Island in the woods

When I go up to BGI, we have class on a "campus" that isn't really ours. We rent a facility for the weekend called Island Wood, an environmental education center on Bainbridge Island. It's an amazing place. This month's Metropolis Magazine features a story about Island Wood that captures the key elements.

The intention behind Island Wood is to allow inner-city kids from Seattle to experience nature and sustainable living. They love it.

“Like when kids get outside and look back here,” Wolf continues, “they see this butterfly roof instead of a normal one with the peak in the middle. One side of the roof is designed to have solar gain, and we want high windows facing south so we can get passive solar heat, and the roof butterflies there so we can capture the water right down the middle, pour it into that cistern. Kids see that kind of stuff and ask about it.”

Island Wood’s architecture, then, is didactic. Mithun project lead David Goldberg calls the structures “a textbook.” The buildings are a meta-environment: they’re not only sustainable, they’re about being sustainable. There doesn’t seem to be any element to the architecture that isn’t making a statement about itself.

Is this an expensive place? One of those nice showpieces that kids can visit, but that is totally impractical for our budget-limited school system? Think again.

[Debbi Brainerd] was concerned at first about the high costs, “but [Mithun] determined that we could integrate all of the green pieces we wanted by taking out things that you would find in a traditional building to offset the price. In the end our cost per square foot was $194, compared to schools being built here at the same time, which were around $235 per square foot. So our cost was really low, and most of that was just trade-off: if you walk around our buildings, especially if you’re in these big areas, we don’t have any lowered ceilings or paint…we’ve left things sort of raw. And we have radiant-floor heat, which will save us money in the long run.

Come visit if you can -- more info at Islandwood.org.