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Industrial Site Conjunctive Points, Culver City & Los Angeles, CA
TEAM MEMBERS
Landscape Architecture Graduate Students: Eileen Takata
Architecture Graduate Student: Jennifer Zurich PROTOTYPE This is a typical light industrial area that is currently being redeveloped as a technology and arts district. The existing site has a 95 to 100% stormwater run off rate and very high heat gain due to extensive paved and roofed areas (98.5% of the total site area). SITE PROFILE The Conjunctive Points site is located at the intersection of Jefferson Boulevard and National Boulevard. The site sits at the juncture of Culver City, a thriving middle-class community, and south-central Los Angeles, an under-served area. The site location is convenient to the 10 and 405 freeways, downtown, Hollywood, Century City, Santa Monica, LA airport, and the South Bay. A bikeway extends from the beach to the site, and a greenway is being constructed along an abandoned railway located at its edge. Ballona Creek, a major flood control channel draining approximately 70,000 acres into Santa Monica Bay, runs through the west edge of the site. The Conjunctive Points project will rebuild this under-used industrial area so as to unite the arts, science, and entertainment industries in a visionary mixed-use community of innovative work-space, theaters, exhibit spaces, restaurants, and parks. The existing buildings range in age (1920s to 1990s) and size. Presently, a total of 360,000 square feet of building space has been redeveloped for private use. Several thousand more square feet are currently on the drawing board. An example of the type of future development that can be expected in the district is the award-winning new business center located in the charrette project area and designed for developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith by architect Eric Owen Moss. The charrette project site is comprised of a 27-acre portion of the overall redevelopment district. There are fifteen former industrial buildings located on the charrette site. Roofs and impervious pavement cover approximately 80% of the site, while Ballona Creek accounts for 19%. Green space is limited to around 1% of the project area, although a small city park and school are located directly to the northwest of the charrette site. SITE DESIGN PROPOSALS Since this site is in the midst of dramatic change, aspects of which are quite unpredictable at this time, the design team opted to provide generally applicable plans and prototypes, rather than detailed site-specific recommendations. The plans and prototypes reduce stormwater run off and heat gain, repair damaged plant and wildlife communities, and enhance the local urban community. The plan works with the existing buildings but also anticipates major changes to the site, as is illustrated in the Conjunctive Points master plan. The charrette plan is based on the existing site and building locations with reference to the current Conjunctive Points masterplan for the Culver City site. Minor modifications to the proposed density and site organization include the addition of approximately 90,000 square feet of warehouse, light manufacturing, and residential uses along Corbett Street. The following specific recommendations could be applied to other industrial sites in the Los Angeles-area as well as to the Conjunctive Points site. Green Planning: Green Policy The charrette team made several overall planning and redevelopment proposals:
Cistern Walls The design team located storage tanks for holding roof drainage adjacent to building exteriors. Above grade tanks such as these are less expensive to install and repair than are below grade tanks. The tanks, or cisterns, could either be installed immediately or be phased in along with future renovations to existing mechanical and plumbing systems. The tanks may be located along the south or west building face to provide some shade, although care must be taken not to prevent access to daylight or to render interior spaces less livable due to obstructed views. The team suggested that tanks like these are capable of collecting and re-using 100% of the stormwater that is now drained off existing flat roof areas. The water may be suitable for site irrigation or, after some treatment, for domestic use (depending on the quality of the rain water). Green Screens The team proposed installing green screens, or narrow strips of trees or vines on trellises that are fixed to building walls and roofs, to provide shade and to reduce heat gain around the building. Stormwater run off from surrounding streets and paved sidewalks can be channelled directly into narrow planting areas alongside the building walls where the green screens are rooted. A secondary mechanical irrigation system of soaker hoses monitored by rain sensors will irrigate these areas during dry periods. Green Creeks The team proposed to modify the existing flood-control channel on the site in order to increase flood control capacity and to provide a recreation space close to water. They suggested that, if this approach were to be followed throughout the region, then flood storage capacity would be significantly increased and recreational access to freshwater amenities would be found closer to neighborhoods. In some instances, it may be possible to create wildlife areas that are contiguous with the city's existing and future green corridors. The goal of these types of "green link" projects is to establish a new urban landscape that will provide a clean and more balanced environment for both people and animals. A range of options was explored by the charrette team. These options included making breaks in the existing concrete channel to allow for regraded vegetated areas; removing pavement and utilities around existing channels; and partially reconstructing parts of the site, using permeable materials such as gabion walls and vegetated areas. Parking Orchard This team retained many of the existing parking areas, but improved their ecological function. In some areas traditional asphalt paved parking bays were proposed. These lots were graded to direct storm water to rows of landscaped islands located between the bays. These landscaped islands act as filter areas that clean the first-flush water from storms occurring early in the rainy season, before the pollution laden water can migrate to the subsoils beneath the parking areas. Shade and/or fruit trees are also planted in the islands to shade vehicles and to provide food. The paved parking areas would be graded so that the centerline of each isle would be substantially higher than the centerline of each green filter island. This would allow for the parking bays to be partially flooded to hold large amounts of water during a flood emergency while not restricting vehicular access. In other areas, the team proposed gravel surfaced parking areas rather then asphalt. Gravel lots are far more permeable than asphalt and are also less expensive to install. These gravel lots would be shaded by trees planted in an orchard-like grid pattern. Salvaged steel pipe (with an inert non-toxic finish) could be used for bollards to control where cars park and to prevent damage to trees. Many other recycled materials and designs for tree guards are possible. SUMMARY The design team was easily able to exceed all of the performance thresholds set out in the charrette project requirements. In fact, they could have developed the site with a higher density of building use and still have met the project requirements. Highly cost-effective above ground stormwater storage tanks can be used on such sites, where there is ample space and where they can easily be integrated with existing architecture and site uses. The rain water stored in these tanks is appropriate for irrigation; for most industrial purposes; for flushing toilets; and, with some monitoring and treatment, for drinking and hand-washing. The challenge for the redevelopment of this site concerns the potential to affect the water quality and overall environmental health of the region outside of its boundaries. For example, the opportunity to affect the environmental function of Ballona Creek was integrated into the design team's rather modest proposals. The proposed treatment of the large, open, paved parking area could easily be modified to suit other parking areas in retail areas or at other industrial sites throughout the region. Many of the green screen proposals can be adapted to fit almost any building - from a single-family residence to a large warehouse. These simple structures, designed to shade building exterior walls, could provide the inspiration for the transformation of Los Angeles and its neighbors. Thus this region - known by the world as the land of the parking lot - could, in the future, become known as the land of the garden. CONSTRUCTION BUDGET The charrette team provided a rough construction budget for the proposed work, rounded in 1997 dollars, as follows: All proposed site improvements, including parking, planting, graywater irrigation system, filter beds, subsurface infiltration area = $3,000,000. Construction Contingencies (30%) = $1,00,000. TOTAL ESTIMATED COST OF CONSTRUCTION: $4,000,000. Note: Professional Design Fees for engineering and landscape architecture will be required. The plans are very conceptual and cannot be used to develop a basis for a design fee allowance. BENEFIT ANALYSIS The following benefit analysis provides a cost value per year; per thirty years; and a total value over thirty years for remediation of the entire property. This information was provided by the charrette team in 1997 dollars.
CONCLUSION The plans you have just seen make a convincing case. They answer our original question-does it make sense to treat every site in our region as a mini watershed-with a collective and emphatic "Yes!". They illustrate how, in so doing, the benefit to our region may be far greater than the cost. We believe that these plans successfully demonstrate not only that the apparently separate issues of water use, air pollution, solid waste management, energy use, water pollution, and flooding are in fact all connected, but that they are all connected at the individual site. We believe that these plans also suggest that improving the environmental performance of individual sites, and thus of our region as a whole, will require more than the usual amount of cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary cooperation and co-ordination between those people and institutions who are responsible for the different pieces of the environmental puzzle. We hope we have illustrated, for the benefit of our citizens and interested parties and groups, what a city comprised of more sustainable sites would look like. We think that such a city would not only protect our shared environment, but would also lift our spirits. The capacity to inspire is sorely lacking in our region, but inspiration is precisely what we need. We feel that these designs provide tantalizing glimpses into how a more sustainable city could also be a city we could enjoy more, and in which we could take pride. But of course this PLANbook is just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. Much more work is still needed. First, it almost goes without saying that proposals such as these are only effective if they are broadly applied. For instance, more than half of our region's sites would need to meet the performance thresholds suggested for flood-control in order to obviate expansion of our flood control infrastructure. As part of this widespread implementation strategy, many of our building codes, zoning regulations, and engineering standards would need to be revised. These regulatory mechanisms, which most often are designed to ship environmental problems off sites to be "fixed" by central authorities (if at all), must be changed so that we deal with as many problems as we can right on sites. But before taking this unprecedented step, the systems, strategies, and devices for accomplishing this improved performance must be tested, adjusted, and improved. We are proud to have a demonstration site for doing exactly that for a typical 50 foot x 150 foot residential lot; however, other demonstration projects are also needed. Projects are needed for school sites, industrial sites, multi-family sites, small-scale commercial sites, large-scale commercial sites, and residential streets. It is also very clear that since sites only cover slightly over half of the land in our region, with the rest being covered mostly by roads, that a second project, one that focusses on the design of streets, is needed. We are confident that our roads and rights of way could be built or retrofitted to ensure dramatic increases in environmental performance. Finally, citizens, home-owners, builders, and government officials need to be supplied with educational tools. These tools must clearly explain how environmental devices and systems should be built and maintained. Virtually no educational tools appropriate to the Los Angeles region exist at this time, and they are desperately needed. This planbook advances a very different way of thinking about how we build our sites and, thus, our cities. Minds will not be changed overnight, but they will change. This change has already begun. With over 150 million dollars from the "Proposition BB" rehabilitation bond now available, over 400 schools are slated for campus redesign and repaving. Consequently we now have a chance to provide a whole new generation of schoolchildren with this new way of thinking. We can use this redevelopment initiative to teach them how their campuses function as urban forest watersheds. We hope that students can then use their new skills to discover any problems stemming from how the water on their campus watershed is handled, and suggest strategies for solving them. Students will then use BMPs, like the ones identified in this book, to suggest how to retrofit their campuses. Their ideas will be used by landscape architects who will formalize their design ideas into real construction plans. Once the heavy construction is complete the students will return, facilitated by TreePeople staff and trained volunteers, to plant new trees and greenery on their campus, in most cases replacing pavement with greenery, and thus beginning the long-term process of caring for the land as "campus watershed managers." Education and understanding are the key to this new way of thinking. Fortunately, the arguments in support of more sustainable sites become stronger every day. The costs of separately managing environmental problems at the "end-of-the-pipe" is clearly too high. Many people in various fields are beginning to re-examine the most basic assumptions of their disciplines because, clearly, something is not working. It seems that the more concrete we pour and the more money we spend, the more problems we create. We believe, and most people agree, that concrete is part of the problem, not part of the solution. We also believe, and most people agree, that the solution lies in large numbers of people taking small steps. The solution lies in working with, rather than against, nature.
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