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29 Aug

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Peninsula College parking lot selected for Sustainable SITES pilot study

August 29, 2010 | By |

SITES-PilotProject-Mark-CMYK

Nakano Associates are working together with Schacht Aslani Architects and KPFF Engineers on Maier Hall,

a new Humanities and Arts building at Peninsula College. As part of this project, the design team looked at how to improve way finding and circulation at the main entrance to the College. The goal was to provide a welcoming entrance, safe pedestrian and vehicular circulation and to meet the current stormwater requirements for cleaning and detention. What started out as a drab large parking lot without identity and sense of place…

Peninsula College Parking Lot Nakano Associates…now provides an inviting and safe entrance with planting beds with trees that provide shade and natural drainage systems (bio filtration swales and rain gardens) that clean runoff from the parking lot. Vegetation includes Pacific Northwest native plant material that helps to anchor this place within the larger context of the Olympic Peninsula.

Peninsula College Parking Lot Nakano AssociatesWe are excited that the parking lot recently was selected for the SITES™ pilot study. SITES is a program developed by the The Sustainable Sites Initiative™ . It is an interdisciplinary effort by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden to create voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices. It is a rating system similar to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for site development and part of the system will eventually be incorporated into the LEED rating system.

During this fall we will document and write guidelines following the SITES system with the hope of being one of the first SITES certified projects by spring of 2011.