Burien’s Highline Heritage Museum building, which is planned to be built at 819 SW 152nd Street, has been nominated for an AIA “What Makes It Green” award for sustainable design.

According to one of the building’s designers, Tim Rohleder of Rohleder Borges Architecture:

“We have submitted the Highline Heritage Museum project as representative of our efforts in the world of sustainable design. The jury has already selected the “Top Eleven” projects from a pool of entries from all over the region including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, Hawaii, Japan and Guam. The “Top Ten” (or in this case eleven) are supposed to be announced the week of May 5th in coordination with juried interviews at Seattle City Hall.

Per the AIA: “2010 WMIG? program recognizes projects that demonstrate the highest accomplishment in environmentally sustainable architecture, combining inspired design, systems analysis, and performance evaluation.”

Readers can vote on the entries here – so click on over there and vote for your soon-to-be-built, innovative and sustainably-designed new museum!

Here’s more info on the museum from the Highline Historical Society’s website:

The Highline Heritage Museum (HHM) has been designed to represent the Community of Highline, the stories of their past, the legacy of their people and their responsibility to the environment. From the start of the programming process, the Board of Trustees has been engaged and committed to creating a symbol representative of their community. It is a broad stroke representing the people from five different communities. The project is proposed as a redevelopment of an existing decaying building on an urban site in the heart of the City of Burien with a promising future for pedestrian vitality. The property lies along a primary pedestrian path with bus routes as connections to all its major constituents. The site is within a few blocks of the new regional county library and the Burien City Hall. The neighborhood also includes restaurants, retail shops, a post office, a regional transit center and a recently completed multi-family, moderate density residential development. The Board of Trustees warmly embraced the opportunity to create a “green” museum. While LEED was initially not accepted as a reasonable tool to gage the success, it was later recognized as an important element. One of the goals is LEED Silver with design strategies that include multiple mechanical zones utilizing ground source heat pumps, managed day lighting, specialty glazing integrating art and energy performance, a super insulated building envelope, transparency to the neighborhood using full height glazing, articulated building forms, and strategic use of site and roof areas integrating exhibits, landscape and pedestrian gathering areas. While there is much excitement at the uniqueness of the “geothermal” systems and the associated 300 foot deep pits, the design is a total package that investigates green opportunities for a building type where there are currently few recognized built examples.

Our cities surprise and confound us by scrambling the categories we use to plan and understand them. At once dense and sprawling, crowded and empty, urban but centerless, dynamic and stalled, the landscape where we live defies planning and leaves us with little grasp of its meanings or pleasures.

Yet it is the product of our choices, individually and as a public: we live here now. So, what can we make of it?

Suddenly will bring art and food and public conversation to bear on the common cause of making meaning and life in the landscape where we live now — as it is, as we are, as best we can. 

Borne of the insights of German urban planner Thomas Sieverts, suddenly accepts the paradoxical “in-between’ condition where we live — an inextricable mix of urban and rural, natural and manmade, global and local — and looks to the creative capacity of citizens, artists, writers, and others to articulate meanings and relationships that can sustain us and enrich our lives within that condition.

A festive convocation of planners, activists, neighbors, friends and strangers alike, with food, films, art, music, and frank, ranging conversation, suddenly seeks common ground and new tools for living here now.

In Seattle and Burien, three days of events, occasioned by Thomas Sieverts‘ visit to the area, will bring diverse communities into common conversation around art, writing, film, public policy, and great food.

Come and discuss the wonderful things happening in Burien, and your thoughts for the future with this esteemed urban planner.

The schedule of events is as follows:

• Thurs., July 2nd 4pm-6pm: Burien through Community Eyes: Walk the City with Thomas Sieverts (gather at B/IAS, located at 5th Ave SW & SW 150th St at 3:45pm, Burien; free and open to the public).
• 6pm-8pm: Conversation and Nosh with Thomas Sieverts, Burien political and civic leaders and neighbors (also at B/IAS, 5th Ave SW & SW 150th St., Burien; food by The Mark & Sal’s Deli.)

For more information on Burien events please go to www.burienparks.net or call 206-988-3713.

Seattle Schedule:

• Wednesday, July 1st, 

9 am – 10 am: KUOW-FM radio interviews with Thomas Sieverts
• 12:00 pm – 2:00pm: Thomas Sieverts in public talks with Seattle City Council and regional policy makers (at Seattle City Council chambers; free and open to the public).
• 7:30 pm: “Urban Aesthetics,” lecture by Thomas Sieverts (at Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave., Seattle, $5 suggested donation)
• Friday July 3rd 1 pm – 4pm: NW Film Forum presents “Police Beat” (written by Charles Mudede and directed by Robinson Devor), with after-film panel discussion with Thomas Sieverts, Matthew Stadler, and Charles Mudede (NWFF, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, Tickets $7).
• Evening: Corridor Project closing dinner hosted by Michael Hebb, with Matthew Stadler and Thomas Sieverts in conversation, including a celebration of “suddenly: where we live now, the visual chronicle;” (location TBA, price TBA, see www.onepot.org for details).
• Ongoing: A portable version of the exhibition, “suddenly: where we live now,” organized on the occasion of German urban planner Thomas Sieverts’ visit to Seattle, will be on view throughout the four days at a location to be determined.

The exhibition includes work by:

• Elias Hansen & Oscar Tuazon
• Molly Dilworth
• Michael Hebb
• Michael McManus
• Marc Joseph Berg

The exhibition opens July 3, 7 p.m., and coincides with a Corridor Project dinner. Exhibition and dinner location TBA.

Please visit www.onepot.org for dinner location and exhibition hours.