HAMMARBY SJOSTAD

The Hammarby Sjostad area, south of city center, was conceived in the early 90's as an Olympic Village for Stockholm’s bid for the 2004 Olympics. Stockholm staked their bid on a highly sustainable Olympics. They of course lost the bid to Athens. But watching the London 2012 Olympics planning unfold, they were clearly ahead of their time. Despite losing to the Greeks, Stockholm moved forward and invested heavily in the development to make it a test bed of new sustainable building system technologies. Now nearing complete build out, the development is one of the foremost research destinations in the world for developers, city planners and architects. 

Aerial from City of Stockholm

The environmental goals for the project were set in 1997, late in the design process.

• 75% built in public transportation at the start 
• 80% target for commute to work by means other than a car (actual is 79%)
• Be twice as green as other developments. In other words, lower the environmental impact by 50% (actual is 30-40%)
• Provide means for residents to work on site (8% actual is lower than expected).

Map from City of Stockholm (hammarbysjostad.se)

The master plan provided for 11,500 residences and 10,000 offices (28,000 people) on 204 total hectares, 171 of them on land. Construction started in 1997 and is nearly complete. The total cost to date  is 4.5 billion euros. Currently there are 20,000 people living on site. The development is quite popular among young families. So, of the total population, 15% are children under 16 years - a much higher percentage than expected or planned. Original plans called for 1 school and 1 daycare center. There are now 3 schools and 15 daycare facilities throughout the area.

The city leased or sold the land to numerous developer/design teams and built the project in phases. Public transportation was key to the success of the development. The car trips, parking and city access were part of the planning discussion from the outset. Currently there are 0.7 parking spaces per unit and nearly 80% of the residents commute to work by some means other than a personal car.

The technology in Hammarby Sjostad was, in many instances, so new that the systems have not been broadly copied. Only now is the city collecting the data on system performance to make it available for use on other projects. The data will be a valuable tool for Stockholm as they embark on the next major development at the Royal Seaport project. Preliminary reports are available on the project web site. It will also serve to refute or validate numerous energy savings, water savings and urban planning strategies for the building design and construction industry at large. As part of the Royal Seaport project, the city has mandated that the information be collected real time and shared within the city and abroad to further advance the public knowledge of sustainable technologies. 

As an ongoing educational resource, the project planned for an informational showroom for residents and visitors called GlasshusEtt. Its dual-glazed facade, solar cells and fin-tube heaters running on district heat from a bio-gas boiler make it an extremely energy efficient building by any standard. Through surveys, community outreach programs and seminars, the staff here have helped reduce water usage on site and impacted significant change in behavior within the development.

Below is a partial list of the sustainable solutions incorporated on site.

Water

•         Wastewater treatment plant that creates biogas for stove gas and city buses
•        Stormwater collection and on site treatment
•     Bio-deegraded sewer sludge is used as fertilizer and to make bio-gas

Fortum Energy's thermal power plant

Energy

•        PV panels on the roof of select residential buildings to produce power for common areas.
•        Solar tubes for hot water heating on select buildings
•         District heating and cooling from treated waste water
•      Bio-gas made as a bi-product of waste water treatment used as bus fuel
•      Bio-gas used for district heating

Waste

•         Below grade vacuum waste collection service for residential buildings
•      Waste is sorted for recycling into 4 fractions
•      Bio-degradable waste is composted and used as fertilizer or turned into bio-gas
•      Combustible waste is incinerated and used for district heating

Transportation

•         Bus and tram connection to local train station
•         Car share program
•         Minimal parking per unit
•         Bike and pedestrian friendly road system
•         Free ferry shuttle across bay every 15 minutes
•         Public access marina
•         Live/work development concept

Locks and salmon ladder

Ecology

•         Land bridges over freeway connect nature reserve to site
•         Reed bed in bay and along canal edges encourages bird habitat
•         Salmon ladder on locks

view to school and residences from nature reserve

Social and public health

•         Pocket parks, access to public nature reserve and ski area
•         Bridges, paths and bike storage promote walking and biking
•         3 schools and 15 daycare buildings on site

2012 OLYMPICS SITE - LONDON, UK

Underpinning the development for the 2012 London Olympics is a focus on sustainability. This strategy may well have helped London win the bid for these Olympics when they narrowly beat Paris back in 2005. In preparation for their Olympic bid, the London Olympics committee hired Bioregional and the World Wildlife Fund as sustainability consultants to craft "Towards a One Planet Olympics", a plan for achieving the first sustainable olympic games and paralympic games. They mapped out a strategy based on the 10 principles of their One Planet Living challenge. Once in motion, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) put in place a plan that included environmental testing, reporting and enforcement to ensure the team was tracking toward the goals. 

The site comprises over 2.5 km² (608.9 acres). This area served as an industrial and landfill site for the city of London. For the past 400 years waste has accumulated and contaminated the site. By the time this site was considered for the Olympics, development solutions had failed to pencil out due to the high cost of hazardous materials cleanup.  In preparation for Olympic development, contractors excavated and cleaned over 1.4 m tons of soil then reused it on site.  The River Lea and its tributary streams run through the center of the site. The river carried this contamination further downstream. The ODA transplanted thousands of reeds by seed to a nearby botanical garden, grew them and moved them to a wetlands area. Once fully established they then transplanted them again as mature wetlands to the Olympics site in 2011. Similar strategies were implemented to transplant native animals and insects and return them to the site. Indigenous plants were selected throughout the site to attract the local insects, and water fowl. The concept behind the landscape plan is restorative; bringing back a thriving biodiversity that predated the industrial habitat. The beauty of this solution is that it also reduces water usage and increases ease of maintenance. That is not to say that the landscape is wild and free - far from it. The plantings are native wild flowers that would, under normal circumstances, flower and die by midsummer. To grant the athletes and visitors colorful blooms in early August next year, the flowers were planted late in the spring season to encourage blooms well into the summer. If my visit today is any indication, the banks of the Lea will be blanketed in color for the opening ceremonies in 2012.

Site map from the London Olympics Development Authority

With more than 10 different rail routes serving Stratford Station, the site will be well served by the London public transportation network. And with all this investment in infrastructure, parking structures are not part of the mix. Visitors will have to leave their cars in the driveway for these Olympics.

The Venues

The Olympic stadium, velodrome, handball and aquatics arena are permanent facilities at the Stratford area site of the 2012 London Olympics.

With its elegant form and warm wood cladding, Hopkins Architect’s velodrome is sure to be the architectural sweetheart of the games. The bowl shape is expressive of the building’s purpose. A series of ramps and earth berms engage the building with the site. A wedge of earth is carved away leaving a prominent entrance. Londoners have a history of naming their buildings after whatever inanimate object it most represents – The Shard, The Gherkin, The Eye, etc. The velodrome is already being referred to as “the saddle” and it may very well stick.  

The Olympic Village will house 17000 athletes and officials. They are designed to be converted to apartments after the games. In order to house more people in less space during the games they were built without kitchens. The retrofit for future residences uses far less resources than building more than the market can bear to house the athletes only to tear them down once they leave. The Qatari ruling family’s property company must have factored this in. They recently bought the village for 557 million pounds.

With the aquatics arena Zaha Hadid finally had the chance to build something in her own back yard. Images for the ‘legacy’ building are fluid, dynamic and evocative – everything you would expect from Hadid.

Aquatics Facility Legacy Image from the London Olympics Development Authority

For the Olympics, the building is equipped with a temporary water polo structure at one end and grandstand structures on either side of the arena to provide 15,000 additional seats for fans and press during the games. They cost less than permanent structures, used fewer natural resources and are designed to be easily disassembled. Unfortunately, these saddle bag appurtenances are overtly functional and temporary and are a disappointing burden on the buildings elegant design.

Temporary Basketball Arena

I’m going to get on my soap box for a minute because there’s room for improvement in regards to the temporary structures. It’s difficult to argue against providing temporary accommodations for venues that will have peak visitation in their first month of use, then never see that number of visitors again. When a number of the so-called temporary facilities from the London Millenium celebration are still in use (London eye and Millenium Dome to name two) there is a strong case to also make “temporary” structures well-designed. International EXPO structures are another (albeit pricey) example. At the 2010 World EXPO Shanghai spared no expense for an event that lasted 26 weeks. Four of these pavilions remain on permanent display. If you are going to seek the brightest and best design talent and demand world class buildings for the permanent venues, why would you not demand the same excellence for the temporary structures? The Olympics are as much fashion statement as they are tourist venue. The venues should be both well designed and highly sustainable. The temporary structures at the Olympics are truly breaking new ground in sustainability. Consider this my personal plea to the designers of the 2016 venues – go one step further and make them look cool too.

Energy Center

The campus is powered by an on-site gas-fired combined cooling and heating plant (CCHP) with built-in flexibility to modify the fuel source in the future to renewable fuels as these become available. The waste heat from the power production is used for district heating. The heat will also be used to generate cooling via absorption chillers to the press building. Given that the athletic facilities will be used in the heat of summer, the measures for cooling these buildings are more relevant to consider. 

The Olympic Flame

Anish Kapoor designed the sculpture that will burn during the olympic and paralympic games. It is officially titled “Arcelor Mittal Orbit” after the man who financed the structure. Kapoor’s bean sculpture “Cloud Gate” at Grant Park in Chicago is ethereal and surreal. The images of his lens-like sculpture “Sky Mirror” in Rockefeller Center are also stunning. The Orbit isn’t complete yet, but this one left me a little uneasy, and according to Kapoor, that is the point. He designed it to look as if it were about to topple. I won’t try to explain, You can listen to him and judge for yourself. None of you asked for it, but my opinion is the size of the structural members are too heavy for the load they support. That could be part of the mystery. The piece has a way of drawing your attention and asking you to restore the balance. This is a departure from his previous minimal forms, but people will flock to this sculpture like they do his other public work. When they do, they will debate its merits just as I am now.


These Olympic games have set out to achieve what no other single event has done. It's not merely the fact that the site was planned as a sustainable development and event from the outset, though this is a major achievement. What is truly original about these games, is that they will bring  sustainable design and construction into the main stream on a global scale. Bob Costas will be espousing the merits of district energy to billions of viewers. Sustainability itself will be an Olympic athlete. The question is, will it bring home the gold?

Please forgive the quality of the photos. The site was tightly controlled for security so my photos were all taken through the window of a tour bus. Better images are available on the official London 2012 site

HERNING DENMARK

Considering it’s population is less than 50,000 people and it’s a fairly rural location, one wouldn’t expect Herning to be at the forefront of energy innovation in Denmark. The Danish Ministry of Climate piqued my interest in Herning when they listed it as one of six “eco-cities” in the country. What I found on the “Climate Buildings” web site surprised me. http://www.climatebuildings.dk/herning.php

Not only is the city supporting hydrogen fuel cell research, they are implementing the technology and targeting more aggressive CO2 targets than mandated by code.

Herning has a vibrant tree-lined pedestrian promenade and a central plaza activated by cafes, farmers markets and the town hall. While there I visited a sustainable 48 unit residential development, the freshly opened DGI Herning Huset complex, Herning municipality and the H2 College student housing projects in nearby Birk. 

48 UNIT HOUSING DEVELOPMENT

This trip to Ydunsvej on the western outskirts of Herning bore little fruit. Armed only with the brief project summnary from one web site, I was prepared to observe only the surface features of the development. What this building illustrated to me was Denmark’s integration of sustainability into the process of all projects. The building design is unremarkable. The development was likely completed between 5-10 years ago. It faces a well-tended municipal green belt and the southern roof is adorned with an array of 30 or 40 PV panels. There are trash sorting facilities, a parking lot of porous paving and resident bike facilities (these appear to have been expanded to accommodate additional riders). Judging by the number of motorized chairs charging in the lobbies, the development has a large population of elderly residents.

By outward appearances, this building was successful. The developer and architect did not set out to save the world or reach dizzying heights of design excellence on this project. It was a building designed to meet the needs of the client and the municipality. What makes it remarkable is the relative simplicity and ease the team meets these requirements. The design is likely the US equivalent of a LEED Platinum building. Danish teams are doing this sustainability stuff in their sleep!

DGI HERNING HUSET

With a location right at the center of town, I literally just happened upon this complex of Fitness Center, Hotel and Apartments. I don’t know much about it so I’ll be quick. The design is playful, modern and open. The facility is open to the public. Like most things in Denmark it isn’t cheap (55 DKK/day or about $11 US for adults.) But the facilities are incredible. The pool area alone includes diving boards, lap lanes, trampolines and climbing walls – 3 out of 4 of these are a thing of the past in US pools thanks to our own pool of well-educated lawyers. This kind of mixed use development enriches the interior of a city and makes it more livable regardless of its sustainable credentials.

http://www.dgi-husetherning.dk/en/frontpage/

HERNING MUNICIPALITY

Herning prepares annual reviews of the total municipal carbon output. They monitor and publish the output of over 100 companies for the purpose of tracking municipal performance on the targeted CO2 reductions. They have built a district heating infrastructure using the reject heat from power production (see details in DENMARK POWER GRID page). More than 70% of homes are heated by this system. This contributed to reducing the municipality’s annual CO₂ emissions per inhabitant to less than half the national average. By 2030 Herning has pledged to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions (including methane, N₂O and CO₂) 35% by 2030. They plan to hit 25% of the CO2 emissions as early as 2015.

H2 COLLEGE STUDENT HOUSING

The H2 College campus is part of a complex of gleaming white buildings that unites culture, business and education. Within the complex stands a prototype building by Utzon, several museums, an innovation center full of incubator start-up companies and the respected Aarhus University.

The slick 2-story student housing boxes of H2 College are oriented in a courtyard cluster with resident access from the courtyard side. There are three new buildings each with 22 units. They were designed to German passivhus standards so achieve 5 times the energy efficiency of a standard building (see facts below).

They were designed using hydrogen fuel cells as batteries for wind generated power . These cells power all electrical devices in the unit. With higher insulation values and air tightness the design requires space heating only on extremely cold days. What are other design features (heat pumps, heat exchangers, water conserve?)

 Building façades are uniform from building to building so are not dependent on solar orientation. The stairs and balconies serving the second floor residents are steel grating providing shaded day light to the lower units. I’m curious about the performance of the buildings with south and west facing windows. The courtyard configuration takes advantage of the serene views surrounding the college farm lands (and the not so serene views of the DONG Energy power plant to the south).

The architecture firm Aarhus Arkitekterne designed and Boligselskabet Fruehøjgaard developed and built the student housing blocks.

FACTS ABOUT PASSIVE HOUSES

Passive houses are characterized by good climate and good economy. First, you can build at prices that match the price of ordinary standard housing, and you achieve an economic benefit through the extremely low energy consumption. The requirements for passive houses are significantly stronger than for low energy houses - and the three main ones are:

·         The heat demand for space heating purposes must not exceed 15 kWh/m2/year, which corresponds to approx. 20 percent of heat consumption in a normal housing

·         The properties must be extra tight: Air density (infiltration by pressure test n50) must not exceed 0.6 h-1 (from 0.3 to 0.4 l / s / m ²)

·         The total primary energy needs, incl. entire energy consumption of household and entertainment must not exceed 120 kWh/m2/year.

http://www.fruehojgaard.dk/Default.aspx?ID=1182

Partner links

Aarhus Architects

www.aa-a.dk

Consulting Engineer Nira www.niras.dk

Sponsor Danfoss www.danfoss.com

Micro power plants Dantherm Power www.danthermpower.dk

Electrolysis Plant GreenHydrogen.dk www.greenhydrogen.dk