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Feature from Environmental Building News
March 1, 1998
Getting to Know a Place:
Site Evaluation as a Starting Point for Green Design
The National Wildflower Research Center outside of Austin, Texas blends beautifully with the land on which it sits—a cluster of buildings connected by rich landscapes of native plants; rainwater harvesting to minimize depletion of the threatened Edwards Aquifer; walking paths through meadow, prairie, and woodland ecosystems; and carefully designed parking areas to filter and purify stormwater before it seeps into the ground. A thousand miles northeast and like many subdivisions outside Chicago, Prairie Crossing is being built on productive farmland. But unlike most, the homes here are clustered on just a small portion of the land, the rest being used in active agriculture or restored to the native tall-grass prairie that once existed here. And on the rugged Big Sur coast, Post Ranch Inn—the first commercial development in decades in what is one of the nation’s most anti-development areas—blends seemlessly into the environment, its modules of lodging rooms half-buried and barely visible to either hiker or the extreme winds that pound the hillside.
What these places share is a connection to the site. Their designs were integrated into the local ecosystem after careful study of what was there and how the natural beauty and health of that ecosystem could be protected, restored, and celebrated. This link between development and the land is all-too-often neglected. Indeed, landscape design is often an afterthought, a plan addressing which shrubs to plant that is developed after the building is completed (budget permitting), with total disregard for what the original building site offered to start with and what its ecosystem calls out for.
This article addresses what should be the first step in most green building projects (certainly those on “greenfield” sites): getting to know a place. This component of the development process should include, whenever possible, a landscape architect or designer. With or without such specialists, however, it is important for all players on a development team to recognize the importance of site evaluation and to understand the site planning and design priorities that emerge from this site evaluation. As landscape architect Walt Cudnohufsky, founder of The Conway School of Landscape Design, points out, we need to “give the environment a voice.” The following pages will introduce this topic, outline key components, and provide simple checklists that can serve as a starting point for ecologically integrated building and landscape design....
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