Green Olympic Village to be socially sustainable too

May 29, 2009--The Millennium Water development on the south bank of False Creek, the 1,100-unit housing project that will serve as Vancouver’s Olympic athletes’ village, will certainly be environmentally sustainable, design manager Roger Bayley assures visitors.

A so-called district energy system will sop up residual heat from city sewer pipes to warm water feeding the vein-like capillaries in the development’s ceiling-mounted radiant heating system. (In the summer, those same capillary-mat panels can reverse, running cool water, to draw the heat out of homes.)

Buildings in the development will feature wider, naturally lit and ventilated corridors and thicker, more deeply insulated exterior walls, and exterior, automatic shading to keep units naturally cool in strong sunshine.

Unseen, drains will siphon rainwater falling on the project’s buildings into basement cisterns that will irrigate its copious green roofs and gardens in the summer and be enough to flush its toilets in the fall and winter.

However, beyond those features, which will combine to reduce Millennium Water’s energy use by 50 per cent and potable water use by 40 per cent (compared with its neighbours on the north side of False Creek), Bayley takes his visitors to the internal courtyard of the site’s Parcel 10 as the best vantage point to paint a picture of its overall sustainability.

Parcel 10 is still only dusty concrete, but here Bayley, with the firm Merrick Architecture, the planning firm for developer Millennium Development Corp., layers on images of what it will become.

Verdant gardens will be added, he said, including evaporative rainwater ponds that will act both to irrigate the shrubs and plants and cool the air on currents as they flow around gaps in the buildings designed to take advantage of air movement.

The courtyard is a perfect vantage point, Bayley said, to look up at the windows of the homes under construction, their proximity and how they all look out on this common space where neighbours can interact as a community rather than exist in isolation inside the towers.

“A lot of people think of sustainability in environmental terms only,” Bayley said during a recent tour of the construction site.

“They don’t think to take the next step of the social issue and what the social circumstance [of the development] feels like, and how those inter-relationships work.”
Notwithstanding Millennium Water’s environmentally sensitive features, that sense of community arising from residents’ ability to interact is a big element of what it means for a housing development to be sustainable.

Source: The Vancouver Sun (abridged)
http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

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Vancouver 2010