South End Green Roof

Our last post rhapsodized on dreams of a green eco-park, but we can't just sit around waiting for the energy vortex to come to Massachusetts (Abu Dhabi's already beat us to the punch).  Living and working in some of America's oldest communities, we don't often have the luxury of ordering up from the sexy array of new materials and technologies designed for all-new construction -- our challenge is to make old structures as energy efficient as possible, without sacrificing what we love about those old structures (and be glad they don't build 'em like they used to). So we were delighted when our clients in Boston's South End topped our sustainable redesign of their 19th-century row house with a green roof of  hardy sedum hugging a transparent roof hatch that lets the light shine in and solar panels that make hot water.  Now -- imagine it spreading like a green wave up and down the block....

Resilient City

The Circle & The Res
As much as we value our clients, working without one lets us really cut loose -- we’re always on the lookout for fun competitions. We just made the first cut in the 2010 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition, an international exercise to “stimulate thinking and discourse about how to increase the capacity for resilience of our cities as we move into a century where our cities will be subjected to the combined environmental and economic impacts of climate change and energy transition.” A bit of a mouthful but one worth savoring --- while Boston may not be as vulnerable as low-lying archipelagoes in the South Pacific, imagine wading through the Financial District during a winter storm, as conservative climate projections predict we might by the end of this century.

 

In fact, our 2009/2010 The Circle & The Res competition entry focused on water, transforming the broad expanse of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, once a key link in Boston’s great public water system, into an energy park. In the late 19th century the City of Boston built handsome Richardson Romanesque and Beaux Arts pump houses along roadways laid out by the Olmsted Brothers to celebrate the Chestnut Hill Reservoir as the high-tech wonder of its day, making this engineering marvel a picturesque destination for fashionable promenades.

  

Our design takes that nexus of engineering and recreation into the 21st century to produce clean energy – elegant windmills rise from the water to dance into downtown Boston along the Green Line trolley tracks; a 1,500-foot solar spire and four roof-top solar obelisks soak up and redistribute the power of the sun; and geothermal wells, taps roots to windmills and solar spire, temper water for heating and cooling. We buried traffic at the busy intersection of Beacon Street and Chestnut Hill Avenue, creating a “gateway” to the bucolic reservoir shore to draw pedestrians who can stroll across the water on a sinuous boardwalk hovering just above the surface to the Lily Pad, a community pavilion and cafe.

We had a lot of fun brainstorming, wrangling, writing, and computer modeling to dream up schemes to make sustainable technology both fun and beautiful – and were delighted to see our most fanciful dream of an “energy vortex” made real in a new green city in that land of dreams near Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Desert (New York Times – In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises, September 26, 2010).

 Click here "The Circle & the Res" to see the complete submission.