Please provide a brief overview of the project.
Goal: The design intent is to create a memorable and flexible place for this growing, arts-based non-profit that embodies their mission, engages the site’s unique existing structures, utilizes the best sustainable practices possible within a constrained budget, and provides a public landscape to an underserved neighborhood of Providence.

Location: Providence RI. The Steel Yard is located in Olneyville, a blighted neighborhood of Providence characterized by abandoned and contaminated industrial lots like the project site, surface parking, and dilapidated housing stock along the Woonasquatucket River. While improving the site’s functionality, a primary goal was to retain the ecological and visual character of ‘urban wild’ in keeping with the context and the site’s abandoned-state beginnings.

Approximate Size: 3.5 Acres

Former Use: Steel fabrication for construction projects. Three industrial buildings exist on the site: One Sims Avenue, a twostory brick building, originally the office and fabrication facility (artist workspaces and a café); 27 Sims, a two-story brick office building (Steel Yard administrative and commercial rental spaces); and the Long Building, a repeatedly expanded corrugated metal and brick fabrication building (workshop space). Five sets of overhead gantry cranes, all of which are working and were incorporated into the project, allow steel to be moved anywhere on site, and give the site its unique character. The buildings and cranes were designated historic landmarks by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, whose approval of the new landscape was also required.

Actual End Use: Required exterior spaces include a primary central space (fashioned as a multi-colored paved ‘carpet’) that allows for individual and group work, staging of large events with audiences of up to several hundred, car rallies, farmer’s markets, etc., and whose character defines a sense of place. This is surrounded by secondary work spaces such as interior/exterior spill-out shop spaces, an outdoor foundry, a ‘hang-out’ space for movie nights and relaxation, and a future visiting artist’s studio (each ~1000-2000 sf). Tertiary service spaces include storage for raw materials and finished art pieces, a paved space serving incubator businesses and artists in shipping container studios, and 20 parking spaces. Completion Date: Sept 2009

What makes this project unique?
The integration of engineering with placemaking and the smart use of material and method in the design make the Steel Yard significant. Throughout the project, uncommon recycled materials (e.g. discarded sheet pile culled from waste of other construction sites and scrap metal bales of bicycles, appliances, and car parts) are featured as prominent site elements. Permeable pavement and bioswales are employed creatively both as sustainable strategies and as design features. Stringent construction budgets necessitated the deployment of volunteers (192 on planting day alone).

Lastly, the use of a transformed brownfield site as a public landscape is the real triumph. To date, the Yard has hosted many popular and growing-in-attendance public events as well as educated increasing numbers of individuals each year. In 2011 in addition to offering expanded education and training opportunities, the Yard will serve as a venue for music, dance, art markets, movies, and a writers’ series. The new landscape facilitates these user-driven and volunteer-run opportunities for community engagement and neighborhood development.

What were the primary funding sources?
Funding Sources:

• $400,000 EPA Brownfield Clean-up Grant;
• $199,000 Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation-managed EPA funds and
• $100,000 of RIEDC Revolving Loan Program loan.
• $300,000 in founder’s initial remediation investment and
• $100,000 from Steel Yard’s private fundraising.
   

Total Cost: $2.1 Million

What contaminants were present on the site?
Contaminants & Remediation: Providence Steel & Iron was a known brownfield site, primarily from lead painting operations, when purchased in 2001. Environmental remediation standards required the extraction of a small amount of soil with lead contamination higher than 10,000 ppm and some chromium contamination. The remaining contaminated soil was treated with a binder to allow it to remain on site, rather than being exported to become a problem elsewhere. A cap of 12 inches of clean fill or pavement was required across the entire site.

As part of the Narragansett Bay watershed, an important sustainability goal was to keep and filter as much stormwater on site as possible. Through a system of bioswales and infiltration zones, the Steel Yard handles up to a 2-year storm without employing the new connection to the NBC sewers. Accommodating this functionality, while also ensuring that contaminated soil did not leach off-site, involved a process of directing infiltration and controlling its volume. While the site’s existing conditions and the involvement of regulatory agencies necessitated a sustainable approach, an ethic of sustainability permeated throughout the project and informed the planting strategy and use of recycled materials.

Before:

After:

Did the project increase job opportunities in the community, or communities, surrounding the site?
The Steel Yard is a community-based non-profit focused on technical training in the industrial arts that is located in a blighted neighborhood characterized by abandoned and contaminated industrial lots and dilapidated housing stock. It has received stimulus money from federal programs to train urban youth in metal arts, in addition to employing the approximately 30 teaching and operating staff of the non-profit.

Did the project help to decrease local crime rates or to improve human health and safety?
Along with a growing group of community projects, including artist housing, an office complex built out of repurposed shipping containers, a charter school, and a sustainable technology company, the Yard is a leader in the intentional reclaiming of Providence’s “Industrial Valley.” As the only one of these projects that is open to the public, the Steel Yard serves as a point of education for this exciting local reclamation. Beyond Providence, the Yard’s unusual story and the project’s design success are being seen as a model for other, similar urban places.

What was most challenging about your project?
Rectifying requirements of remediation imposed by RIDEM with the desire of the Narragansett Bay Commissions for no connection to the municipal storm water system and overcoming their concerns for storm water recharge on a contaminated and remediated site.

Did the project receive any loans, grants or financial assistance from any public or private organizations?

• $400,000 EPA Brownfield Clean-up Grant;
• $199,000 Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation-managed EPA funds and
   
• $100,000 of RIEDC Revolving Loan Program loan.
• $300,000 in founder’s initial remediation investment and
• $100,000 from Steel Yard’s private fundraising.
   

Could you describe the collaboration that occurred among multiple parties to enable the project?
The client and design team was tasked with tackling the RIDEM mandated brownfield cleanup while also creating an identifiable place with varying sized spaces to accommodate limitless possibilities for activities. The collaborative design process required understanding the complexities inherent to a community non-profit with a variety of stakeholders. In addition to meeting programmatic needs, the design team met other challenges including the preference to retain contaminated soil and manage stormwater on site despite limits to infiltration. The innovative solution married these issues with success, providing a site that both solved the environmental issues and fosters the Yard’s organizational flexibility and growth.

What type of innovative designs and energy-efficient technologies were implemented?
Working within a pre-established framework of buildings and gantry cranes, we developed a programmatically flexible landscape that lends a visual identity to the Yard. Design moves were driven by operational and conceptual design objectives:
 

1. Reduce soil disturbance
   Following a directive from the client to keep as much contaminated soil on-site as possible, site disturbance was minimized, thereby limiting excess fill housed in on-site landforms. Where possible, pavement was built up from existing grade to eliminate excavation for base courses. A large surface of permeable and non-permeable pavement, ’the carpet,’ was placed on grade in the center of the site to serve circulation, event, and outdoor fabrication functions.
2. Reconcile grade displacement
   New, higher, pavement grades were integrated with lower finish floor elevations of existing buildings through the introduction of a ‘moat’ at the perimeter of the ‘carpet.’ This zone lowered grade at the buildings, and captures, transports, and stores storm water during rain events as a bioswale.
3. Re-introduce ‘Urban Wild’ vegetation & habitat
   The ‘moats’ were filled with water-loving plants to filter storm water and prevent erosion of the swales, but more importantly, to establish vegetation across the site in areas not conflicting with events or fabrication. Landform areas are also planted according to their program—the central landform and ‘movie room’ with turf to allow spectator seating or everyday lounging of ‘Yardies’, and the southern landform with sumac and grasses to enclose the main space and screen adjacent properties. Native pioneer and volunteer species were introduced in the original planting, and are expected to re-colonize the site, restoring the abandoned site’s existing condition—a leafed oasis in its industrial context.
    

The integration of engineering with placemaking and the smart use of material and method in the design make the Steel Yard significant. Permeable pavement and bioswales are employed creatively both as sustainable strategies and as design features.

What recyclable materials were used to classify this as a "green" development?
Throughout the project, uncommon recycled materials (e.g. discarded sheet pile culled from waste of other construction sites and scrap metal bales of bicycles, appliances, and car parts) are featured as prominent site elements