Artful Rainwater Design: Creative Ways to Manage Stormwater

pleasure.

Introduction

On a rainy day in Portland, Oregon, a man stops at New Seasons Market at Arbor Lodge to pick up a few items for dinner. As he hurries inside, he looks up above the entrance canopy and notices that rain is spewing from a spout near the roof and onto a metal sculpture of salmon that appear to be swimming upstream against the current of the falling rain. For just a moment he’s reminded that runoff from rain flows from rooftop to river; it had better be clean and plentiful!

Across the country, in Gainesville, Florida, a student at the University of Florida indulges in an evening workout at the Southwest Recreation Center. The position of her treadmill gives her a view through the glass facade to the entry landscape, where she can see that a water runnel leads from the building, across the sidewalk, into a lushly planted landscape; at the sidewalk edge, a filigree sculpture contains a column of blue light. She’s intrigued but puzzled—can’t quite figure out the message. As she leaves the building after her workout, she stops at the sculpture and reads a small plaque at its base; there she learns that the sculpture represents the palmetto’s cellular structure, and the blue light suggests the plant’s slurping of water that comes from the building roof. Like the man in Portland, she realizes that roof runoff is feeding the plants and that rain is a resource, not a waste product.

These brief examples highlight features of Artful Rainwater Design (ARD), an approach to sustainable stormwater management in which the management system is designed as a landscape amenity. ARD not only controls the quantity of runoff and improves its quality but adds experiential value to the landscape. The visible aspect of the design educates, entertains, or enlightens—it celebrates rainwater’s resource value and tells the story of how it’s being managed. The term was coined by Stuart Echols in 2005, as we began to research the topic. Artful is meant to suggest that the design is beautiful and engaging; Rainwater is used instead of stormwater because stormwater management has historically treated rainwater as a waste product to be removed. By using the term Artful Rainwater Design we want to emphasize that rain is a precious resource worthy of experience and celebration.

Figure I.1. The rain scupper at the New Seasons Market at Arbor Lodge in Portland, Oregon lets people realize rain’s important impact on rivers (design: Lango Hansen Landscape Architects PC; Ivan McLean; photograph: Stuart Echols).

Figure I.2. Students exercising in the rec center at the University of Florida are given the opportunity to come to a realization about rain (design: RDG Planning and Design; photograph: Kevin Thompson).

Onsite management of rain is required in more and more municipalities, as sewage- and stormwater-carrying pipes exceed capacity in cities and towns around the country. The days of combined sewer systems, which regularly sent untreated sewage into waterways during major storms, are waning. In fact, increasingly forward-looking regulations across the United States require that the first flush of large rain events (i.e., the initial—and dirtiest—rainfall up to 1½ inches) be managed on site, and more and more states expect site design to manage a ½- to 1½-inch storm. Rather than a burdensome regulation, we see this as an opportunity to create a more vibrant site design by using green infrastructure (soil and plants) rather than pipes to manage rain on a site. As Tom Liptan, retired environmental specialist of the Bureau of Environmental Services of Portland, Oregon, has said, Use the landscape!¹ This approach is both logical and beneficial: Let the water nourish plants while the plants absorb pollutants, and let the water then function within the natural hydrologic system through infiltration and evapotranspiration.

Urban sites often lack the space necessary for traditional large stormwater detention ponds; expensive urban land demands clever thinking about rain capture. Runoff management can be achieved in this context through multiple small, dispersed systems, from green roofs to flow-through planters, from water harvesting systems to rain gardens. The end-of-pipe, back-of-lot, out-of-sight and out-of-mind stormwater management approach is losing viability. And making those small, dispersed runoff management systems visible and legible is a design opportunity. By creating sustainable stormwater management systems that visibly communicate their management strategies, we can make people aware of rain as a resource, and we can make them realize that we must both control the quantity and ensure the quality of rain for it to truly serve as the resource needed for natural systems to thrive.

This strategy gives designers an opportunity to advance the agenda of environmentally responsible design by making the systems not only visible and legible but beautiful. As Elizabeth Meyer stated in her manifesto published in Landscape Architecture, A concern for beauty and aesthetics is necessary for sustainable design if it is to have a significant cultural impact.² ARD gives designers a further opportunity to advance the agenda of environmentally responsible design by making the systems beautiful. If we create a landscape that people enjoy and value, it will be maintained and sustained, and its environmental benefits will endure.

Therefore, this book is grounded in a set of principles we consider imperative for the future of rainwater management design:

•Rainwater is a vital resource.

•To ensure the resource value of rainwater, a sustainable stormwater management approach is imperative.

•Current and imminent runoff management regulations in the United States point toward a full-site green infrastructure approach that manages small flows, especially first flush, in a system of small, dispersed, site-wide interventions.

•To be truly sustainable, stormwater management must be beautiful so that people value it.

•Using ARD as a sustainable stormwater management strategy is an opportunity that designers should seize.

What Does ARD Address?

Projects that incorporate ARD are usually designed to sustainably manage small rain events and the first flush of large rain events (i.e., the initial—and dirtiest—rainfall up to 1½ inches). ARDs do not generally manage major flooding from large storms. But rain events up to 1½ inches represent the majority of runoff in temperate climates, accounting for 60 to 90 percent of all rain events, depending on geographic location. Consequently, the ARD approach to rainfall management presents an exciting design strategy in the context of increasingly stringent requirements to manage first flush and small storms. In other words, the opportunity posed by ARD—and presented in this book—is effective, beautiful, and enlightening management of small storm and first flush rainfall.

Our hope is that ARD will become the new normal of runoff management because it addresses so many important issues. ARD provides a strategy to:

•respond to regulatory demands for runoff management, especially of small storms and first flush;

•provide efficient runoff management on urban sites;

•manage runoff in responsible ways that benefit our natural water systems;

•use rainwater as a resource to nourish the landscape;

•transform people’s perception of rainwater from waste product to resource;

•add amenity value to a landscape;

•ensure both environmental and cultural sustainability.

In sum, ARD adds up to a significant and timely approach to rainwater management in the twenty-first century.

The Scope of This Book

While some designers across the United States are undertaking ARD, many are wary. They fear it’s too expensive, too hard to shepherd through the approval process, not appropriate for their geographic region, or they simply don’t know how to do it. This book will provide designers with useful how-to information and ideas on this approach to runoff management.

We began to explore this topic in 2005 with the identification of a robust set of outstanding ARDs from across the United States. Although we admire the extraordinarily innovative ARD work occurring abroad, regulations and aesthetic preferences in the United States differ from those in other countries, so geographic focus was a necessary element of our research. And although our focus is on projects in the United States, we hope that readers in other countries will also find these projects and our points useful and inspirational.

We found exemplary ARD projects initially by sifting through American Society of Landscape Architects and American Institute of Architects award-winning projects, identifying those with an artful approach to sustainable stormwater management, contacting their designers, and asking them for more ARD ideas. Since that time, by talking with folks at our presentations around the country and by developing a network of professionals and students who know of our work, we’ve expanded our initial set to well over fifty projects nationwide. (See Artful Rainwater Design Project List at the back of the book.)

We have visited nearly all of these projects to conduct onsite analyses, and we have obtained and reviewed information from their designers; in other words, each design has undergone our scrutiny before being admitted to our project set. Because ARD is a new and evolving design subject, additional exciting projects undoubtedly have been overlooked simply because they haven’t yet received the exposure and popularity of the projects profiled in our book, but we have made every effort to study a wide variety of exemplary projects.

A glance at the ARD project list will show that just about half of the designs are located in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. A variety of factors have made the Pacific Northwest a virtual mecca of ARD. The consistently wet weather in these states from October to May demands that citizens develop strategies to live with rain, ranging from establishment of very strict stormwater regulations to development of innovative ways to transform rainwater from a nuisance to an asset. And it’s important to note that Seattle and Portland aren’t mystical, artsy meccas of ARD because of any kind of counterculture creativity. In fact, by the 1990s those two cities were forced to act—by calamitous combined sewer overflow issues in Portland and by severe salmon habitat degradation in the Seattle area. Those problems, combined with frequent light rain, simply meant that these cities were first in line to address all the challenges faced by the rest of the country when ARDs are considered, from needing to change regulations to convincing municipal officials. And so our examples from Portland and Seattle, though geographically clumped in the Pacific Northwest, should not be dismissed by designers from other regions. In fact, they offer a particularly rich collection of exciting and potentially transferable ideas to designers nationwide.

This book divides ARD into two components: the amenity of landscape design and the utility of sustainable stormwater management. Within amenity and utility topics, we discuss goals, objectives, and techniques. This format is intended to be user friendly, easy to follow, and easy to use as a reference document.

Part 1 provides background on the subject, from the historically traditional approach to stormwater management (gray infrastructure) to the strategy that manages stormwater with soil and plants (green infrastructure) to recent demand that stormwater management address amenity. The discussion then focuses on the recent history of ARD: where it’s being implemented, in what kinds of facilities, and reasons designers are taking this approach.

Part 2 covers each of the amenity goals, objectives, and techniques in depth, and part 3 presents the utility goals, objectives, and techniques of ARD. Both of these sections further encourage readers to consider creative ways to apply these ideas to their own designs by offering a set of questions for each topic.

Part 4 presents a set of twenty case studies: ARDs we’ve found across the United States that offer some exemplary strategies. For each case study, we first provide basic data and a brief overview of the project background (impetus and intentions for the project, as well as special challenges); then we describe both the utility strategies and the amenity strategies, concluding each with a section we call Of Note: a few interesting facts about that design worth considering in your own ARD design.

Part 5 presents some final thoughts on ARD, including the most common reasons people say "We can’t do Artful Rainwater Design in our stormwater management" and useful rejoinders. We conclude the book by giving you information and encouragement as you embark on your own ARD efforts.

From rain scuppers shaped like salmon to sculptures inspired by palmettos, river rocks that show a rain trail, and water plants that create habitat—and much, much more—the ideas in this book will help you design better, more ecologically sensitive stormwater management systems that celebrate rain. ARD is a rewarding approach that honors water as a precious, life-giving, and inspiring resource.

NOTES

1.Tom Liptan, Personal communication with authors, 2013.

2.Elizabeth Meyer, Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance, Landscape Architecture 98, no. 10 (2008): 92–131.

1. The History of Stormwater Management and Background for Artful Rainwater Design

Although rainwater has been considered a resource in agricultural contexts for millennia, in urban contexts it has historically been considered a waste product. With some exceptions in historical management strategies, urban rainwater was treated as a problem to be mitigated, a waste product to be eliminated or controlled.

However, recent innovations in stormwater management have catalyzed a transition from treating urban runoff as undesirable to appreciating it as a natural resource that must be managed with great care. Management strategies have shifted in past decades, from simple flood control levees and combined storm and sewer systems to onsite detention systems intended to control excess flow rates, and later to infiltration and rainwater harvesting systems intended to reduce runoff volumes and non–point source pollution. Since the 1990s there has been greater interest in treating rainwater as a resource for groundwater and surface water recharge, especially through infiltration and biofiltration. In the late 1990s, authors of some regulations and publications began to call for stormwater management to include the goal of creating amenity in addition to reducing runoff quantity and quality. And since the early 2000s, some designers have begun to effectively address all three goals and celebrate rainwater through the creation of Artful Rainwater Designs (ARDs). This part presents background understanding of this transition in stormwater management and how it has evolved into ARD.

ADDRESSING STORMWATER RUNOFF QUANTITY: TRADITIONAL FLOOD MANAGEMENT

For thousands of years, stormwater management focused exclusively on flood prevention. Even in 1760 b.c.e., King Hammurabi of Mesopotamia presented stormwater regulations in the Code of Hammurabi to protect downstream landowners:

Figure 1.1. Historically, stormwater management focused on flood control; the design of systems like this detention basin considered neither beauty nor even visibility, because they were often located out of the public eye (design: unknown; photograph: Stuart Echols).

Figure 1.2. Over time, designers began to realize that stormwater management systems could also provide habitat and amenity, as in the case of this wet detention pond (design: unknown; photograph: Stuart Echols).

Figure 1.3. Today, designers see benefit in locating sustainable stormwater management systems in highly visible spots, making them beautiful, and providing means for the public to learn how the system works, as at this rainwater biotope at the Visitor Center entrance in the Queens Botanical Garden (design: Atelier Dreiseitl and Conservation Forum, BKSK Architects; photograph: Stuart