Perkins+Will‘s VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre in Vancouver, BC is designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous set of requirements of sustainability. Formally and functionally, it encompasses the goals of environmentally and socially conscious design. The building is an undulating landscape of interior and exterior spaces rising from ground to roof level and providing a vast surface area on which vegetation could grow, thus reoccupying the land on which the building sits with the landscape. The building also features numerous passive and active systems that reuse the site’s renewable resources and the building’s own waste.
More photos after the break, including a video about the project!
White Rock, a small surburb outside of Vancouver, Canada can now boast to having the largest green wall in North America thanks to Green Over Grey, Vancouver, Canada-based company that design and install green walls (also known as living walls). The once bare 3000 square foot wall is now a lush garden of a wide variety of plant life. It is located on the facade of the Semiahmoo Public Library and RCMP Facility.
MCM Partnership has shared with us their design for the Great Northern Way’s new campus building, the Center for Digital Media. Follow after the jump for additional rendering, graphics and a description from the architect.
The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is on track to open in the summer of 2011. CIRS aims to be the most innovative and high performance building in North America, a “living laboratory” where professors, students and partners demonstrate leading-edge research and develop sustainable design practices, products, systems and policies. The building will push the frontiers of sustainable construction materials and building techniques. It will draw much of its heat from the ground, electricity from the sun, ventilation from the wind, water from the rain–all while reducing the university’s energy use and carbon footprint.
