Construction Advances on the Dalles Festival Park

At week 21 of construction, The Lewis and Clark Festival Park is beginning to take shape. All of the landscape elements including planters, seat walls, pilasters, and the entry signage are faced with a stone called Mustang Basalt. This unique stone with nice red tones adds a lot of warmth and texture to the park. A pattern of large and small stones are being dry-laid and tight set. Stay tuned for more photos showing the progress on this park!

Stone mason: Don Olmstead of The Stoneyard

Graham Oaks Nature Park Green Roof Featured in Parks and Rec Magazine!

Metro's Graham Oaks Nature Park, located in Wilsonville, Oregon is loved by neighbors and animal inhabitants alike. GreenWorks always strives to meld built elements and the natural environment together in our designs. A great example of how we've achieved this can be seen in the structures at Graham Oaks Nature Park.

The shelter is a modified prefabricated structure from Western Wood Structures. It was was modified to match the restroom on site as well as incorporate green features like the ecoroof. These multifunctional efforts were developed by a forward thinking team.

• Waterleaf Architecture worked to match colors, roof lines and green features from prefabricated structures from two different manufacturers.
• GreenWorks worked to develop an irrigation and ecoroof plan that would flourish in the sites open condition.
• Metro (as always) pushed the sustainable envelope and was able to support these slight modifications to make the buildings more ‘green’.

The result is seamless, beautiful and functional.

The National Recreation and Park Association recently included the ecoroof in an article entitled 'Green is Gold' in its March 2012 issue.

You can read the full article on the Parks and Recreation Magazine website.

Grant High School Community Garden

The Environmental Club at Grant High School in Northeast Portland is in the process of establishing a Community Garden and a Learning Garden in the front of the school. Their inspiration for the gardens came from a desire to give back to the local community, provide fresh food from the garden to the cafeteria, and learn about sustainable agriculture. The students received a grant from State Farm and have teamed up with Portland Community Gardens to make their dream a reality. The Environmental Club enlisted the help of GreenWorks to create a design for the garden that would be aesthetically pleasing to the surrounding community, include two ADA accessible plots, and maximize the available garden space.

The gardens are located in front of the school in the NE corner of the existing lawn on NE 36th Avenue. Portland Community Gardens will assign the community garden plots on a first come first served basis. The learning garden will be maintained by the environmental club and sustainable agriculture classes as well as the biology, special education and Japanese departments.

On February 16th the Environmental Club and Portland Community Gardens held a Town Hall event where they invited the local community to ask questions and express their concerns about the garden. The attendees voiced an enormous amount of support and enthusiasm for the project. Neighbors are eager to get a spot secured and start gardening!

GreenWorks was honored to contribute to the creation of the Grant High School Community and Learning Gardens. The Environmental Club has been working on the garden's implementation for over a year now, coming up against many set-backs and logistical road blocks. They are truly a remarkable group of students who simply wanted to give back to the surrounding community, supply their cafeteria with fresh and healthy food and provide an opportunity for future students to learn about sustainable agriculture. Follow the Grant High School Community Garden blog here.

Future Recreational Attraction on the Deschutes River in Downtown Bend, OR

Recently, the Bend Park & Recreation District has been working on a plan to alter the spillway on the Deschutes River at the Colorado Dam in downtown Bend to enable kayakers and inner-tubers to ride downstream without having to maneuver around the dam. The Colorado Avenue Dam creates an impoundment that was once used to support lumber mill operations and also maintains surface water levels upstream in the Mill District area. The dam is located in an area of the river that is heavily used during the summer months by people on inflatable rafts and inner-tubes. The current configuration blocks downstream passage and requires all river users to exit the river and put-in downstream. The dam creates a pinning hazard exposing a high number of users to the potential of being swept into the dam.

GreenWorks, as part of a team including OTAK, Pacific Habitat Resources, and RiverRestoration.org, provided a design for safe passage over the existing Colorado Dam for many types of river users including inflatable crafts, and hardshell boats like kayaks and canoes. The design includes whitewater play features, a higher pedestrian bridge and increased habitat diversity along the river. By incorporating a fish passage and on-bank habitat restoration, improvements to McKay Park, and removal of the existing pedestrian bridge, the design will achieve improved safety for river users and environmental conditions of the river.