Artful Rainwater Design

On a rainy day in Portland, Oregon, a man stops at New Seasons Market at Arbor Lodge to pick up a few items for dinner. As he hurries inside, he looks up above the entrance canopy and notices that rain is spewing from a spout near the roof and onto a metal sculpture of salmon that appear to be swimming upstream against the current of the falling rain. For just a moment he’s reminded that runoff from rain flows from rooftop to river; it had better be clean and plentiful!

Although rainwater has been considered a resource in agricultural contexts for millennia, in urban contexts it has historically been considered a waste product. With some exceptions in historical management strategies, urban rainwater was treated as a problem to be mitigated, a waste product to be eliminated or controlled.

As we discussed in the Introduction, there are two components of ARD, amenity and utility. This section of the book presents the amenity side of ARD: the goals, objectives, and techniques a designer might use to make a sustainable stormwater management system into a landscape amenity that celebrates rain, encouraging visitors to learn about, be entertained by, or otherwise enjoy the rainwater-focused landscape. Our hope is that, armed with the cumulative information from this section and part 3, augmented by real-world details from the case study section, designers will have abundant ideas and strategies for their own creation of ARDs.

This part of the book focuses on an array of sustainable stormwater management options and their potential connection to the amenity options in ARD. Plenty of manuals on sustainable stormwater management illustrate and explain effective management strategies, and we have no intention of replicating those sources in this book, nor do we intend to present every possible stormwater management strategy. Instead, we present a range of sustainable stormwater management strategies that are particularly appropriate to ARD.

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.