Case Studies of Artful Rainwater Design

Abstract

Imagine this scenario: You’re a designer with a solid regional reputation. One day, the director of campus construction at a local community college calls you with a serious problem: The college and its parking lot sit uphill from a nearby commercial area; the business owners are threatening to sue the college, because in large rain events, storm runoff from the college property floods their building basements. Worse yet, because they have combined sewers in this town, the flooding sometimes results in sewage backup in those buildings. It’s a simple enough problem to solve: You could put in one of those turf pits of a detention basin, but then you think, “That’s a lot of land to use, probably surrounded by a chain link fence for liability protection, right at a town–gown edge. What kind of a place, and what kind of a town–gown relationship message, would that create?” You mull it over for a while, and then suddenly the answer comes: The college doesn’t have a stormwater problem, it has a rainwater opportunity.