Vision of a Green DC

Posted by on 16/01/2008 at 01:10PM


Bottom segment: Anacostia. Middle: overall design and layout for the city. Top: new eco-friendly features in any representative neighborhood with the following color key: orange for high-density building, blue for rainwater collection, green for energy infrastructure, yellow for expanded Metro. The vertical red tubes represent geothermal wells.

The Washington Post and DCist cover the City of the Future design challenge held yesterday at Union Station. From DCist:

Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP won yesterday’s City of the Future design challenge to imagine what Washington would look like in the year 2108. The winning team went green, envisioning a self-sustaining city with soaring towers built on the sites of former forts that once defended Washington, transforming them into centers for wind and solar energy production, hydroponic farming and defensive security systems. In this environmentally friendly city, cars have no place. Metro has been drastically expanded. The diagonal streets designed long ago by Pierre L’Enfant have been turned into pedestrian-friendly green belts, or the “lungs of the city,” as described by Hanny Hassan, partner at BBB. Above-ground public transportation runs on the square street grid of the city.