Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[ Thunderclap & Rain ]
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
Good morning.
Glad to see you all here.
I've put together some images that have inspired me.
So despite what I say and yammer on about at great length,
look at the pictures because they're worth a thousand words.
And these are things that I've looked at and considered
when considering different things to do
with water in general.
And one thing that's important or a good point
to remember is that rainwater is just water.
We're looking today at rainwater which is
in the hydrologic cycle, precipitation.
But I don't think we need to just focus on that.
It's-- rainwater is just a name of a particular point
in time where water expresses itself falling from the sky.
It concentrates, it flows,
it erodes and it goes
through several different permutations before it does the
whole thing all over again.
So-- and this has been going on for quite a while.
So long, in 1959, Beatrix Farrand didn't even know
that she was designing an evaporation garden
when she designed the Pebble Garden at Dumbarton Oaks
and this is-- what I'm driving at is rainwater is water.
You can use it as a resource
and there's beautiful ways to express it.
And this used to be part of a fountain
that was pumped mechanically.
That system has long failed,
but it's now rainwater that activates this piece of artwork.
And the same thing in the 17th century
that Shah Jahan built this nice little memorial
for his wife, Mumtaz and he also built an
evaporation garden.
So you can attach different expressions to different parts
of the hydrologic cycle, so this is just as effective
as a bio soil for example.
It's just a different part.
We're focused on the precipitation.
Well, this is also a part of that natural cycle.
As is this, this is a groundwater garden
that Richard Haag designed at the Bloedel Reserve
at Bainbridge Island and this is no different
than the evaporation garden or a rainwater garden.
This is a groundwater garden
and it's just using a different--
it's defining expressions differently.
Here is a ground spring in Brooklyn that was long hidden
by vegetation and things and was only recently discovered.
And then we look at this and our perception is, "Well, OK,
that's a-- gosh is that a sewage overflow, or you know,
it doesn't look so nice.
Shouldn't it be more precious than that
in an urban environment?
Is it the same thing as this?"
I think we need to talk about what our perception
of water is, or storm water or rainwater
and that it's not just something that's polluted
and needs to be controlled and manipulated.
But it needs to be revered and sanctified
and people's perspective on it needs to change in order
to bring about a different approach to storm water
because that's what we're doing right here today is changing
our perception of what rainwater is,
that it's not all bad storm water,
that not all rainwater erodes and creates floods
and so on and so forth.
But that it's something that we need to pay attention to
and design around and design with.
This is probably a '20s era.
This is in Canton, Ohio, a way of expressing storm water.
This is all storm water again.
So it's beginning-- you're beginning
to see an artful expression of storm water.
It looks like it could be pumped and re-circulated
and all that, but it's not.
It's just storm water.
Similarly in-- when you [inaudible] spaces
between architecture and landscape architecture,
water can be used as Carlo Scarpa did in the Brion Cemetery
to isolate architectural elements to sort of sanctify them
by making islands of them, connecting structures,
merging the architecture with the landscape,
these are all important different ways of putting meaning
to water and giving them--
giving a special reverence for its presence.
This is a baptismal, also by Carlo Scarpa.
It-- just its form, the vessel that carries that water.
Now, this is just water, but rainwater is just water
as is groundwater, as is evaporation, as is transpiration,
as is vapor, as our clouds, snow, ice, and all of that.
It's water.
And here, we're seeing how special something designed for it
to try to give water a form, adds to its meaning,
in this case for a cultural meaning religious meaning.
It's holy water.
As is this.
This sort of drives the point home this--
you know, was there a designer involved in this?
Does it really look holy, does it look revered?
It says holy water.
But it only looks like a very devout plumber looked
at this with interest.
It's interesting.
If we actually transpose the meaning of some--
you know, this looks like everyday expression of water.
It looks like a public drinking fountain.
But if public drinking water was--
did carry a meaning of sacredness or holiness,
just think what we think about flooding waters
in the Mississippi, that it's holy and revered
and that it's renewing and replenishing our soils
and that it's taking away bad things and bringing new
and we'd have a whole different perception.
I don't know if that's making any sense or not,
but you really have to look at how we perceive things.
This is a [inaudible] design for a baptismal
that is [inaudible].
It's-- So it's-- water gets meaning from the container
and the way we handle it.
McIntyre Garden by Lawrence Halprin
in 1961 also handles water in the very interesting way.
This could just as well be water--
storm water, collected storm water.
It could be runoff from this residence's driveway.
It's also an expression that is ephemeral.
You could not have that water there
and the design still comes through.
So you can't have-- in fact, I was just in Washington,
D.C. a few weeks ago and none
of the fountains were functioning yet and it's like, gosh,
I never realized how many memorials were so dependent
on water as an integral sacred element
and should they not be designed
where they aren't dependent upon that.
Similarly, in Beijing, China, I worked on a project,
almost every project you see there uses water
as an organizational element.
So you have this 92 acres of housing
and they're big residential blocks of apartments.
But there's a spine of water that they like to sort
of group things around 'cause it's--
it is revered there a little bit more, I mean,
it is seen as an essential life quality element.
But I thought it was also sort of not very practical
because there's water concerns in Beijing already
and so I convinced them not to have
that as an artificial water pump re-circulated treated
feature but to retreat
and capture all the storm water off their housing blocks
and take it down into the central spine
and have the ephemeral bodies of water that when were--
when they were dry, they were usable
and when they were wet, they were features.
Water is free.
Rainwater is free.
In Portland, rainwater is-- or water is very expensive.
I'm moving out to the country so I get to go
on to a well system where rainwater which I equate with--
or storm water and groundwater is cheap.
It's just a pump away.
So I'm gaining a different respect for water and I think
until you design with it, try to manipulate water
and understand its myriad forms and expressions,
until you try to grapple with that and you try to design
with it and you screw up, then you start respecting it,
even at 10th and Hoyt,
the project you might be familiar with.
We had to go back and retrofit some of the water features
because it didn't move like I thought it would.
And so you always have to model your projects.
Herbert Dreiseitl is a great one for, you know,
full scale mockups of his water expressions
and that's critical.
It also shows a little respect that water has power
over your successor.
But it could also be a lot of fun.
Historically, people have made fun of it.
They have made it a little scary,
a little scary there-- rainwater.
In Portland, there's Ethos Cultural Music Center
and they have this wonderful downspout that actually moves
and functions and generates a rotation
that plays a music box inside this device.
Going back to that, it's really no different.
This is sort of a modern day Villa d'Este water organ,
if you're familiar with that.
It's all gravitational water running
down through this garden that creates sound
and through a piping system that creates an organ sound.
And this is a modern day sort of a Villa d'Este.
In Las Vegas, the Bellagio, we all know that one.
It's a little too dependent upon solenoids.
Here's another expression that's a scrim,
sort of a stage scrim and a backdrop
to a social environment.
Or maybe you need to catch it before it hits the ground.
Here, this is in Mexico.
The-- I don't know if you know Las Pozas.
It was designed by Edward James in the '50s and '60s
and these are sculptural elements that mimic natural forms.
But here, you're catching water way up in the air, 20,
30 feet up and you have aquatic plants up there,
sort of artificial trees up in the air.
Another great idea.
So, these are just different expressions
and different ways you can mold and play with storm water.
Or you can actually take the direct serious
rainstorm runoff.
This particular stream is ephemeral depending on the season.
And it comes down, great waterfall
and Edward James created this fantastical water display
where it comes down and falls into pools and goes over weirs
and runnels and gets collected and then moves on
and down and splashes.
And people come in here and play, and you can sort of see,
it's performing a duty here.
You have the-- that first base
and it's beginning to silt in.
So, it-- you can have that central experience
of actually being in that water, playing in it,
swimming in it, but it's also collecting the sediment
if it needs to be collected and in creating that sort
of a fantastical space.
Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti does something similar
with great reverence.
He's collecting the storm water off the roof of some
of these structures built in the '70s.
And in this case, it comes falling off the roof
and there's sort of a waterwheel element here that's missing
but it would rotate the waterwheel and then it would go
down to a cistern and then it was actually piped
and the same storm water would pop
up in another part of the garden.
So you have to play with these ideas.
Here, in Arizona, it doesn't rain all that often
but when it does, you want to activate it and make it sort
of interesting and also save it for use.
Or in Dresden, there's great things you can do
with downspouts, little whimsical.
It doesn't necessarily-- it displays storm water.
It doesn't obviously--
or apparently, it doesn't detain it a whole lot
so there's not a lot of mitigation value there.
But it's a certainly interesting display.
As is this Buster Simpson up in Seattle,
a lot of different downspout situations
where little P traps collect enough water
to sustain little bunches of sedge.
But those were some of the ideas I went through in my mind.
First of all, gosh, what is rainwater?
Is it any different than any other type of water
at which it-- really it reacts the same way?
You can manipulate it similarly.
Is it anything special,
do you have to do anything special with it?
And we had this project of a courtyard and with the support
of the architect-- the prime architect, he--
they really wanted to do something interesting
with the storm water.
So we decided to take all the roof,
the 32,000 square feet of roof storm water and take it
into this 8-- 7,000 square foot courtyard.
So we looked at how to take the storm water off,
collect it on the roof, funnel it down
and do something fun with it.
Well I thought, how do you do that?
It's not always raining in Portland.
And if you make something that's activated by storm water,
then it's only activated, you know, some of the time,
maybe more often than in Phoenix but still only some
of the time and how do you retain the interest
of storm water when it is flowing and keeping interest
for that space when it's not flowing.
And what landscapes traditionally do the most
with the least.
So I looked at Persian gardens that really collect water
in a very-- that's very scarce at some seasons
and how they collect it using [inaudible]
and jubes and other devices.
This is an aerial of underground--
hand-digging underground aqueducts that lead
to these gardens on the edge of the [inaudible].
And this is an example, so you have these,
hand-dug tunnels from the foothills.
All this storm water comes down, it goes underground
and porous soils, but they dig down to that water table
and they redirect the water to these gardens,
and run it through there.
And sometimes, it's just a trickle, sometimes it's a river.
And so I looked at what types of devices they use
to exploit the lowest runs of water.
This is a chadar that's used for low flows of water.
It's scalloped like fish scales
but in opposition to the water.
So it activates the water, it turns it into white water.
It makes a noise, nice shore sound.
And it's also beautiful to look at.
Then I looked at other devices like this
where you have little niches where candles are put
into the wall and lit up at night.
And you have sheets of water that fall
over those candle niches.
So you have backlit water
and then you have fountain sprays coming up in front of it.
That's like, "That's interesting, I could work with that."
And that was some of the ideas that I started
with for my ideas at 10th in Hoyt.
This-- I went to Morocco, these aren't from Morocco.
There are off of Google.
But I went to a little oasis south on the border
of the desert in the Moroccan desert on the edge
of the dunes and you see all these different ways
of irrigating where water is precious.
So you know, they gather it.
They have to concentrate it and collect it.
And it's precious out there,
so they have a reverence for it.
So I started thinking about these runnels
and I made little concrete casts of various types
of channels with different variations to try
to piece them together and see how I could make--
apply some of these ideas to 10th in Hoyt.
So, these are actually some photos from the project.
And you can sort of see here, I did a 90-degree turn.
And originally, I just had this runnel here sort
of budding in to this runnel.
Well, it was such a flow--
and that's another thing, trying to calculate flow
of water off a roof.
And the head that it gains while it's going
down the downspout.
We had to add some precast pieces here
so this water wouldn't shoot beyond the runnel.
So you learn a lot about water dynamics
and then we have a low flow channel here.
So high flow, we might have water flowing up to this point.
Low flow, it gets concentrated at,
you know, smaller channel.
So you can graduate the size of your devices and you start--
I guess I was going back to the chadar.
We looked at a larger sample.
This is a full scale cast.
I made this cast out of the formwork out of foam core,
half-inch foam core.
But it was to full scale to see how a person,
a precaster could precast a runnel in a way I had
to simplify it obviously in the end.
But it's a fun way to understand how
to construct these things as well and what it takes.
My plan was to set tiles on each one of those things
to bring some color into it.
And then we built models to try
to simulate the central downspout.
The main downspout here, there's a downspout,
there's one here in the corner, and another one here.
And how do you bring that into the space and still provide
for circulation through it?
And it's like mechanics-- and the cost, oh my god, you know,
this is going to cost a lot.
I won't use my usual expression.
But it turns out that it doesn't take a lot.
This cistern that we have on the project,
which I'll just pass this up here for a second.
So this is the main downspout.
It comes down, goes into a system that carries
about 40,000 gallons.
It's-- This is all over a parking garage, keep in mind.
And I'm not storing water 'cause state health code would
come after me.
So I'm-- it's actually an extended detention pond
where I took drill and drilled-- Tom's laughing.
A little hole in the stand pipe, the overflow pipe.
So technically, this water is always moving
and always draining out.
Therefore, I'm not collecting it,
therefore I don't have to clean it, I don't have to scrub it
down with detergents and I don't have
to drain it to a septic system.
So there are little ways you can get
around some of the rules here.
But anyway, this is a typical flow on a rainy day.
It comes down, you keep it out of-- it is quite--
it's about three or four feet deep that cistern.
It's made out of Caltite concrete
so it's a hydrophobic concrete mix.
And it's kept out of people's touch,
so you don't have that issue to deal
with from a state health code perspective.
And there's the final precast chadar thing reminiscent
of the Persian gardens, another picture.
A plan view, so there's the central thing, the cistern,
and these are recirculating.
So I have a very simple 139-dollar float valve sump pump
in the bottom of this cistern.
Goes on when it rains.
When we get enough water, it turns on, starts recirculating.
When the water drains down to that little pea-sized hole,
then it stops functioning.
So it's an extended play sort of system.
Here we have-- these are very shallow filled
with granite river rock, very large ones.
And they supply some detention,
but they're my evaporation gardens.
This is an extended version of Beatrix Farrand Pebbles--
Pebble Garden where there's just a very shallow bit of water
that sort of highlights the rock, the texture, the color,
and then it overflows and into the other system.
Now, this isn't a completely 100 percent treated water.
It's essentially a giant detention system.
It's not for water quality that's handled
by conventional Stormscepter filters
in the basement of the structure.
But that system could be downsized.
So there was about a 30,000 to 35,000 dollar cost savings
for this project because they didn't have to handle
so much water at peak flows.
Yup? Time?
Oh, boy. So anyway, here're some photographs of the project
and I kept the texture going and the planting going
because it had to retain interest during times
that the rain wasn't flowing.
And then I also used this idea from the Persian gardens
of backlighting some of these fixtures.
This is all Corten steel that's penetrated
with glass buttons.
And it creates again another type of chadar system,
borrowing from history.
And it's still pretty well kept today.
I think that's about it for my time.
These are more recent photographs.
Anyway, that's about it I think.
That's not fair.
[ Applause ]
>> I think 10th in Hoyt was a Trammell Crow project.
>> It was Trammell Crow,
but it was actually a partner developer
that really pushed Trammell Crow to look beyond.
>> What has been the response
from the client or other clients?
Have people noticed?
And said, "Hey, I want one of those too."
Or if they basically ignored you?
>> No, the response has been good.
Actually, the most important response
from the developer's perspective was marketability.
This project gained so much interest
from prospective apartment.
This is an apartment building, not condominiums.
But from prospective ranchers that they thought it was--
it really improved their marketplace,
in a very competitive market.
Also, we're currently--
I mentioned that one of the criticisms was
that those planters weren't flow through planters.
Right now, we're working on a project very similar to this,
a lot of the same elements,
but they will be flow through planters.
So you have a total of 100 percent storm water treatment
in a similar situation.
So there's-- so we're doing two things there,
we're creating a better marketplace for the developer
and then we're treating storm water more diligently.
>> I just wanted to comment, Steve,
on the acoustical qualities of that space
that you've designed.
>> Oh thanks, you know.
Oh, you want to talk about it?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Laughter ]
I'd rather you talk about it.
Well it-- you always have interest.
I think the great thing about water is
that it's a very sensual thing to work with.
You can feel it, you can smell it, you can hear it.
And in that particular space, because of the recycling
of the rainwater, you always have that sound
of a little water feature happening there.
And that in itself is inviting.
You notice the plan was sort of a central courtyard
or in a donut and there's just a breeze way that goes
through the building to get to this courtyard.
And you really sense the water auditorily as you pass by
and it draws you into that space.
>> So, about-- I think you mentioned the recycling element--
>> Right.
>> -- that at a certain point,
it drains down and no more water.
>> Right.
>> So what percentage
of the year is there water that's active,
would you say versus not.
>> In reality or theoretically?
>> In reality, yeah.
>> There's always water there.
>> Yeah, OK.
So, it's not-- I was going to ask
if it was sometimes an issue
that people think something is not working or--
>> Right.
>> -- they aren't--
>> No, what really happens is that little pea-hole
that I talked about, it somehow gets plugged up.
>> OK.
[ Applause ]