As part of our Green Ingenuity Series, I want to share with all of our readers a project by a planning and design company out of Houston. This project was born out of a competition for sustainable design. You will hear the speakers in the background while viewing their project.
Allow me to give you some background which will make for a better viewing experience. When a developer develops a piece of land, he or she is required to design that piece of land so that no additional water runoff is created. This presents a challenge when you start putting up a lot of roofs and roads because water sheds off these items quickly. This water shed, when multiplied by the homes and streets in a city creates flash flooding and erosion problems downstream. To help mitigate this problem, you often times see a huge depression at the corner of a new development. This depression is made to capture the said runoff and release it slowly back into the environment. Developers hate this because it is lost land. One solution which I will blog about in near future is a rain garden which captures and holds water, releasing it back into the environment very slowly.
The video is about 6 minutes in length. Please enjoy.
Houston Sustainabillity Design Competition. Residential Winner.
Excellent. Having lived with Texas deluges, I can truly appreciate the problems that are being addressed. The sticker price ought to attract attention even if the concept doesn't!
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