passive House consultants.  While there are about 30,000 PH projects worldwide, the US rollout has led to a few complications.

First, within the name, there are two inherent misconceptions:  that they are passive solar houses, and that it is a strategy for houses (since the direct german translation for haus would be 'building' , it's easy to overlook the impact on larger institutional and commercial projects).

Second, the Passive House standard was developed in Germany, and there are concerns that it doesn't address other climates.  In very cold climates, for example, the PH standard would call for an impractical amount of insulation, while in hotter areas, a code compliant house with an interior air seal might make the cut.

Third, the software is a black box, and as one conference goer pointed out, the Northwest is home to a lot of DIY building science 'rogues' who want to see into the box, fiddle and tweak the system to optimize it for our climate. It's a bit of a culture clash manifesting itself in the black box/open source conversation. Plus it is proprietary, so I feel a little bit of the same resistance I have to LEED and the USGBC.

Fourth, the spent energy metric is based on an area measurement.  Since the US first adopters are building houses, and on the small side, the bar is pretty high because the same energy hogs populate big and small homes alike.  Joe Giampetro has recently finished his 'Mini-B' passive house--essentially a small DADU, so it can be done, but there is no inherent reward for building not so big.

The flip side of the argument would be that we shouldn't be building single family detached at all.  Urban Olympic, our multifamily Passive House, seen in the prior post, will be an excellent data point to compare how the overall size of the building affects the energy model's performance and cost of construction.

All in all, if you are a building science nerd, I'd recommend the next event, scheduled for June 17th.  Regardless of your commitment to green building, the underlying idea is powerful, and will have a big impact on the industry over the next 20 years.

Urban Olympic is a community of 9 townhouses, and will  mark a couple of firsts for us:  our first Passive House project and also our first project under the new Seattle multifamily code.

Passive House is a rigorous green building standard focused on exclusively on energy consumption, energy efficiency and air quality. They are super insulated, almost airtight, and therefore need very little energy input to heat (up to a 90% reduction of the energy used by a typical code compliant house).  The heat from equipment, people and lighting retained within the insulated building envelope essentially replaces the furnace/boiler as the primary heat source. Fresh air is conditioned through a Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV) with the exhausted air.  Although solar gain does factor into the equation, Passive Houses are not passive solar houses.

Urban Olympic, to my knowledge, will be the first multifamily Passive House in the United States.

Join CAST and 89 other exhibitors at the Phinney Ridge Home Fair!  Always a good time to pick the experts' brains about whatever home improvement issue you may be having.  Plus, there is a special emphasis on green companies and services, including landscaping, solar tech, 'passive house' (super insulated/energy efficient construction--not 'passive solar')

See you there!