Month: February 2012

We are coming down to the last couple weeks of the CSL project and it has been quite a journey thus far.  We recently met with Dean Gregory again last Friday as we needed a little more clarification on some of the data and information that we need to collect.  He recommended that we try and contact someone who is involved with UBC Building Ops.  The man Dean said we should try and come in contact with is Jeff Nulty.  We have yet to have a conversation with Jeff, but when we do, hopefully the rest of the data that we need can be found.

 

We have now split into three groups of two, with each group working on either section 3.1, 3.5 or 3.6 of the Sustainable Sites Initiative.  We feel that this will speed up the process of completing each individual task.

 

In the mean time, I have found a pleasant video about the newly improved Buchanan Courtyards.  It features students and alumni giving their first impressions of the courtyards when they were first opened.  Follow the link below if you have time to check it out.  Keep in mind that in the video, the water catchment pool is operational, but at this current time it is turned off.

http://legacy.arts.ubc.ca/about-arts/buchanan-courtyard-video.html

 

 

If you head on over to the “Schedule” tab, you will be able to see a Gantt Chart with the work that we have completed thus far, and also the tasks that we plan to complete with their respective dates.  We are currently in the collecting data section.  We have acquired the necessary information for two of the sections in the SSI (section 3.7 and 3.8) and we just need to find relevant data for the remaining sections (3.1, 3.5 and 3.6).  We are meeting today with Dean Gregory to go over the remaining data that we need for these last few sections of the SSI.

We have made a ton of progress over the last week.  We have gotten a hold of the Sustainable Sites Initiative guidelines and have been thoroughly reviewing them.  The section of the SSI that is relevant to our project is the “Site Water- Design” section.  In this section, there are a list of prerequisites that are basically the guidelines which will determine how “green” the Buchanan Courtyards actually are.  The prerequisites that we need to evaluate for our project are the following:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basically, the more points that are scored for each prerequisite, the more “green” the Buchanan Courtyards are.  Our job over the next few weeks will be to find all the necessary data required for these prerequisites.  Some of this data includes finding evapotranspiration data, rainfall data, and the area of the courtyards.  We will be working hard to gather this information, so we can see just how “green” the courtyards are!

 

We were also given some civil engineering drawings of the site, which helped us gain a greater understanding of how the drainage system installed in the courtyards actually worked.