Sustainable Community

Stans Museum of Life and the Environment

The planned Stans Museum of Life and the Environment (MLE) site comprises 400 acres at the intersection of I-77 and the Catawba River owned by the Culture and Heritage Foundation – the Culture & Heritage Museums (CHM) supporting foundation. The parcel, a gift of Jane Spratt McColl and her husband Hugh valued at $8.5 million when donated in 1998, features a mile of riverfront and has frontage on the Sutton Road (I-77 exit 83) interchange.

Recognizing that the strategic position of the property that would greatly enhance visitor accessibility to MLE also made the property highly suitable for development, the CHM was presented with an extraordinary opportunity to determine the future of the land surrounding the nation’s first museum to explore the ecology of people and place.

At the request of the CHM’s governing Culture and Heritage Commission, MLE architect William McDonough + Partners convened a property development charrette to educate our stakeholders on aspects of a sustainable community design. Subsequently, McDonough’s firm was asked to devise the following institutional values related to sustainable design to guide development of the museum and its surrounding site:

• All species are intertwined and create the web of life
• The concept of waste does not exist in ecological systems
• To create a viable community we must become indigenous to our place
• An understanding of energy flows will guide design
• Water is a primary source of life

To integrate the sustainable goals into plans for the property, the CHM created a joint design research project between Clemson University’s Schools of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture and the University of North Carolina Charlotte’s School of Architecture. The project - “Green Architecture and Urbanism: A Real-Life Sustainable Community for the Carolinas” - was made possible in part by a grant from the York County Community Foundation/Foundation for the Carolinas.

Green Architecture and Urbanism

In fall of 2003, faculty and students researched and analyzed the site’s landscape and ecology and the application of green architecture in a metropolitan regional/urban context in order to create development scenarios for the site including layout of proposed uses of the site, draft zoning codes, green engineering strategies, sample building designs, economic/marketability study, etc. The project was divided into three phases that included analysis and precedent study, master plan programming and development, and design development and development protocols.

The students, with the assistance of consultants in the areas of retail/commercial development, urban planning, green building technologies, and transportation, spent nearly four months creating a range of development proposals. Their strategies were based upon extensive research in the areas of climate and solar orientation, geology and hydrology, and biological and archeological surveys. The students also researched green architecture precedents in the U.S. and abroad. The larger community context within which the new museum and associated development would occur was also explored.

To gather community input, the CHM formed the ‘Sustainable Community Advisory Committee’ to include people connected with this project from a local and regional context. The committee included environmentalists, developers, designers, academics, and community members, as well as surrounding property owners. The group met with the university teams during the design process, evaluated their findings and then provided direct feedback to the students.

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