by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: Dockside Green is a mixed-use, masterplanned development in Victoria, B.C., that will be completely LEED® Platinum-certified. Despite its ambitious sustainability, its understated architecture doesn’t go out of its way to flaunt these goals.

How do you … design a leading-edge sustainable community in a rapidly developing and architecturally conservative market?

At the Dockside Green master plan development in Victoria, B. C., there are groundbreaking applications of alternative energy strategies and unprecedented regulations for buildings sustainability, but its designers at Busby Perkins + Will say that getting the plan’s elements to work as more than the sum of its parts was more challenging than making any single technical innovation come together. Because its sustainability strategies operate as a closed-loop system that recycles waste into fuel stock for other systems, calibrating the links in this chain became the foremost design challenge.

“Quite a bit of time was spent upfront making both the site-wide plan service the individual phases as well as making sure the individual phases could plug into the site-wide [plan],” says Robert Drew, an associate partner at Vancouver-based Busby Perkins + Will.

Acres of platinum
If it holds true to its design intentions, the 15-acre Dockside Green will exist at a level of sustainability that is currently unmatched in the world. All of its buildings will be LEED Platinum-rated and carbon-neutral. Parts of its 100,000-square-foot first phase have already earned the highest LEED score ever—63 out of 70 points, besting the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Wisconsin by two points. Its 150,000-square-foot second phase is likely to do the same when it’s finished in early 2009.

When the entire master plan has been built in 10–12 years, it will contain 1.2 million square feet of townhouse, low-rise, and tower housing units—enough for 2,500 people. A mixed-use development, it will also contain 70,000 square feet of commercial space, 80,000 square feet of office space, and 20,000 square feet of light industry. Carola Beloborin, Dockside Green’s director of development, says no final budget has been compiled for the project yet, but that costs have not dramatically increased due to the use of sustainable building practices. Drew estimated the cost of the first two phases at $45 million each. The project’s developers, Vancity and Windmill West, will sell units for $250,000 to $1.2 million, including affordable housing units.

The site of the development is on the coast of Vancouver Island on a former industrial brownfield that had been mostly vacant for nearly a decade. The primary organizing device for the long, narrow site is a manmade, landscaped stream and greenway that defines the north-south axis of the project and cuts through its center. The native landscaping includes birches, maples, ferns, and shrubs. This stream ends at a public plaza and amphitheater in the southern-most section of the project.

The work of sustainability
Dockside Green’s sustainability approach encompasses simple recycled materials and complex energy generation processes. Most notably, the plan calls for an on-site biomass gasification plant that turns biowaste like sawdust, leaves, and other yard waste into a clean-burning gas, which is then used for hot water and heat. It will also be burned to drive turbines that generate electricity, thereby making the development carbon neutral or even a potential exporter of alternative-fuel-produced electricity. Using biowaste as a fuel source is a natural fit for the area’s logging industry-heavy economy. “There is a lot of biowaste in the Pacific Northwest, and this is a perfect opportunity to get rid of it, or manage it in a way that generates power,” Drew says.

The development’s wastewater filtration system may be its most visually prominent sustainability feature, but many visitors and residents may not realize what they’re looking at. A series of on-site filtration chambers, filter ponds, and the stream that runs through the center of the plan will remove pollutants and return the recycled water back to the site, creating a closed loop of water efficiency. In a dual-tracked system, blackwater and graywater will be dealt with separately, and blackwater will emerge as nearly potable graywater. This, along with water-flow restrictors, will save 70,000 gallons of water a year.

The concrete used in the buildings will contain 40 percent recycled fly ash. And wood from once-submerged logs are part of the design. Many buildings will have sedum and shrub-seeded green roofs as well as hydroponically fed modular green exterior walls.

Residents will have extraordinary abilities to observe and control how their units consume energy. An Internet-based program will let them set energy consumption levels from home or anywhere else. This feature will be tied to automatic solar window shades that raise and lower according to user-defined performance parameters.

Dockside Green is also being developed alongside the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development program, currently in a pilot phase, which will extend LEED into how entire communities are formed. “A lot of LEED for Neighborhood Development is being formed by the experiences we’re having from Dockside Green,” says Drew.

Aloofly green?
Most of these sustainability features don’t express themselves, literally or abstractly, in the architecture of Dockside Green. In a literal way, a few features (the cedar slat panels on the townhouses, bright blue solar window shades, and central axis greenway and stream) are obvious signifiers of green, but, for the most part, the project’s design doesn’t call attention to itself or adopt a figurative language of eco-friendly design. Its understated and subtle parti is unconcerned with melding its forms to any subtextual statement about sustainability’s role in contemporary culture.

The four buildings that are part of its first phase (a nine-story tower, two-story townhouses, six-story tower, and four-story residential building) are deferentially Modern in a New Urbanism, suburban office park kind of way. The towers are rounded and vaguely ovular to offer needed street level façade relief, and the cedar-clad townhouses have warm, faceted connections to adjacent waterways, but neither finds a way to tell potential buyers: “I am perhaps the most sustainable real estate venture on the planet.”

Drew says this modest, unassuming approach was born out of pragmatism specific to the development’s real estate market and its generally conservative architectural tastes. “A lot of Victorian architecture is just that,” he says.

Though some of Dockside Green’s first buyers were attracted to it specifically because of its emphasis on sustainability and the project’s marketing materials are intensely detailed and green-specs heavy, Drew says making sustainability an expressive part of the architecture would have gotten lost in the rest of the details of purchasing a home. “They struggle to understand a floor plan, let alone anything else.”

In the development-hot Pacific Northwest, entire residential towers of 300 units sell out in a few hours. When the first phase of Dockside Green went on the market in December of 2005, 85 percent of the units sold in three hours. In this climate, Drew says, it’s not worth it for architects and developers to invest in subtly grand gestures of expressive sustainability.

“I don’t think [buyers] know what they’re looking at when they bought it,” he says. “There’s absolutely more interest in the relationship between the suite and the views. Everybody wants a corner suite. Nobody wants to be back against the elevator.”

And optimally placed suites they shall have. From this viewpoint, the technical achievements of Dockside Green may be overshadowed by the victory of getting thousands to sign up for a more sustainable lifestyle without truly realizing it.