Photo Courtesy of Brian Libby
The News is out from Portland Architecture:
“For all of Portland’s leadership in the field of sustainable design, the city and its architecture firms have been continually on the outside looking in when it comes to the biggest national architecture prize for green buildings, The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment’s Top Ten Green Projects list”. Read the full article.
SERA Architects plan to cover Portland's main federal building with an eco-facade.
Portland, already famous for its green cityscape, is about to become even greener. The city plans to makeover the austere concrete of the main federal building by adding a facade of plants that will rise vertically along the exterior. The proposed project was recently featured in The New York Times showing that Portland and the green architecture trend is catching national publicity.
The “vegetated fins” would cover up to 200 feet of the western side of the building. An eco-facade of that magnitude would, in my opinion, certainly surpass our own wind turbines as downtown’s most grandiose display of green architecture. The vegetation would bloom in the summer, creating cooling shade, and die back in the winter to allow sunlight into the building. Hopefully, we will soon see a notable uptick in projects like this one. I believe that the city could seriously benefit, both environmentally and aesthetically, from a trend like this. I look forward to eating lunch in the park looking up at a building like this. Here’s to a greener city.