In association with Goring & Straja Architects
Portola Valley’s old Town Center was located in a 1950’s school, built directly on top of the San Andreas Fault. The new Town Center occupies the same 11 acre site but relocates the buildings out of the fault zone in the northwest corner of the site. The Town Center is the heart of the civic, community and cultural life of the town, and is designed to expresses the character and values of Portola Valley. It also resolves the seismic, access, capacity and infrastructure issues of the old town center.
Portola Valley was founded in 1964 to protect the western hills of this mid-peninsula community from development; so it followed that the primary development goals for the new center were to increase open space, restore habitat, and create buildings that compliment the natural landscape. The site plan - the result of many meetings and design workshops with town residents and staff - places the main buildings and town plaza in a corner of the site surrounded by tall trees. A wide swath of restored native landscape extends across the front of the site, through a meadow and a newly daylighted portion of the creek and into the Town Plaza. Where the 1950’s school buildings once stood, new playing fields open up to views of the western hills.
The three main town center buildings – the library, town hall, and community hall –are arranged around a town plaza and performance lawn. Reclaimed vertical redwood cladding links the buildings to the two large redwood groves on the site. Wide gabled roofs that present simple, familiar shapes visible from the road, lift up inside the plaza to mark the entries and invite people in. Deep sheltering porches and sunscreens of reclaimed Alaskan yellow cedar shade the tall windows that look out to the landscape.
The community also clear they wanted a very green town center. The old school buildings were deconstructed: the wood was remilled into paneling and ceilings for the new buildings, and the concrete and asphalt was ground up and used as base rock. Local eucalyptus trees, cleared for fire prevention, were turned into flooring in the multipurpose room, and alder trees cut down to make way for the new softball field became columns inside the buildings. The high-slag concrete keeps 100 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The town has plans to turn the abandoned 60-inch concrete creek culvert into a rainwater cistern to collect and store run-off from the roofs for use in the landscaping.
Passive design strategies include natural ventilation, daylighting, thermal mass, and exterior shading. Efficient mechanical systems include radiant heat and nighttime cooling to keep energy use to a minimum. Three of the five buildings have roof-mounted photovoltaic panels that generate a total of 76 KW of on-site power. The site-generated power, coupled with the efficient design, results in buildings that are predicted to reduce their energy costs by 53%.
Awards: › LEED Platinum › European Centre Good Green Design Award › AIA CC Merit Award & Savings by Design Honor Award › National AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects Award › North American Wood Design Award of Merit › AIA SF Merit Award for Energy & Sustainability › AIA EB Design Award, Citation for Architecture › Acterra Sustainable Built Environment › Sustainable San Mateo County Green Building, Commercial Category
