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.

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

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July 22nd, 2010

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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.

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.

Controversy has been brewing in Ottawa over a proposal to turn a brownfield site into a stadium, to be called Lansdowne Live. John E. Martin, an Ottawa businessman, has invited Sherwood Engineers to join a group of politicians, government officials, architects, developers and community leaders to a private breakfast meeting this Thursday, Aug. 27, to discuss the situation. Sherwood will be presenting a case study based on our experience turning a brownfield site into a stadium in San Francisco. We will let keep you updated about the project as the dialogue continues.

Daylighting urban streams has long made sense aesthetically, but now the environmental, traffic calming, and air pollution benefits can be quantified based on new studies of the famous Cheonggyecheon running through downtown Seoul.

From the New York Times:

Cities from San Antonio to Singapore have been resuscitating rivers and turning storm drains into streams. In Los Angeles, residents’ groups and some elected officials are looking anew at buried or concrete-lined creeks as assets instead of inconveniences, inspired partly by Seoul’s example.

By building green corridors around the exposed waters, cities hope to attract affluent and educated workers and residents who appreciate the feel of a natural environment in an urban setting.

Environmentalists point out other benefits. Open watercourses handle flooding rains better than buried sewers do, a big consideration as global warming leads to heavier downpours. The streams also tend to cool areas overheated by sun-baked asphalt and to nourish greenery that lures wildlife as well as pedestrians.

But four years after the stream was uncovered, city officials say, the environmental benefits can now be quantified. Data show that the ecosystem along the Cheonggyecheon (pronounced chung-gye-chun) has been greatly enriched, with the number of fish species increasing to 25 from 4. Bird species have multiplied to 36 from 6, and insect species to 192 from 15.

The recovery project, which removed three miles of elevated highway as well, also substantially cut air pollution from cars along the corridor and reduced air temperatures. Small-particle air pollution along the corridor dropped to 48 micrograms per cubic meter from 74, and summer temperatures are now often five degrees cooler than those of nearby areas, according to data cited by city officials.

And even with the loss of some vehicle lanes, traffic speeds have picked up because of related transportation changes like expanded bus service, restrictions on cars and higher parking fees.

“We’ve basically gone from a car-oriented city to a human-oriented city,” said Lee In-keun, Seoul’s assistant mayor for infrastructure, who has been invited to places as distant as Los Angeles to describe the project to other urban planners.

A new report by DesignIntelligence surveyed architects about their interest in sustainable design. Their 2009 Sustainable Design Survey drew data from architecture and design firms throughout the US.

Here are the Top 5 Individuals cited as role models of green and sustainable design:
1. William McDonough
2. Ed Mazria
3. Bob Berkebile
4. Amory Lovins
5. Barack Obama

The list of Top 5 Firms cited as role models of green and sustainable design includes many of the architecture firms we partner with:
1. HOK
2. Perkins + Will
3. BNIM
4. Kieran Timberlake
5. (tie) Arup
5. (tie) Mithun
5. (tie) William McDonough + Partners

It’s encouraging to know that even in tough economic times, the push for sustainability goes on, and that these successful architecture firms recognize the importance of partnering with sustainable engineering companies like Sherwood Design Engineers.

Local water supply in rural India from the New York Times

• Dr. Nocera at MIT is reserching the ability to capture energy through photosynthesis, so that we can harness solar energy at night
• A cap and trade system for carbon emissions is looking like it is gaining consensus as the best option for  accounting for externalities of pollution, but how much will it cost our society?
• More on green schools, this time talking about “the halo” system that enables natural light to shine into the classroom even on cloudy days at Da Vinci Arts Middle School in Portland, Oregon
• Design your own graywater capture system!
• Google tackles office greening in London. Best way to increase recycling? Take away trash cans at individual desks.
• How can a hotel go green but still cater to visitor needs? Take a hole out of the soap bar…
• A new analysis report was released recently, showing that India could face a severe water supply problem if they do not change their usage patterns soon

Check out these awesome street ‘redesigns’ from the GOOD Livable Street Contest. There’s lots of ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of how people would redesign their streets to make them more walkable, breathable, and permeable. While some of them would likely face technical challenges, they represent a good slice of the ideas out there for making better streets.

The contest is closed now, but due to the overwhelming volume of responses, they’ve given the judge an extra week to pick a winner. Check back May 18th for an announcement……

Treehugger brings word of the new Z-Competition: Re-skin old buildings to make them zerofootprint. Or at least, come up with scalable designs for retrofitting older, energy-inefficient buildings to reduce their consumption and improve functionality.

The competition will be judged on the aesthetics, energy efficiency, smart technology, return on investment and potential as a solution for a large number of buildings.

Like the X-Prize, this isn’t just a design competition. Five finalists will be chosen, their designs implemented and monitored over three years. The Z-Prize ca$h will be given to the building that has most reduced the energy per square foot.

Retrofitting existing buildings is one of our most pressing global challenges. It’s the most bang for the buck, the most quickly implemented, and with billions and billions of square feet of building stock out there, could represent a serious dent in carbon emissions.

The competition welcomes teams from all over the world.The deadline for the submission of designs is September 1, 2009.