The Orange County Great Park, with its 1,347-acre master plan, is the focal point of the redevelopment of the 4,700-acre former Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro. Phase 1 of development includes the 28-acre South Lawn, including extensions to the Ken Smith-envisioned timeline and a first of its kind large scale overland stormwater harvesting system for reuse as irrigation. Among many of the forward thinking sustainability goals of the project, Sherwood is working is to decrease the irrigation demands of the park and reuse as much water on site as possible. The Park will be harvesting and storing all available onsite and offsite runoff in a series of design-oriented storage basins.  Stormwater from these basins will then be treated and reused for irrigation, with the aim of reducing the reclaimed water use significantly. One of the project’s goals is to be a new model for water resources planning within the LA basin.

image: Hargreaves Associates

The Haihe Riverfront Ribbon Park is in Tianjin, south of Beijing. Sherwood is working with Hargreaves Associates and the city of Tianjin to produce design development documents of a new park along the Haihe River, the first of over ten miles of parkland that will provide the most significant open space for this rapidly expanding 11 million person city. We are providing services toward wetland creation; water reuse; stormwater management and riparian protection.

Sherwood is developing a new Visitor Center at the entrance to San Francisco’s Lands End, a Golden Gate National Park landmark. The shoreline trails attract more than one million visitors a year with breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin Headlands, Point Reyes and the Pacific Ocean. Construction began last May on a new center that will include informational exhibits describing the area’s rich cultural and natural history, park-related retail, and a café. In addition to these indoor exhibits, several exterior interpretive elements will be placed around the restored site.

Sherwood Design Engineers teamed with EHDD and Surface Design landscape architects to provide grading, drainage, utility and LEED Gold design support for the site. Among the features of the project are a large bio-retention area located along the building and sidewalk edge, which collects and treats all site stormwater and rainwater before releasing it into the city storm drain system. Graywater, collected from the restroom sinks, will be treated and reused on site for toilet flushing.

2011 was a great year for Sherwood Design Engineers’ sister non-profit organization, The Sherwood Institute. The Institute is growing, both in terms of the number of volunteers working for its causes and its profile. Sherwood Design Engineers has made a big investment in the institute, and we are excited for 2012 but we still need your help making our projects come to life.



The Sherwood Institute recently partnered with Nicole Faria, Miss Earth 2011 (and Bangalore native) to create a global steering committee to solve the water crisis in India. And now we need your help to make it happen.


The solutions needed to truly restore the lakes exist today.



Truly and permanently reviving the extensive lake network of Bangalore will involve a tremendous amount of work and careful coordination between civil engineers, urban planners, hydraulic engineers, ecological scientists, political bodies and citizens, detailed planning, extensive resources and expert execution. This is why the only way it will happen is with leadership and guidance from groups such as the Sherwood Institute and support from the world through individuals and like you.



Please consider making a donation to this project today – simply click here!

Another way you can help is to shop on Amazon.com using this link. Sherwood Institute is now a non-profit affiliate of Amazon.com. A portion of all sales made through that link will go to helping us complete critical water/energy infrastructure projects and outreach around the world. There’s no price change to you and the site is identical to the normal Amazon.com. If you’ll be shopping on Amazon.com anyways and want to help, use the link, and share it with your friends as well!



As 2012 opens, we are working with Waggonner & Ball on the master restoration of New Orleans for the Greater N.O. Development Foundation. For the project we are helping to prepare a comprehensive, sustainable, integrated water management strategy for St. Bernard Parish and the East Banks of Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. We are also planning a big Bangalore Lakes-related event (read: party!) during Greenbuild, which will be in San Francisco in November, 2012. Watch this space for more details!


Our work on the exhibit “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” for the New York City MOMA is complete, and we are working with the museum to finalize the exhibit for an installation this winter. The show, in which five teams of architects have been rethinking housing in American cities and suburbs in light of the foreclosure crisis, has been getting a great deal of press recently, including the New York Times, New York magazine and a feature on NPR.

“Foreclosed” is the second program in MoMA’s “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” series, which started in 2009 with “Rising Currents,” which addressed New York City’s rising water levels. Feedback has been provided by the design and lay community on ours and other alternative design approaches to the current suburban model. The model and our work will be refined by the museum’s curators and then be put on display in the main museum in Manhattan in February, 2012.

Here’s a quick update on Boeddeker Park, one of Sherwood’s projects that was selected for the ASLA Sustainable Sites (SITES) initiative last year. Here are some of the challenges the project has faced in the past year:

· Project specifications need to be very carefully written in order to ensure that contractors will follow SITES requirements and proper materials are used. This is especially critical for projects that go out to public bid. There are no specification templates for SITES like there are for LEED since the program is so new. We are in the process of developing our own SITES specifications that may ultimately help inform a template.

· The water prerequisite 3.1 was very difficult for the Boeddeker project to achieve even with a 30,000 gal rainwater cistern in the design. The cistern was designed to collect rainwater and use it for irrigation. The rainwater supply would meet about 50% of the total annual irrigation demand and save 82,000 gal of municipal water annually. Unfortunately having a rainwater cistern did not help us meet this prerequisite because the irrigation savings calculation only compares the design and baseline case during the peak irrigation demand month (July). As per our design calculations, during this month, the rainwater cistern has less than 500 gal left in it so it doesn’t help out with the monthly irrigation demand. We were unable to show a 50% irrigation demand reduction in July even though the rainwater reuse system was meeting 50% of the annual irrigation demands. The rainwater system could theoretically be designed to maintain the required volume of rainwater until the month of July so it could be used up then to meet at least 50% of the monthly irrigation demands but this would result in a lesser annual water savings. This didn’t make much sense to us so we planned to dispute the calculation methodology with the SITES administrators.

· Another reason the irrigation demand reduction was hard for this project to meet was the social importance of the lawn area. Lawn requires a substantial amount of irrigation but it was very important for this low-income, very dense, urban neighborhood (Tenderloin District) to have a real grass area. The Trust for Public Land and SF Recreation and Parks Dept did not want to substitute artificial turf for the lawn in order to reduce the irrigation water demand.

Sherwood staff recently volunteered at the San Francisco Food Bank, helping package nearly 2,500 pounds of brown rice. The organization provides food to nearly a quarter million people through over 450 nonprofit partners. Our contribution was able to help the Food Bank reach their goal of distributing more than 45 million pounds of food to our local communities. Sherwood staff also donated canned foods and money to the Food Bank, helping distribute food to over 36,000 households in our community this holiday season.

From Saturday’s St. Petersburg Times:

“A panel of jurors listened to hourlong presentations Friday from each of three finalists vying to design the city’s new icon, a pier to replace the inverted pyramid that opened in 1973. At the end of the day, at least one juror, Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch, said he had made up his mind about how the designs should be ranked. But he did not reveal his decision.

However, the designs that elicited the most praise and interest from the five judges were the Lens by Michael Maltzan Architecture of Los Angeles and the Wave by BIG of Denmark and New York City. West 8 Urban Design of New York, which created a concept called the Eye, received a more restrained response.

…

More than 200 people watched the presentations at the Coliseum. Downtown St. Petersburg resident Laura Andrews liked the Wave, but her favorite was the Lens. “That’s the one that intrigues me the most,” she said. Alex Rios, an architecture student at the University of South Florida, also liked the Lens. “It’s so integrated into St. Pete,” he said. He liked BIG’s form and called it appealing and “very thought provoking.” He thought the Eye offered amazing views. He said the jury seemed to favor BIG and Michael Maltzan. The panel will meet on Jan. 20 to announce their decisions.”

Read more about each of the finalists’ entries here.

Project: The Meadow Farm, Santa Cruz, California
Project Type: Residential
Project Team: Sherwood Design Engineers, William McDonough and Partners, Bernard Trainer and Associates, Redhorse Constructors Inc.

Goals for this greenfield residential project are to reduce waste, minimize demand for potable water, and use 100% renewable energy, regional materials, and native drought-tolerant plantings. On-site materials will be used as subbase for slab foundations and for earth rammed walls within buildings. Rainwater will be used in toilets and laundry, blackwater waste will be treated for use in irrigation, concrete pour tailings will be recycled into landscaping pavers, and an edible garden will be created.

The Meadow Farm project was designed with site based sustainability as a key goal; however despite the importance of sustainability to our client we have had trouble moving forward with the SITES certification. We have had three large hurdles with the SITES work: difficulty complying with the specifics of prerequisite 1.1 (limit development on various farmland soils), not having full team / client support, and not being involved with SITES early enough in the design process,

First of all, our main difficulty has been that the Meadow Farm project does not meet prerequisite 1.1; limit development of soils designated as prime farmland, unique farmland, and farmland of statewide importance. The NRCS designation is not consistent with local zoning classifications which made it difficult to understand. An alternative compliance path of mitigating farmland soil disturbance is allowed through purchasing an agricultural conservation easement at a 5:1 ratio. Despite the design of the residence only disturbing approximately 20% of the site (and restoring much of the undisturbed areas) because our project site is almost 100% designated farmland of statewide importance we must follow the alternative path. The project does qualify for all of the requirements of this pathway, however it has been very difficult for the design team to determine how to go about creating or purchasing an agricultural easement. Almost no information was provided by the SITES team in the pilot resources (webinars, FAQs etc.), the resources provided have been vague and misleading; it is a very complex topic to understand. The team’s extensive research has still not been able to determine how to acquire a conservation easement in a reasonable scale, cost and timeframe.

Secondly, this certification program was something that a few of the consultant team members decided to take-on with their own internal resources and was not a primary goal for the project from the beginning, thus not garnering the full commitment and resources that was applied to the LEED process. Sherwood has taken on the prime certification manager, learning the prerequisites and credits from scratch and informing / teaching the other members. The project owner has been very supportive of the program in principle but has not committed beyond this. This has made discussing things such as creating an agriculture easement on land already owned by the client an additional challenge.

Lastly, most of the design work was complete before knowing about and being selected as a SITES pilot project. While the SITES team has been very understanding in giving some leniency in credits which require work in the design stage, project specifications need to be very carefully written in order to ensure that contractors will follow SITES requirements and proper materials are used. Because this project is already in construction many credits which may have been easily obtained are not available.

The Sherwood team recently had our annual Fall Retreat with a kayaking/camping overnight stay at Marshall Beach near Tomales Bay in the Bay Area. Here are some pictures of our great adventure!