Light Bulbs

October 03, 2008 — In 2010 the Winter Olympics will come to Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. The athletes will live in an all-new, sustainable urban neighborhood. Denis DuBois toured the site, now under construction, with the man in charge of Olympic Village development and the surrounding neighborhood known as Southeast False Creek. (photos) Vancouver 2010 Olympic Village, now under construction, will be a sustainable neighborhood of LEED Gold and Platinum buildings. The home to 2,700 athletes in 2010 will become home to over 10,000 residents after the Winter Olympic Games. The skyline of Vancouver’s North False Creek high-rise development is echoed across the inlet by a forest of cranes erecting the new Southeast False Creek neighborhood. The facing waterfront communities will share the trait of having been built for world-class events. (North False Creek was designed and built for the 1986 World’s Fair.) Considering its role in the Olympics and the high volume of green-building activity in one location — 6 million square feet — SE False Creek has gained precious little international attention. This will be a community of 10,000 people, and every building will meet or exceed USGBC LEED Silver. Sixteen of the buildings in the community will be completed in time to serve as the athlete’s housing and amenities during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, explains the City of Vancouver’s Ian Smith. He is the Manager of Development for SE False Creek and Olympic Village. Time to stop talking and build Southeast False Creek is an industrial brownfield. The site would be mostly underwater, were the shoreline not filled in years ago for industrial development. Ian Smith, Manager of Development for Southeast False Creek and Olympic Village, explains the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Village within the larger Southeast False Creek sustainable neighborhood. The foreground models aren’t melting — they’re skewed by design — and are preliminarily targeted for Canadian athlete housing during the Games. Of 80 acres, 50 are city owned and 30 are privately owned. The City of Vancouver started planning for the site around 1985, while still topping off buildings across the water for the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication. At the time, Vancouver planners thought their city would blossom as the office capitol of Canada. They debated whether to continue the style of the Expo ‘86 buildings — tall blue glass-and-steel towers with pedestals — or to develop something different. Instead of heating up, office expansion froze. That gave an advantage to proposals for a mid-rise residential community for this site. By 1995, high-ranking city officials declared Vancouver a “sustainable city.” After four more years of investigation, the city issued a policy statement describing its goal — to build SE False Creek as a model for urban sustainability. In 2004 the debate and discussion suddenly gave way to action. An official development plan opened the door to proposals from developers. And Vancouver won its bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. “We believe the goal of urban sustainability for this site was a factor in Vancouver’s selection as the 2010 Olympic host city,” says Smith. “The Olympics decision made us stop talking.” A model for urban sustainability At the time, the USGBC was but a few years old. (The commercial-oriented LEED rating system in the United States had spawned the short-lived LEED BC, which eventually gave way to the Canadian Green Building Council.) “We believe the goal of urban sustainability for this site was a factor in Vancouver’s selection as the 2010 Olympic host city.” –Ian Smith, City of Vancouver, of Development for Southeast False Creek and Olympic Village. “We really didn’t know how we were going to secure better performing buildings,” says Smith. Drafting the city’s own guidelines would take too long for agreement and interpretation. The city finally made LEED Silver the minimum requirement for the site. All three short-listed developers proposed that all buildings meet LEED Gold. One developer was selected. Buildings within SE False Creek will meet LEED Gold, except one. An affordable housing building for seniors is designed to be a net-zero-energy building and LEED Platinum. Ian Smith leads a group of architects, developers, urban planners and visiting city officials through the 2010 Olympic Village construction site. In the background: one of the two skewed structures. Whether looking at the detailed model in Smith’s office, or walking through the construction site, the buildings are an impressive sight. “There was a real debate over what residential buildings that are LEED Gold look like,” Smith recalls. “Do they look like commercial green buildings, all metal and glass? There was a desire to develop a residential model, and a Vancouver model, for green buildings.” The buildings include green roofs that are attractive, create spaces for community gardening, and mitigate some of the runoff issues that come with converting a site to impervious surfaces. They have exceeded the 50 percent green roof requirement. Rainwater will be captured and used to irrigate rooftop gardens; the excess will be stored in cisterns and used for flushing toilets. A district heating system captures heat from sewers. The warmed water flows from heat exchangers into insulated pipes that lead to radiant panels in the ceilings of the units. Thicker walls will afford more insulation, and the developer won an exclusion for the resulting loss of marketable living space. Together the buildings form an attractive waterfront neighborhood. SE False Creek is a pilot site for the new LEED for Neighborhood Design rating system. Transportation is a serious consideration in a sustainable urban neighborhood, and SE False Creek has plenty of options. “Residents could choose to live in this neighborhood and not have a car,” says Smith. A car-sharing program is one of the required amenities here. SE False Creek lies at the convergence of three pedestrian-bicycle routes. The city’s electric bus system will serve the site. The Science World rail station — a major urban hub for SkyTrain (light rail), Via Rail and Amtrak — is within walking distance. A proposed streetcar line could connect the neighborhood to the station and to Vancouver’s trendy Granville Island shopping district. Giant light fixtures are dwarfed by the Southeast False Creek buildings behind them. Because the Olympic Village is on the waterfront, this public walkway is being built all at once, instead of a piece at a time. Olympic Village Within SE False Creek, poised on the waterfront, is the 1.4 million square foot Olympic Village. These 16 buildings will house 2,700 athletes during Vancouver 2010. The ground-level units will serve as facilities for training, dining, healthcare and other amenities for athletes. After the Games, these will become retail and restaurants. Athlete housing will revert to private residences. “Very little retrofitting will be needed after the Games,” says Smith. “There are hardly any internal petitions.” Residential buildings surrounding Olympic Village will be constructed after the Games. (Due to security requirements for the Olympic Village, those buildings on its perimeter would have to remain unoccupied during the Games.) Units within the Olympic Village are about 80 percent sold. Prices have ranged from CAD $600 to $1,100 per square foot, and averaged an impressive $900. The development is on schedule, says Smith. Some buildings will be handed over to the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee as early as December 2009 — just 13 months away. Related articles: ” Beijing Olympic Village Certified Green; Vancouver Seeks Twin Golds for 2010 ” ” Urban Sustainability in British Columbia Canada ” ” Dockside Green ” (residential sustainable private development in Victoria BC) Related links: City of Vancouver - Southeast False Creek and Olympic Village By Denis Du Bois at Energy Priorities

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Vancouver 2010 Olympic Village