China’s Olympic Village wins LEED Gold — not admiration

Designs of three LEED-ND projects in Beijing feature green technology, but the rating system doesn’t guarantee good urban design.

The Beijing Olympic Village, containing 22 six-story buildings and 20 nine-story buildings on 160 acres, won a Gold rating in the US Green Building Council’s LEED-Neighborhood Development pilot program in August.
Monotonous in appearance but outfitted with an impressive array of energy- and water-saving devices, the Olympic Village became the first project outside the US to be certified by LEED-ND. Some new urbanists in the US and Canada immediately expressed disappointment with its regimented buildings and site design, which smack of 1950s modernist public housing.
As of mid-August, LEED-ND certification had been awarded to only seven other projects, all in the western US:
• Eliot Tower in downtown Portland, Oregon;
• Helensview housing in northeast Portland;
• Depot Walk housing in the Old Towne Historic District of Orange, California;
• Mixed-use Emeryville Marketplace in Emeryville, California;
• Mixed-use, transit-oriented Station Park Green in San Mateo, California;     
• Redevelopment of Westfield University Towne Center mall in San Diego into a denser, mixed-use project;
• Union Park, a $6 billion, 11 million sq. ft. mixed-use project on 61 acres near downtown Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Olympic Village, designed to house 17,000 athletes and to be converted to a residential area and tourism site after the games, had previously not been identified as a LEED-ND entry, perhaps to avoid embarrassment if it failed to win certification. The US Department of Energy provided technical assistance to Guoao Development Company on construction of its buildings, described as 50 percent more energy-efficient than similar buildings in Beijing.
The village, which also contains seven community centers, three commercial and retail buildings, a health center, library, gyms, swimming pools, tennis courts, and a kindergarten, is a conveniently located compact development that should reduce the need for cars, according to EMSI, a US-based firm that consulted on its energy and sustainable design components.
The project uses solar photovoltaic power and solar thermal power for lighting and hot water. Vegetation covers more than 60 percent of the roofs. Drought-resistant plants make up more than 90 percent of the site’s landscaping. Rainwater is collected for irrigation. Bikeways and multi-use trails run within a quarter-mile of all buildings, connecting the community. Landscaped areas are extensive. The project has been presented as something of a model for China, a nation that is said to erect nearly half of the world’s new buildings each year.

A design letdown
Aesthetically, the buildings are “nothing special,” the Chicago Tribune observed, with “identical six-story blocks of apartments” of taupe brick with white concrete trim. “Windows are large, balconies are small, and the development would fit right in along any suburban corridor, were it not for the national flags hanging from the balconies,” wrote reporter Kathy Bergen.
The buildings do little to shape the landscape into well-proportioned outdoor rooms. Steve Coyle of Town Green in Oakland, California, wrote on the Urbanist listserv that, looking at the layout, “I thought it was an exploded image of a circuit board for a Hummer.” To define “sustainability” mainly as energy, water, or waste efficiency is to ignore the qualities that make satisfying urbanism, he said. Sustainability, he argued, demands attention to place — scale, form, resilience, and context.
Steve Mouzon of PlaceMakers contended that sustainable buildings must first be “lovable.” “If a building is demolished in a couple of generations because it cannot be loved, then its carbon footprint [as a standard of construction and operation] is utterly meaningless,” Mouzon said. Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia said the award to the Olympic Village “reveals the limits of LEED for sure.”

Other Chinese LEED-ND
Five other projects in the pilot Neighborhood Development program of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) are in Chinese cities. EMSI, which has offices in Washington, DC, Missouri, Beijing, and Shanghai, has worked on two of them: Linked Hybrid, a 15-acre Beijing project, and Silo City, a 62-acre Beijing project for which Farr Associates of Chicago was a subconsultant.
In their buildings and site plans, Linked Hybrid and Silo City are vastly different from the Olympic Village, yet all three projects reflect the desire of an increasingly prosperous China to have open spaces and vegetation interspersed among its buildings. EMSI says Silo City, an 8.8 million sq. ft. development in Beijing’s central business district, features “a network of continuous walkable streets” and “a series of linked, vegetated open spaces.” Photos available on the Web reveal grass, shrubbery, and trees spread about in ways that often look like afterthoughts. The green spaces provide relief from a congested city but, for the most part, they fail to mesh with the buildings to form a greater whole.
The irregular passages and open spaces are reminiscent of American urban designs in the 1960s and 1970s that offered pedestrians places to escape the public streets. Given China’s high population density, it’s possible that these spaces will be more active and lively than those in US cities. They’re a far cry, however, from traditional urbanism.
The Beijing projects are among 248 developments in the US, Canada, China, South Korea, Mexico, and the Bahamas that are being evaluated by LEED-ND.