THE INNOVATION CENTER
ST. CROIX, U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS
PROJECT STATUS | BUILT
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The Research Technology Park is a knowledge-based, e-commerce center on a 10-acre site within the University of the Virgin Islands campus on St. Croix. It was launched in 2002 as a government-sponsored public-private collaboration for technology-driven businesses, with the goal of generating long-term economic growth in the islands. After years of planning and design services from our part, the earlier architectural concepts for the Innovation Center (link), very much linked to the traditional vocabulary of the existing campus architecture, were abandoned to foster a more exciting, contemporary building that suggested innovation in its very presence and design.
An agreement was reached that the Innovation Center would be an iconic 20,000 SF “green” building with LEED certification. It would be used as the marketing showcase and headquarters for the Phase One Development of the RTPark. We assisted in the selection process of architects (Architectural Alliance, with Scott Andrew Natvig of S.A.N.D. as the Architect of Record), the hydrology engineers (Williamsburg Environmental Group), and the other consultants needed.
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
On the island of St. Croix, the industry of sugarcane sponsored centuries of economic and cultural development. Local ties to that memory are very strong in the urban fabric of the island’s historic districts. Today, E-Commerce is envisioned as the new industry of St. Croix. The design for the Innovation Building could show a faint echo of the plantation in the stone walls, the agricultural plots-gardens, the grid system, and the sheltering roofs, yet reinterpreted into a modern and progressive expression.
THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN
We conceptualized for the architects the formal expression and layout for the building using precedents that we believed were appropriate. It would be narrow and stretched, almost like a dam, across the site, in a symbolic gesture to “stop” the stormwater coming from the university campus from flooding the neighborhood to the west of our site. In concept, the building could perhaps exemplify a contrast to the landscape not unlike the “Machine in the Garden” modernist precedents of previous office parks and corporate headquarters set among a pastoral landscape.
Precedents: Glenn Murcutt: Bowali Visitor Information Center; Peter Walker’s South Coast Plaza & IBM Japan Makuhari; O. Niemeyer+ Roberto Burle Marx, Itamarati.
THE GARDEN AS MACHINE
However, unlike the modernist prototype, the landscape here would not be an aesthetic counterpoint to architecture, subordinated to the building-object. The Garden would become the Machine—a working landscape with depressed experimental terraces to test waste reuse for bioretention soil-making in their invisible biological engine, underground. The concept for the site would resonate with that of the building, both from a formal point of view and from an operational, infrastructural point of view.
Precedents : Michel & Claire Corajoud, Parc du Sausset; Clement/Berger & Provost/Viguier, Parc Andre Citroen.
In the first few design schemes, the stormwater entering the site was collected along the campus side in a canal, which doubled as an elevated walkway during the dry season on its higher side. From here, after storm events, visitors could see the runoff water enter and percolate through the experimental plots by gravity. In heavy storms, what would not be absorbed in the bioretention test plots fast enough would reach the long swale siding the walkway on the opposite side, by the parking lots. The cleaned water was then stored in a cistern and pumped for the water garden placed in the building courtyard for passive cooling of the building.
REMADE LANDSCAPES
During Phase One construction, the landscape architect, hydrology engineers, and soil scientist would team up to select different kinds of locally available waste materials in order to engineer different permeable soil mixes for the bioretention design. Each soil-waste mix would go in a different test garden plot, to be compared over time among each other in their performance. The waste materials would include washed dredging from the harbor, bagasse and rubble from construction sites, coral/limestone quarry waste, composted shredded wood from tree pruning and green manure, and organic matter from cattle farming in St. Croix.
Our local caliche-carbonate, which makes both structural stability and soil permeability difficult, would be mined out, if found during our project excavation, but reused on-site as berms and levee-elevated walkways to access the plots, to shape and hold the sunken terraces, or used as aggregate for garden walls, stone mulch, or for driveway pavers to be manufactured locally. Existing grass turf would be tilled into the ground, and tall palms would be planted also in Phase One to provide structure to the open spaces. Native trees acting as hedgerows among gardens and parking lots would be grown in pots at the back of the building until big enough to plant. Recycled glass would be used for the paving patterns by the water feature.
The hydrology and stormwater performance in the test plots would be evaluated to select specific adaptable forbs and grasses for the water regimen observed. Tree seedlings would be added in strategic spots. The plants would be monitored for their potential to control erosion and increase infiltration into the soil medium, in both dry and wet conditions. After a couple of years, when trees planted at the outskirts of the park holding area reached a 25-gallon size, they would be transplanted at the edges. The trees previously planted in the test plots, if too big, would be transplanted to the UVI campus parking areas in need of shade, and the planting of the garden plots would start again.
Michel Desvigne, le jardins elementaries; Clement/Berger, Parc Citroen; Noguchi’s California Scenario
FROM TEST LOTS TO GRASS FIELD
The client was not eager to embrace such an experimental landscape “in the making” for their project. During Schematic Design, the test plots concept had to be abandoned for a much simpler (and more predictable) field parterre of two contrasting grasses.
One of the two grass species could be let grow naturally, not mowed as a traditional lawn parterre. Alternatively, one type of grass could be both let grow tall or mowed following our design shapes, to reveal the pattern and improve filtration. During and after storms, the gently sloping grass field would manifest different gradients of green from the drier upper area to the lower wet area by the collecting swale. The production of soil from waste was moved to holding area plots in the lower back of the site.
More design emphasis was directed to the inner courtyard, with a stepped garden that was filtering runoff entering from the northeastern corner. The garden edge became a hedge-swale of native plants resistant to flooding in the wet season and to drought in the dry season, shaped to the outside by a greenscreen that makes it formal without clipping. During storms, the runoff is introduced and modulated from the hedge-swale into the garden terraces through weirs.
The water canal parallel to the building collects the filtered water from the courtyard terraces, cooling the building nearby by charging the eastern breezes with humidity. Canal water and rainwater collected by the building roof enter the cisterns under the water parterre, covered with a blue-green-gold recycled glass paving pattern—a metaphor for water in dry spells. Water in the parterre is made visible only during the wet season as a feature; when it is produced, otherwise it is hidden and protected inside the cisterns.
A convex canopy for collecting rainwater in freshwater cisterns was added to the building roof. A greenscreen is also mounted to cool the building's west façade. The university wanted some reference to Danish colonial plantations with windmills, which was juxtaposed with a contemporary turbine in the courtyard garden in the preferred scheme, with palm rows and a grid geometry, reinforcing the idea that both garden and building are a working machine, both are a cultural landscape with meaning derived from their environmentally conscious concerns.
AFTERWARDS
This $13 million project started construction in September 2011. The site and landscape design were heavily value-engineered and lost most of their original form and infrastructural functions. The parking lot was asphalted and got caliche rocks only in the tree pits. The grass parterre was eliminated, with only a grass lawn lined by rows of Columbian foxtail palms along a planted swale. No water-glass parterre and not even a garden were planted in the building courtyard to manifest the seasonal water harvesting. We were not hired to perform construction administration, and the implementation was very poor at all levels. Empty, unsustainable lawn grass everywhere, trees bending with no staking, a skeleton of ugly-looking palms to subdivide the spaces, and colorful bromeliads to decorate the building from up close. A few years later, even the building roof canopy, the icon for collecting rainwater for reuse in cisterns, was removed.
