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

Sherwood has been asked to present two panels at the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Washington, D.C., September 10–13. More than 6,000 landscape architecture professionals from across the U.S. and around the world will be gathered together to earn up to 21 professional development hours, enjoy the fellowship of our profession, and reconnect with the fundamental elements of design.

For the panel “Global Exchange: The Best Sustainable Codes, Standards and Policies” Bry Sarte will present alongside Jim Heid of Urban Green, Mary Muzynski of the Trust for Public Land, and Mark Spalding from The Ocean Foundation. For the presentation “Redefining Water Management: Landscapes and Buildings Under Water” John Leys will be joining Joan Krevlin from BKSK, Judith Hientz of WRT and dlandstudio’s Susannah Drake.

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.

The ASLA Sustainable Sites Initiative is an interdisciplinary effort by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden to create voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices. The new initiative is similar to LEED accreditation but it focuses on the site, which is not a big focus in current green building/development accreditation programs.

Sherwood is involved in several current projects that have submitted applications for the 2-year pilot program. We will be notified in late April whether these projects have been accepted and will of course keep you apprised as to what happens. Until then we encourage you to learn more about the program.

Sherwood’s Bry Sarte was interviewed for the January, 2010 of AIA’s arcCA magazine. The five page long piece is called “Changing Practice in Civil Engineering.” The interview is not yet posted on the AIA web site but we will link to it when it is up. In the mean time here’s a sneak preview from the article:

Q: What is the current state of sustainable practice in civil engineering?

A: Sustainable infrastructure is still evolving, both as a definition and a practice. At this point, nearly every civil engineering firm has a sustainability menu among its offerings, but, I would argue, these offerings are not often integrated with the overall practice.

Storm water management and water resource are among the most forward thinking areas of civil engineering – states and municipalities are beginning to make changes in this regard, with some states now requiring rainwater harvesting. There is also tremendous will to change the energy system with smart grids, wind farms, biofuels, and pilot projects for other innovative advances. But change needs to happen first at the regulatory and code level. Without new codes in place, many sustainable systems cannot easily become widespread.

Sherwood is currently supporting design and project management duties for a joint venture project between the Presidio Trust and the Golden Gate Park National Conservancy (GGNPC). This project is currently sprinting along in design, permitting and bidding. The scope entails the site improvements required for the implementation of a green prefab building donated by Zeta Buildings along with the fabrication of 2600 sf of greenhouses.

This facility’s purpose is for seed preparation, propagation and establishment for all native plant species used in the parks. Its timely completion is critical for the uninterrupted Native Nursery operations who provides all plantings for restoration work done in the GGNP and the Presidio. Any break in this operation or delay in the seed propagation and seedling establishment will affect the overall growth, advancement and health of the natural resources in these parks. There is a very tight window for deconstruction of the existing Habtarium and construction of this new facility.

This project is just the first step for the future Sustainability and Stewardship Center which will be a model for sustainable systems, especially through Water Resource conservation with a closed loop water reuse system relying on little to any municiple water.

The latest issue of The Architect’s Newspaper has an article on one of Sherwood’s projects, New York’s Olmstead Center. Click here to read the full article.

Sherwood Engineers in Architects Newspaper article on Olmstead Center

West Coast Green is this week in San Francisco, and I am honored to be among the distinguished list of speakers at the event. I will be co-presenting a panel on Integrated Water Systems with Paul Kephart from Rana Creek and Andy Mannle this Friday, October 2, at 11am. The panel we did last year, “The Sexiest Large Scale Water Design Applications We Have Ever Seen”, was S.R.O. So they’re bringing us back for an update, which we’re calling (somewhat less racily) “The Whole Pitcher.”

Also at West Coast Green, Sherwood will be participating in the “Greening Fort Mason Design Slam.” The event was created to brainstorm design strategies and practical ideas for the continued evolution of Fort Mason Center as a leading environmentally sustainable destination. I will be facilitating this charette this Friday October 2 at 12:30pm along with a number of great minds from WRT, The Grove Consulting, Van Meter Williams Pollack, Solutions and PEC. You can read more about it here and register to attend the conference here.