Springfield Ecological Energy Demonstration
“Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles.” -David Suzuk
The Springfield Ecological Energy Demonstration (SEED) is located in Springfield, Oregon, on an old industrial site: Booth Kelly. Booth Kelly currently embodies a problematic situation, where ecological habitats, industrial production, and the city all intersect each other. This has created detrimental interactions, where industrial waste degrades ecological health, and the city is unable to interact or access the site itself. As a result, it becomes important to rethink waste and the processes that occur on site. This project identifies the hidden potential behind industrial processes, such as brewing, and how the biological waste of brewing can be used to fuel energy production, and then, how energy production by-products can be used to benefit ecological and public systems. By creating these relationships and interactions in a well-designed manner, industrial, ecological, and communal functions can begin to interact in a symbiotic manner, instead of harming each other. This way, the proximity of different elements becomes a beneficial proximity, rather than a harmful one. The specifics of the program involve brewing and food production, energy production, a luxury hotel, spa, and a large grand hot bath. These elements allows SEED to become the bright new future that Springfield, Oregon, so desperately needs.
This project is being entered into the Post Capitalist Work design competition through Collage Lab, a competition that is focused on re-evaluating how we formulate our relationships with industrial production within the city.
At the heart of this project was an attempt to visualize and understand how waste can be visualized as a larger ecosystem that can become interconnected with other processes. So, in effect, waste can be eliminated when it becomes re-imagined as a resource for other program elements. As a result, something as simple as making beer can become fuel for a vital process, such as generating energy and heat for the City of Springfield, and then in turn, the by-products of this relationship can be used to support natural ecosystems. This then not only becomes a new way to understand energy plants as a new public center, but as a way to formulate new relationships with the waste we generate.
At a site scale, the project takes the initial energy of development, and invests it into making this unique place, shown in red above. In effect, by creating a powerful destination, various other businesses have the potential to infill and feed into the existing system, generating an entire world centered around bio-waste as a resource, leading to various businesses that become a social and economic benefit, while fueling the biomass cogeneration energy plant. Such businesses include:
“The paradoxical challenge is to simultaneously create simplicity and variety, diversity and coherence. In other words, to create a city in the building.” -Bjarke Ingeles
An East-West Section through the key building, showing the filtering light through the main space, and how the east end opens out to the wetlands. The grand space beneath the suspended hot bath becomes animated by light filtering through the water and the floor of the pool. The animated space becomes the core that connects all of the various building elements, interlinking brewing beer, food vendors, luxury hotels, cafes, and a spa and hot bath, around this central circulation space.
“Our goal is a delightfully diverse, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil, and power – economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.” -William McDonough
A section perspective, showing all of the different interactions between the various elements, and how they all exist within a close knit space that allows for beneficial relationships to arise. By understanding the size of cogeneration plants as a commodity, rather then a challenge, various elements begin to increase value of the structure. Such elements include:
The hot bath on the roof is the key destination - no where else in Oregon will anyone be able to get a view of the hills and the city while enjoying the therapeutic elements of the spa and bath.
In the underbelly of the building, people will be able to observe and see the complete industrial process of making beer. A chance to sit down and truly understand the making of beer, from beginning to end (and the afterlife that extends into energy production). Bathed in hot steam that emits from the pipes that run about the place, the environment becomes a new industrial aesthetic.
The key perspective, showing the main open space below the hot bath, with light filtering through the water. Pipes are flying over head, going from the brewing and food production on the right, to the energy production on the left. There are also luxury hotels located above looking down on the processes happening below.
The following images below are of the final model, showcasing many of the elements described above in a physical, realized form.
“The single and most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.” -Malcolm Gladwell
