FEATURED PROJECT TTC
TRANSBAY TRANSIT CENTER
It’s not only one of the biggest developments on the West Coast of the US right now, it will also be one of the most sustainable of its kind ever built. WSP Flack + Kurtz reveals how it is going for LEED Gold.
From the window of WSP Flack + Kurtz’ offices in downtown San Francisco, Clark Bisel can see a vast empty site, four blocks long. And when he looks back to his computer screen, he sees how that site is going to look in 2017, when the Transbay Transit Center finally opens – and more importantly, exactly how the building is going to achieve an environmental rating of LEED Gold or higher.
“This is very much a unique facility, there’s no transit centre in the world like this,” says Bisel, a senior vice president at WSP Flack + Kurtz who has been leading the services engineering for the project since 2007. “We’re developing this as one of the most energy-efficient buildings on the west coast of the United States. We’re talking some pretty serious measures on energy efficiency and water efficiency. Coupled with the public transport mission of the facility, these are the core values of the development.”
The transit centre will not only bring together all bus and rapid transit services for the Bay Area, it will also eventually be the northern terminus of a new high- speed rail link from Los Angeles, and it will include the tallest building west of the Mississippi, a 75-plus storey office tower, on which WSP Flack + Kurtz has also been appointed.
“Transbay is actually many projects, it’s one of the biggest things happening on the West Coast right now,” says Bisel. “Our
focus is on the transit terminal at the moment. Underneath the facility we have an enormous thermal reservoir of mud and baywater, so we have a very large geothermal heat exchange set up underneath the building, with tiny cooling towers. We are also looking at really extensive daylighting, throughout the whole upper storey, and light pipes to distribute light from outside throughout the bus deck below.”
There may be a lot of clever sustainability measures hidden in the fabric of the transit centre, but it is going to look pretty green from Bisel’s window too – there will be a whole new city park on the roof. “That’s part of the building, and it adds a lot of complexity,” he says. “Up in the park, we will have a marsh that treats waste water from the sinks so it can be reused back in the facility. And with the thick soil in the park, we will use the roof as a stormwater retention system. If we get heavy rain, the soil will absorb it, limiting the flow into the city sewage system, and large tanks within the project will collect it and recycle it back into the facility.”
From Bisel’s point of view, it’s this kind of lateral thinking that has made work on the project so enjoyable: “We’ve had a very committed design team, who all understand that this project is different and that we need to explore these areas, not just take a cookie-cutter approach.”
clark.bisel@
wspfk.com
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