This project, dubbed Project Sustain Urth (PSUrth), is optimizing the involvement of the collective social networks within the participating organizations to generate social capital around the following project concepts. The project will also enhance the working linkages between Portland State University, City Repair and the Portland Office of Sustainable Development. This will set the stage for future student-led sustainability projects. A longer term goal is to integrate sustainability into the broader fabric of the university's educational mission. There is no question that future generations of university graduates must be fluent in considerations of sustainability, and this project has the potential to catalyze and unify the various sustainability initiatives currently underway on campus.
This natural building project demonstrates “place-making”, a key but underutilized tool for achieving sustainability through the development of community.
The oven will be used primarily by PSU's Food For Thought Café, a student-initiated & maintained café focused on locally grown and vegetarian cuisine. As the oven will provide the café with freshly baked organic bread and pizza, it will encourage ecologically-responsible and localized food consumption as well as being a wondrous display of natural building technique and beauty. The oven will bring a great sense of pride to PSU students, and will promote creative dialogue, engagement and collaboration. Convectional heat produced from the oven will be captured and transported into the adjacent cob benches, to provide heat. The natural tendency of convection, in this case rising heat, necessitates the oven be graded approximately 3 feet below the ground, in order to induce the most efficient cogenerational exchange.
The benches will be constructed around the oven, facing both outward to the park, and inward to the oven and Dialogue Dome. These structures will be built to be easily accessible and utilized both by individuals simply walking by, and by those whose destination is engagement amid the space. Reasonable exposure to the construction steps will be left unfinished, allowing visitors to see the processes evolution from the ground up. The benches, resting upon a foundation of locally reclaimed bricks, will be durable yet hospitable, whimsically playful, and artistically engaging, bursting with color, sculpural integrity, and salvaged mosaic media.
The groundwork will be multi-functional, through construction of a (Fibonacci-style) spiraling stone pad that allows for (modest) vegetation growth and stormwater permeation. The ancient spiraling effect is meant to be engaging, and draw the participant's vision to the groundwork form, where they will quickly notice that a space need not be 100% pavement to be safely navigable.
The intent of this sheltered structure is to provide a shared eco-space for the PSU student/professor and administrative community, to thoughtfully dialogue on issues surrounding the advancement of sustainable development especially, the impacts to the ecosystem of conventional building. Local, regional, and world-wide natural buildings will also be highlighted within their cardinal orientation and distance from the spiral's epicenter. This structure will also support the most encompassing living roof on site, while offering brilliant daylighting through a central skylight. Contained within the arching Dome overhead will be a visual and written history of the communities previously located within the PSU area that were displaced during the expansion of the institution.
We envision a wide-ranging demonstration of various greenroof construction techniques, from locally available materials like earth and straw, to cutting edge recycled and recyclable lightweight materials like metal alloys and rubber membranes.
Continuing with the goal of multi-use structures, these cascading shelters will serve to display locational information regarding likely destinations of campus travellers. It will help replace or complement the Campus Map at the current preferred location. It will also serve as an icon to the commitment and vision of PSU & Portland for a more responsible and ecologically-harmonious urban presence.
The regeneration of the planting strips around the periphery of the structures encourages an edible food garden primarily inhabited with herbs, as they represent edible gardening while having a lighter maintenance demand than a traditional vegetable garden. This garden will be maintained by Food For Thought and will have integrated cold-frame structures that will provide a year-round growing environment.