The Green Stadium That Isn't
A critical look at the football stadium proposed for outside Los Angeles, called "green" architecture, but it seems the costs will far outweigh its benefits.
"Though we often forget or sidestep this fact, the same qualities that make a piece of land ideal for development aiming to attract visitors from across a broad area in Southern California — easy freeway access, wide-open spaces, precious few pesky neighbors — also tend to make it a kind of planning black hole, a site that has little chance of succeeding in urban terms in any but the most circumscribed sense."
"Clearly the greenest approach, if hardly the easiest politically, would be to adapt the Rose Bowl or the Coliseum rather than build a massive new facility, no matter how smartly engineered, from scratch. Even a new stadium on the edge of the Dodger Stadium parking lot, an option Frank McCourt reportedly considered, would be greener than the City of Industry plan, simply because it would use a new NFL facility as a mechanism for the kind of large-scale infill development Los Angeles needs."
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correct LA Times link
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/11/are-you-ready-for...
Green sports stadiums...
This is where the green revolution comes full circle… building things and/or justifying projects just because they are green, which is not being green at all. An example in the SF Bay Area is the ‘Margarido’ house up in the Oakland hills, recently featured in the SFChronicle/SFGate… 4700 square feet of Platinum LEED (NorCal’s first ‘Platinum’ house... yours for a cool $5 million). Yes, it’s an in-fill house replacing one that burned down in the disastrous Oakland Hills fire eighteen years ago, but more “green” would be not to re-build in such areas at all. I fear that we may take this to a whole new level and start building new sports stadiums around the country because they are greener than the old ones.
BTW... the LATimes link doesn't work.
chrisinsobe
Careful green building policy
We certainly do have to be careful about how we determine whether a project is green. This is a subject that has arisen with mass produced housing development, as well as commercial.
Do we permit a 1,000 unit tract home subdivision simply because the homes will feature more energy efficient design? Or do we recognize that the overall design of instant-built homes and forced development is flawed?
The hallmarks of sustainable building should include durability and necessity, asking why is this project being built and who will really benefit?