Other Tangents

The Bertschi School Field Trip

Last week we were fortunate to be invited to tour Capitol Hill’s Bertschi School, specifically the Living Science Wing of the Bertschi School. What an amazing experience this was!

B&V Team
June 26, 2014

Last week we were fortunate to be invited to tour Capitol Hill’s Bertschi School, specifically the Living Science Wing of the Bertschi School. What an amazing experience this was! We were able to see firsthand the beauty and innovation of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council’s Living Building Challenge. According to the International Living Building Institute, the Living Building Challenge “defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today and acts to diminish the gap between current limits and ideal solutions. This certification program covers all buildings at all scales and is a unified tool for transformative design, allowing us to envision a future that is Socially Just, Culturally Rich, and Ecologically Benign.”

Fotor

It’s truly remarkable what this school has done to enrich the lives of its students, the community, and the world at large. Stacy Smedley, one of the KMD Architects that initially organized the Restorative Design Collective that built and designed The Living Science Classroom pro bono, was gracious enough to give us a tour of the space.

Fotor3

This was great because we were able to hear firsthand the unforeseen difficulties that came with this project, as well as the unexpected insights. For instance, we learned that sourcing materials were the wild card of the project, eventually requiring a full-time staff of six people to manage it. Conversely, we learned that after speaking with the students of the school, the Restorative Design Collective found that many of the students' ideas were not only in line with the International Living Building Standards, but also quite innovative. For instance, one of the students suggested that it’d be great to have a river running through the building. The building now has a beautiful channel running through it that collects rainwater and flows through the space. Giving the students a chance to observe firsthand the building’s rainwater harvesting.

Although we are no longer students, not in the traditional sense anyway, we must say that we were inspired by our experience at the Bertschi School. We were reminded of why we love learning and academics: simply because learning can and should be FUN!

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