Screenshot of Green Design Atlas (courtesy City of Portland)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Perhaps the best compliment a person can give the City of Portland's new interactive online Green Design Atlas is to say, 'You mean there wasn't one already?' It's the kind of basic, easily accessible data and explorative tool one expects there to be but often finds missing.
Such was the case five years ago when architect Tony Tranquilli, now of Portland firm Waterleaf, was asked to give a green building tour. "I’d only been here two or three years. I didn’t have the project history," he recalls. Soon Tranquilli, along with wife Alison Tranquilli (an architect with Scott Edwards) and a group of other volunteers, set in motion a collaborative effort to create one, attracting interest quickly from the design community and the city, first the AIA/Portland Committee on the Environment, then the Cascadia Green Building Council, Ecotrust, and the Bureau of Plannning and Sustainability. Metro and the Portland Development Commission soon climbed aboard.
But a green design atlas could mean a lot of different things. Where to begin? What would the definitions and parameters be?
"The number one thing was to map anything you have to have solid data. One of the questions all of us worked on trying to determine was, ‘What was needed? What does the community need? How do we go about finding that data? How do we create a database?’ All those questions were tied to how we were going to share this with the public," explains Analisa Fenix, a cartographer for Ecotrust who became a key author of the map. "There were so many questions about audience and regional scale. And we didn’t want it to be static, a snapshot in time. We wanted it to be able to expand and grow as the industry grew."
Launched last month, the Green Design Atlas (GDA), is an online map showing an inventory of local innovative, green-certified commercial buildings in the Portland metro region, including Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington Counties. The idea is to provide a one-stop resource for developers and design professionals to market sustainable buildings and share data, thus helping to stimulate market transformation.
Part of the initial challenge was timing. The idea took off just as the American economy was crashing in 2008. So plans evolved, from a site that existed on its own to one hosted by the city.
"We’d had funding from Metro and PDC, but it was just enough to get us going and pay for some key things to be done," Fenix adds. "The figure we were going to need to put the full website into gear was not going to be possible. We just kept going, kept to the grindstone, but we had to start to evolve like the rest of the country to the new reality. The funding doors were closing. What other options could we take through partnerships?"
Even so, the handful of volunteers who started the effort were driving the atlas's creation. But there was a lot of learning on the fly. "None of us have built websites. I think it was a good and a bad thing," says designer Brian Peters of architecture firm Western Design Group. "We would have slapped something together and had something up much sooner that way. But because we didn’t have that expertise, we spent more time thinking about what we liked and didn’t like."
Screenshot of Green Design Atlas (courtesy City of Portland)
The initial phase of the atlas charts Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified buildings, with other green building certifications and search filters to follow. "We didn’t want it to be a LEED-centric endeavor. It’s only a small piece," Tranquilli says. "There are so many facets that are great to be able to search on. LEED is the first cog." The idea is to have the atlas go beyond architecture, too, with landscape design and other related designs.
Even though it's a big part of my job to be aware of new architecture in Portland, particularly if it's a highly rated sustainable design, I still found the map educational. In my own Hawthorne District neighborhood, for example, I knew of the LEED Gold-rated River East Center by Mackenzie near the Hawthorne Bridge, as well as The 20, a LEED Gold-rated mixed-use apartment building at SE Hawthorne and 20th by GBD Architects. But I didn't know about the LEED Platinum-rated Mint Dental Works project, an interiors design by Paolo Design Group at SE 14th and Morrison. Talk about "filling" in information.
The volunteers wrestled with how much to make the atlas site fixed information and how much interactivity to allow. "Our original concept, we liked the idea of a wiki-oriented, user-friendly site. For especially small architecture firms, it could be a marketing tool to put your project on the site.
"The first time I gave the entire Excel spreadsheet to everyone, I looked at it and we were past column ‘ZZ.’ I think the first count was like 270 projects. So it was a lot of data. Everyone was like, ‘Whoa, this is too much data for us to be in charge of,’" laughs Peters. "But in wanting to have some sort of wiki aspect to it, the idea is that now that we have at least the LEEED information kind of in hand, it would just be people who go to the site and want to offer up revisions because it’s not correct data. For whatever reason. That makes it a tolerable amount of work to do. It’s not that you’re looking at thousands of cells that needed to be updated continually. We’re hopeful the public will want to participate and it’s not just us doing the research."
Though the heretofore five-year volunteer effort that helped lead to the Green Design Atlas now enjoys funding and resources from the City of Portland and the other involved partners, its creators hope to do more.
"This is a massive database that we’ve started, but we only wanted to create a framework that could be built upon and expanded by a much wider base: the architects and people on the ground actually creating the sites," Fenix says. "The collaborative nature is one of the largest veins running through this project. I think part of our hope was if it was live and it was growing and evolving as things were happening on the ground, other designers would be inspired.
At the same time, Fenix cautions that the Green Design Atlas we see today is still in its beta-release phase. "We’re doing that somewhat of clumsy first step where we’re looking for user feedback. We think we have a pretty good idea of what the community wants, but now we’re at that turning point, which is essential for longevity, to see. If we’re not, we want to refine it. We can use the funding we currently have and look for more to continue to tailored it. It has to be tailored and it has to be up to date, and it has to have a location where it’s resting that can be maintained. You have to have a lot of volunteers to make a project with this many goals to thrive."
Advertisement
Cool! Very valuable info. Will add this info to the tours I give for the AHC. Lots of work putting that together. Came across a couple buildings where the color of the flag didn't seem to match the LEED designation. Also, don't think I saw the recently opened Edith Green GSA building on the map. Always some tweaking to be done on these things.
Posted by: Ellen | July 26, 2013 at 07:13 AM