by Jason King
Under development is a project along 38th & Division in Portland, Oregon – an infill mixed-use apartment complex developed by Urban Development Partners and designed by Francis Dardis with a range of sustainable features. A few renderings of the proposed project gives you a feel for the style, which provides a modern twist along this southeast Portland street. The major features include moving an existing house to the back of the property, and a split building that spans overtop a community courtyard that drifts through the property.
The project includes permeable paving and flow-through planters to accommodate stormwater management, which is beneficial as the project is within a combined sewer overflow (CSO) area, so additional measures were taken to relieve the pressure on the City infrastructure through this development as part of the Stormwater Management Manual. The challenge in meeting all of these requirements is to avoid stormwater becoming a problem and to treat it as an opportunity. A view of the site plan shows additional features that add to the vibrancy of the project, including artwork and landscape beds integrated through the site. In addition, the project is getting additional funding from Metro to provide innovative development approaches, which added some great ideas to an already cool project.
The canopies around the perimeter of the project will include vegetated planters to soften the building edges and provide an amenity from street level as well as from units. The following sheet shows the configuration of these ‘Green Canopies’ along with their detailed specifications and locations.
Another feature is a living wall that will surround the trash enclosure area, turning what could be a difficult area into an amenity. The design will use a custom metal fabricated system of vertical trays that will hold growing media and a number of perennials and herbs to provide color and texture throughout the seasons.
On the south portion of the property, we are incorporating a number of habitat art elements, including areas for mason bees, hummingbirds and songbirds, micro-invertebrate habitat areas, and a bird-bath feature, along with interpretive information.
The habitat is closely aligned with the site plantings, which is densely configured along the south of the property and includes screening and a large flow-through planter which will include a number of habitat-friendly species that provide shelter, food, water, and other inputs to a range of insects, birds, mammals, and potentially amphibians or other species. For a small site, this concentration of planting area creates a significant patch, especially due to its adjacency to the Ivon Community Garden.
A visual matrix of species associations shows the benefits that come from the site features, and it is interesting to note how particular species are beneficial to multiple different types of habitat from invertebrates to birds and mammals. It will be fun to see the the success of the site in attracting wildlife through art and landscape as it matures.
The site is currently under construction, and additional features are being developed, so stay tuned for updates.
In this class, a combination of architecture and landscape architecture students are going to blend theory with on the ground techniques related to large-scale, landscape-focused urban analysis, planning and design. The major technical components will focus on GIS mapping and using this as a tool for multidisciplinary design, as well as studying the agency of mapping (a major tenet of landscape urbanism theory) as a tool for communication and organization of complex spatial information.
