Line for Blue Bottle Coffee at their Linden Alley Kiosk

Linden St is undergoing a welcoming transformation of what the designers are calling the birth of an outdoor living room, otherwise known as Linden Living Alley. The Blue Bottle coffee shop has drawn a crowd of people over the last few years that have had to assemble and enjoy their coffee along a narrow sidewalk. During peak coffee hours, especially on the weekend, these people spill over into Linden St in order to find refuge from the tight sidewalk conditions and to escape the long line. Sherwood Design Engineers have teamed up with Winslow Architecture to design a pedestrian oriented street that encapsulates the multi functionality of what a city street is about. This design integrates an isolated driving alley dedicated to one lane of traffic, including traffic calming and safety measures and transforming the remainder of the street corridor to landscaping and urban pedestrian space.

This project is scheduled for completion around October 1^st 2010 so go and enjoy a latte in a space dedicate to the people.

Architecture in the City hosted by AIA-SF will be sponsoring a tour led by David Winslow covering the various pedestrian alleys, including Linden Lane, throughout the city.

The conversion of city streets and alleys to pedestrian friendly zones has garnered some support and opposition. Check out the Socketsite discussion forum that has developed some popularity recently surrounding this topic and specially Linden Lane.

Davis Court August 26th

The Davis Court project is progressing nicely. According to Drew, Sherwood’s project manager, one infiltration system CU Structural Soil backfill is halfway completed. “CU Structural Soil is a type of soil that allows trees to grow underneath concrete without damaging the surface or surrounding area,” he says, “which if not used can cause major damage to sidewalks and other structures from tree roots.” The infiltration piping is being constructed now, to be followed by the structural soil and planter beds backfill. The remaining demolition is completed and site infrastructure is being installed. Stay tuned for more updates as work continues!

In urban areas most people can’t imagine, that there was once, or still is a stream underneath them. Many municipal urban planners are bringing these streams “to light,” by a process called daylighting. This includes bringing a stream to light, from underground, often by integrating storm water management and ecosystems. Daylighting can have many benefits, including ecological, economic, and social. We wrote about a daylighting project in Seoul, South Korea about a year ago. Since then daylighting has gotten exposure from cities like Seattle, Berkeley, Portland, and our very own San Francisco. Most of these streams and creeks, which have not been visible since the 1800’s are now viewable as sewers and pipes transformed underground in order to make room for urban development. With global warming on the rise, many cities cannot handle the pressure of rising stormwater runoff, often backing up water treatment plants, which directly affects the entire city. Urban planners are turning to daylighting as a resource to relieve pressure from stormwater runoff as well as connecting people with their water resources.

Seoul Stream Daylighted and Turned Into a Beautiful Public Space

Seoul’s landmark daylighting project involved tearing down a major divisive freeway through the heart of the city and replacing in, instead of with another vehicular transportation network, with an enhancement of the natural environment, a community amenity, and a stormwater management improvement.

Thornton Creek in North Seattle has just recently been daylighted in collaboration with a mixed-use, residential, commercial, and office, development adjacent to the Northgate Mall.

While daylighting seems like an extremely attractive option for urban water system improvements, there are also many issues related to daylighting. One of our engineer’s Adam writes, “While it’s easy to tout the benefits of daylighting from an academic or professional perspective, American municipalities often get caught up on fiscal constraints, searching for exaggerated untruths to defend inaction. Benefits vary depending on the location and scale of the drainage network, what habitats are associated with the stream, the local climate conditions, existing stormwater management conditions and infrastructure, and the scope of the daylighting project.”

Recently San Francisco has pondered upon the thought of using daylighting throughout the city, which would relive stormwater runoff pressures and would expose watersheds to the public. Show your support for the use of daylighting in San Francisco by attending the next community meeting here.

I am pleased to officially announce that my first published book about Sherwood’s work, “Sustainable Infrastructure: The Guide to Green Engineering and Design”, is being published by John Wiley and Sons and will be on store shelves this September! The book is a complete guide to integrating sustainable strategies into infrastructure planning and design, and it has been literally two years in the works. To give you a brief preview of what the book will contain, here is the table of contents:

Chapter 1: The Process of Applied Sustainable Engineering Design
Chapter 2: Sustainable Infrastructure Frameworks
Chapter 3: Water Conservation & Supply
Chapter 4: Integrated Water Management
Chapter 5: Energy and Greenhouse Gases
Chapter 6: Sustainable Site Planning, Built Systems and Material Flows
Chapter 7: City-Scale Approaches
Chapter 8: Applications for Sustainable Communities
Chapter 9: Building-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure

There will be two book launch parties, to be held at the AIA in San Francisco and New York City. For these events, which we are calling the Sustainable Infrastructure Summit, The Sherwood Institute and other sustainable infrastructure leaders will come together to host a forward thinking discussion. There will be a reception with a discussion and Q&A. We hope that you can save the date to attend these events and celebrate with us!

September 14, 2010:
AIA NY Panel Discussion + book signing reception
536 LaGuardia Place (in the Hines Gallery)
NY, NY 10012

September 22, 2010:
AIA SF Panel Discussion + book signing reception
130 Sutter Street (in the Gallery)
San Francisco, CA 94104

We hope you can make it, since in addition to these being fun events you won’t want to miss, you will also be the first on your block to see (and buy) the book in person. You can also pre-order the book on Amazon or direct from Wiley.

- Bry

Davis Street between Jackson and Washington streets in downtown San Francisco is currently undergoing a renovation. This urban space which is privately owned has traditionally been used as a corridor for pedestrians traveling to and from Market St and the downtown area to the waterfront properties. This space is also the entrance to the parking structure for the Gateway living complex as well as a drop off for a restaurant. This combination of private and public use has created an opportunity to transform this site from a difficult and hazardous experience to a new open urban plaza. The design team of RHAA landscape architects and planners, Endres Ware structural engineers, Ned Kahn artist, CMS fountain specialist, Pankow Construction and Sherwood Design Engineers were challenged by the property owner to develop a space that invites pedestrians, allows for integrated vehicular traffic and creates a space for the public and private.

The site improvements will include a relatively flat seamless pedestrian friendly plaza space, a unique stormwater collection, conveyance, treatment and groundwater infiltration system integrated into the tree planting zones and an art feature to highlight the uniqueness of the space. The stormwater system was designed to meet LEED credit 6.1 as dictated by the new San Francisco Stormwater Guidelines for Combined Sewer Areas recently adopted by the city. The runoff from the site will be separated into four microsheds, with the two larger sheds discharged into sequential hydraulically connected planter beds that will receive the stormwater, treat through plantings and amended structural soil and then infiltrate into the favorable sandy soil below the site. This system was designed to handle at least a 2 year 24 hour storm event.

We plan to upload daily photos of the progress of this project. At completion we hope to have a flip-book of the construction of this project! We hope you will follow along, and if you pass by the site,  email us your pictures! (press@sherwoodengineers.com)

July 30th 2010

July 28th 2010

July 27th 2010

July 22nd, 2010

July 21st 2010

July 20th 2010

July 16th 2010

July 13th 2010

Last week one of our Engineers performed the final punch list walk through for the first phase of the Presidio Sustainability Center in San Francisco, which you may remember reading about here. This facility will be the home of the Seedhouse and Nursery Center, which will ensure the survival of California’s native plants in the Presidio and the Golden Gate National Parks. The center will be used for collection, incubation, germination, and growing of California’s native plants. California has up to 5,800 native plants and most are in rapid decline due to pressures from urban sprawl, agriculture, overgrazing, recreation impacts, and invasive non-native species. A majority of these plants are endemic to California, meaning they can only survive in California’s climate. The Seedhouse and Nursery Center is the first phase of completed work which is part of a planned Sustainability and Stewardship Center. This facility should be in full operation within two weeks, after obtaining an occupancy permit. Below is a rendering that we developed of the future build-out conditions and pictures taken on-site. Hopefully you can see the resemblances between the build and planned design.

Presidio Nursery House

Rendering of Presidio Seedhouse and Nursery Center

Sherwood’s work for the Presidio Sustainability Center was featured in the SF Chronicle last week:

“A new state-of-the-art seed and plant lab opened Wednesday as the new home for the workers and volunteers pushing to return the Presidio’s landscape to a vision of California’s past. The lab at Fort Scott includes an area for cleaning, sorting, drying and storing the native seeds and spores brought in by the nursery’s collecting crew, as well as an adjoining propagation lab where the seeds can be planted and started before they’re moved to the greenhouse. The new lab and its adjoining greenhouse replace the huge, battered World War II-era metal warehouse that housed the Presidio’s nursery center until it was condemned and demolished last year.”

Read the full article (and note Sherwood’s rendering of the site, which can be seen in the picture above) at SFGate.com.

Our project “Sausalito Residence” which features California’s first rainwater-harvesting system approved for residential use, is 1 of 5 homes featured on the AIA Marin Homes Tour on May 15. Read the full article at SFGate.com here, more details are also in this article on the Houzz blog.

Liquid SPACES non-profit and Sherwood Design Engineers invite you to see the work of Andrew Merriss, a talented young painter working in oil on wood panel. Merriss’ work is bold and original, and shows the maturity and innovation of an artist well beyond his years.

The newly installed show titled ‘CARBONMIX’, featuring Merriss’ most recent large-scale work, is currently on display at our One Union Street exhibition space. Please save the date for our Opening Reception & Party on Thursday, March 4 from 5:30-8:30pm. We will have food, drink and live music.

Our last event in October, a fashion show fundraiser featuring the work of five young fashion designers, as well as a book signing and speech by Tobias Scarpa, brought together more than 200 people, alongside more than 30 volunteers.