Veg.itecture

Monday, December 13, 2010

Green Science Oregon features Green Roofs

Episode 1 from Green Science Oregon - showing some local green roofs and research on PV/Solar synergies.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Next Gen Wildlife Crossings

The competition finalists were announced for the ARC: International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition - which, in short, aimed for: "buildable context-sensitive and compelling design solutions for safe, efficient, cost-effective, and ecologically responsive wildlife crossings."

A rundown of finalist teams here, via Bustler:

Janet Rosenberg & Associations with Blackwell Bowick Partnership,
Dougan & Associates, and Ecokare International

HNTB Engineering with Michael Van Valkenburgh & Associates

with Applied Ecological Services, Inc

The Olin Studio with Explorations Architecture (Paris),
Buro Haphold (London) and Applied Ecological Services

Zwarts & Jansma with OKRA Landscape Architects, IV-infra and Planecologie

Balmori Associates with StudioMDA, Knippers Helbig Inc., David Skelly, CITA,
Bluegreen, John A. Martin & Associates, and David Langdon

The jury comments allude to the innovations within, but at a glance, there's nothing dramatically important to be gleaned from the visuals presented of the winning entries that jumps out as revolutionary. As with most (all?) competitions, the devil is in the details, and the imagery is a small portion of the real underlying genius of the proposals, which require delving into the PDFs of team entries for more information.

For instance Balmori's design includes a specialized modular wood structure and sophisticated monitoring equipment to track data on species crossings. Olin's proposal uses a plastic modular grid of what look like habitat green roof trays with different ingredients of ecosystems - from grassland to forest. Janet Rosenberg's proposal is a new 'species' of bridge, investigating multiple internal pathways to accommodate different travel patterns, with a structure that looks at mitigating sensory stimuli from the roadway (lights, noise, smells) that perhaps has everyone seeing red. MVVA's submission uses condensed parallel habitat bands, using an interesting successional planting scheme over time to populate these with appropriate plantings. The Zwarts & Jansma team really looked at the formal architectural (not so much landscape or habitat) properties in their curving bridge.

Now look back at the images above, and discern any of those ideas from the renderings...